The New York Times<\/CITE> this morning has a long article on the stolen paintings of Edvard Munch<\/A>, most notably the iconic painting “The Scream.” Copies of “The Scream” (there are apparently four versions, which I didn’t know) have been stolen on two different occasions: in 1994, two thieves propped a ladder up against the wall of the Norwegian National Museum, broke a window, and snatched the painting, and in 2004, two men in ski masks burst into the Munch Museum with guns, grabbed two paintings off the walls, and ran to a waiting car.<\/p>\n Reading about the thefts, it occurs to me that if this is what art theft is like in Oslo, Norwegian caper novels must be just about the dullest books ever written. I mean, one of the world’s most famous painting has been stolen twice, and both thefts had all the subtlety and sophistication of fraternity pranks.<\/p>\n Where are the helicopters, the laser alarm systems, the complicated double-blind diversions, the “Afghanistan banana stand?” What kind of country allows smash-and-grab art thefts?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The New York Times this morning has a long article on the stolen paintings of Edvard Munch, most notably the iconic painting “The Scream.” Copies of “The Scream” (there are apparently four versions, which I didn’t know) have been stolen on two different occasions: in 1994, two thieves propped a ladder up against the wall… Continue reading Idle Thought<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-63","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-silliness","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=63"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/63\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=63"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=63"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=63"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}