The Week in Meep: Sumo, Sushi, and Dante!
I love when I forget that I bought something
Today is naka-bi, that is the halfway day, of the March 2025 Grand Sumo Tournament, held in Osaka!
Now, many people when they think of sumo, think of wrestlers like Chiyomaru, the eternally round:
I just posted my height-weight scatterplot for the top-level sumo wrestlers (also called rikishi):
They do tend to be heftier than your standard guy, but here’s our newest Yokozuna, Hoshoryu, who is a bit lighter than most of the top wrestlers:
Okay, that was him goofing with the mascot of a green tea drink some time ago.
Here he is looking serious in Yokozuna regalia:
Anyway, Hoshoryu has been running into a bit of trouble at the tournament, and it’s a bit of wackiness in who’s in the lead… also, my favorite, Ura, keeps landing in the arms/laps of the other wrestlers surrounding the ring, which leads to some amusement.
Rather than put some questionable-looking gifs in your face, here is Ichiyamamoto pondering his life’s path, going from being a sumo fan to being a top pro sumo wrestler.
Moving on….
Sushi!
Just a quick interlude. My middle child was home for her spring break, and between that and a win for my oldest child, we decided to celebrate at a conveyor belt sushi place.
Here’s a pic of my favorite dessert - taiyaki! With ice cream!
Taiyaki is this fried/baked cake, made with a pancake or waffle-type batter in a fish-shaped mold, and it’s filled with red bean paste. You can see a dab of the adzuki bean paste next to the ice cream. They serve it hot from the “pan”, and it’s great with ice cream.
Yes, it’s as great as apple pie.
Dante with my Worcestershire Sauce
As I do, I ordered a gallon of Worcestershire sauce for when my middle child came to visit…
My prior gallon was close to empty, and my middle child likes the sauce about as much as I do. I was refilling the empty bottles this morning as she left, so opened the Amazon box this was in…
…having completely forgotten I had ordered two books along with the Worcestershire sauce.
They Flew: A History of the Impossible
Accounts of seemingly impossible phenomena abounded in the early modern era—tales of levitation, bilocation, and witchcraft—even as skepticism, atheism, and empirical science were starting to supplant religious belief in the paranormal. In this book, Carlos M. N. Eire explores how a culture increasingly devoted to scientific thinking grappled with events deemed impossible by its leading intellectuals.
Eire observes how levitating saints and flying witches were as essential a component of early modern life as the religious turmoil of the age, and as much a part of history as Newton’s scientific discoveries. Relying on an array of firsthand accounts, and focusing on exceptionally impossible cases involving levitation, bilocation, witchcraft, and demonic possession, Eire challenges established assumptions about the redrawing of boundaries between the natural and supernatural that marked the transition to modernity.
Using as his case studies stories about St. Teresa of Avila, St. Joseph of Cupertino, the Venerable María de Ágreda, and three disgraced nuns, Eire challenges readers to imagine a world animated by a different understanding of reality and of the supernatural’s relationship with the natural world. The questions he explores—such as why and how “impossibility” is determined by cultural contexts, and whether there is more to reality than meets the eye or can be observed by science—have resonance and lessons for our time.
I picked this book because of my interest in Teresa of Avila. I had come across her before in investigating what happened to her brothers who had gone to Central and South America for various reasons.
Also, Jimmy Akin. Example: Catholic Paranormal Investigations
Seymour Chwast’s Adaptation of Dante’s Divine Comedy
The "left-handed designer," Seymour Chwast has been putting his unparalleled take—and influence—on the world of illustration and design for the last half century. In his version of Dante's Divine Comedy, Chwast's first graphic novel, Dante and his guide Virgil don fedoras and wander through noir-ish realms of Hell, Purgatory, and Paradise, finding both the wicked and the wondrous on their way.
Dante Alighieri wrote his epic poem The Divine Comedy from 1308 to 1321 while in exile from his native Florence. In the work's three parts (Inferno, Purgatory, and Paradise), Dante chronicles his travels through the afterlife, cataloging a multitude of sinners and saints—many of them real people to whom Dante tellingly assigned either horrible punishment or indescribable pleasure—and eventually meeting both God and Lucifer face-to-face.
In his adaptation of this skewering satire, Chwast creates a visual fantasia that fascinates on every page: From the multifarious torments of the Inferno to the host of delights in Paradise, his inventive illustrations capture the delirious complexity of this classic of the Western canon.
One of the reasons I picked this up is that it was one of the few adaptations I could find that included all three parts of the Commedia.
I did like Niven & Pournelle’s Inferno (I’m going to ignore their sequel right now), and there have been a variety of adaptations, but people tend to get stuck in hell. So I’m looking forward to going through Chwast’s version. I’ve already flicked through rapidly to check that the sections are evenly weighted, and it looks so… I will likely have remarks at the end.
The Purgatorio is my favorite part of Dante, and I wonder how this will be treated.
Even with the editorial reviews on the Amazon page, they included only pages from the Inferno section, not Purgatorio or Paradiso.
William Blake’s illustrations for Dante has been some of my favorites.
Sigh, even in the Met Collection, I could only find Blake Dante illustrations from Inferno.