Happy Mother's Day! Some Art, Sumo, and Sainted Mothers!

Welcome to new readers...

I noticed an influx of new readers this week — howdy! My normal content is mortality trends and public finance, but on Sundays, I like to post lighter stuff.

Or heavier stuff in the form of sumo.

Sumo: NATSU BASHO TIME!

The May 2024 Grand Sumo Tournament started today, with all the top-ranked guys getting their comeuppance, which promises yet another rambunctious tournament.

Stolen from @bingusbugg

Here’s a short English language intro from Hiro Morita and Sumo Prime Time:

This one does not have any English, but it’s not needed….

BOOM. In the dirt. Ah, Happy Mother’s Day to me.

Some Art for Mother’s Day

John Herreid, a Catholic illustrator and graphic designer, posted a twitter/X thread on art of mothers, and I liked this one:

A couple pieces from the Met by the same artist, Kitagawa Utamaro:

Kitagawa Utamaro, Mother and Child, Japanese, ca 1800

Kitagawa Utamaro, Mother and Child, Japanese, ca 1793

Sainted Mothers

The Catholic Church recognizes many mothers as saints (the most obvious being, of course, Jesus’s own mother), but let us look at a few others, such as:

St. Elizabeth Ann Seton

That was from January this year. This is near the tip of Manhattan, and I usually stop by (on the outside), to say a Hail Mary or few:

Elizabeth Ann Seton was a convert to Catholicism, which is an involved story which I will not tell now. But she is closely tied to Catholic schooling in the U.S., as she had started a congregation of religious sisters who started the first free Catholic school in the U.S. A lot of Catholic schools are named after her, including Seton Hall University.

My local parish has a statue of her:

It’s not fancy, but she wasn’t a fancy lady.

Speaking of statues at my church:

St. Anne (the mother of the BVM)

One of the things I like about the iconography of St. Anne with the BVM is they often have Anne instructing Mary, with Mary holding a book.

Though, of course, books with pages were anachronistic for the time. They would have had scrolls, if they had any permanent written items for instruction. Though most likely, they would have worked from memory in instruction…. [but let me pull back from this tangent].

Here ma, I got you a flower

A flower is nice.

One of the stained glass windows in our church also has a scene with Anne, Mary, and Joachim (the BVM’s dad), but the pic I took here cut out Joachim:

I just liked what the light was doing on the wall. Mary! Look at the scroll! Your mother is trying to teach you!

Closing pic: Me and Ma

Here we are, preschool Meep (that is me), planning to take over the world.

SOON

Happy Mother’s Day!