On this day in history the death of Jan Frans de Boever

Jan Frans de Boever was a Flemish painter, born in Belgium. He passed away today 63 years ago in 1949 for the mathematically challenged. He was an incredibly self-absorbed man, considering himself the best Belgian painter ever. Considering that Belgium has produced incredible artists like Pieter Bruegel the Elder and Peter Paul Rubens de Boever might have been full of other things other than himself. While, Jan Frans de Boever was incredibly talented and I do enjoy his work, his egotistical behavior alienated himself from most of his peers and he became reclusive.

In his reclusiveness and self-absorption he created his own style that was pretty, how to say it nicely... dirty. He painted morbid paintings of prostitutes and scantily clad women as objects of evil. Considering he was probably spurned by numerous women in his loneliness, his depiction of them as lustful temptresses using men as toys might be a bit of sour grapes. However, his best work were his depictions of Charles Baudelaire's erotic poems Les Fleurs du Mal. He created them for an exclusive client who paid him handily. The last few decades of his life were lived out in America. Considering he died nearly 70 years ago he probably looks a bit like this painting here below nowadays.

The mines of Spiennes, a smackdown worthy of RAW and the added bonus of Ben Stiller.

The black lung is an excruciating disease that kills those who suffer from it a slow and painful death after years of backbreaking work in a dark, depressing mine. Luckily, those that mined Spiennes presumably died of old age long before Ben Stiller uttered his famous Zoolander line. Unless there is some Belgian man out there who happens to be 6,312 years old, give or take ten years.                                                                                                                        

Sigar is the one in the red at the
top right. Aquinas isn't pictured
because he is preparing a 2x4, to
knock Sigar the F#$K out.

The mines are some of the oldest in Europe dating back to around 4300 BC. Neolithic Belgians apparently used the flint mines to create axes. Those axes were then used to undertake a massive deforestation process in Europe so that the new way of living could be done, farming. The mines stretch over a range of 100 hectares and show man’s technological transition from open mining to full blown underground mining. Though there is scant evidence to deny the claim, I highly doubt that the mines ever saw a merman tell his fellow miners that, “water is the essence of wetness”. Such poetic philosophy would not be seen in Belgium until Sigar of Brobant talked some nonsense about what is true in philosophy may be false in religion and what is true in religion may be false in philosophy. If Jon Voight had been there he would have chided Sigar with some cutting remark about thanking God that Sigar's mother dying before she realized what a nitwit he had become. But, he wasn’t. So St. Thomas Aquinas stepped up to begin bashing Sigar’s flip-flop politics and philosophical quipping.  Smack down from the gordo with a lazy eye. Je ne veux pas te faire de peine Sigar. Mais d’un autre coté… raccrocher brutalement!