Wednesday, September 03, 2008

HBPRS, #8

Another episode of the Hard-Boiled Poker Radio Show is now up here, including a segment from yours truly.

Interesting that Shamus chose to illustrate my little contribution in the show notes with an engraving by William Hogarth. You would have to be a meticulous--perhaps even obsessive--reader to have noticed and remembered this little fact, but I once mentioned that the pseudonym under which I both blog and play online poker is taken directly from what is perhaps Hogarth's most famous series of illustrations, "A Rake's Progress," featuring the character Tom Rakewell. There are many days when I feel as he is shown in Plate 6: "Scene Six takes us to another gaming house where we witness Tom Rakewell's second, inevitable loss of fortune. Half mad, wig torn from his head, he wrenches his fist at the Heavens. Quite literally, by having married the old hag and now losing her fortune, all his cards have been played. He has sealed his own deplorable fate." I just hope to avoid the other Rakewell's subsequent stages of downfall: debtor's prison and the madhouse.


Addendum, December 12, 2010

It appears that the links given above are now broken. Try here instead: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rake%27s_Progress


2 comments:

kfn8ed said...

Hi Grump, enjoy your blog. Almost daily visitor. Do you have a by the click deal with the other blogs you display on your site ?

Rakewell said...

No. I just list ones that I like and read.

I'll make this promise to readers: Everything you see here will either be me and what I think/like/dislike, untainted by financial considerations, or very clearly and explicitly a paid ad. There won't be anything for which I'm being paid without it being labeled as such.