THEFT IN THE TML!!

Priceless Portrait Stolen From League Office

Search Spreads to Susquehanna, Cempa to be Interviewed

(AP) Albany - the biggest theft in TML History was trumped by a robbery last night in league headquarters. On Wednesday, Kyle Weisser duped the Albany Avalanche out of Mark Prior, Juan Uribe and their 1st and 2nd picks in the 2006 draft for a guy who didn't even know what country to play for in the World Baseball Classic. We're talking A-Rod here of course. He is the player who, on the deadline for deciding which team he would play for, announced he would play for Orange. No one had the heart to tell him the WBC was for countries not counties.

But this story is not about A-Rod. Its about the theft of the classic work of art, the Mona Landin. The Mona Landin was acquired from the collection of Larry Rumsey when he left the TML in 1997. It has since hung in TML headquarters until Thursday Night when it was lifted. It is such a unique item that no one has been able to put a price on it.

From the beginning The Mona Landin was greatly admired and much copied, and it came to be considered the prototype of the Deliverance portrait. It became even more famous in 1911, when it was stolen for the first time from the Salon Carré in the Louvre, being rediscovered in a hotel in Zagazig two years later. In 1946 Larry Rumsey acquired it when the Louvre auctioned it off to help raise proceeds for France's post war reconstruction.

It is difficult to discuss such a work briefly because of the complex stylistic motifs which are part of it. In the essay ``On the perfect beauty of a woman'', by the 20th-century writer L.C. Roots, we learn that the slight opening of the lips at the corners of the mouth was considered in that period a sign of elegance. Thus Mona Landin has that slight smile which enters into the gentle, delicate atmosphere pervading the whole painting. To achieve this effect, the unknown artist uses the sfumato technique, a gradual dissolving of the forms themselves, continuous interaction between light and shade and an uncertain sense of the time of day. But this is probably more than you need to know.

Listen you, the villian who did this is still on the loose. Other paintings at league headquarters were thankfully undisturbed. Gatto Gothic, The Four Cooches, On the Beach at Walla Walla, and the classic Weisman's Mother remain secure at league headquarters. But the perpetrator or perpetrators of the crime remain at large. All signs of course point toward Susquehanna. Mr Cempa as we know is not a gentlemen. So his heisting a valuable painting is not out of the question. Plus at past drafts eyewitnesses Kevin Tyle and Hank Pedicone have heard Cempa marvel at the painting, emiting cries of "What a Babe!"

A search party has been sent to Susquehanna, but so far the party reports they have seen nothing of the painting nor Mr. Cempa, but do hear the faint strands of banjo music in the air. More on this as this big story develops.