Futility Closet - 275-A Kidnapped Painting

Starting point is 00:00:00 Welcome to the Futility Closet podcast, forgotten stories from the pages of history. Visit us online to sample more than 10,000 quirky curiosities from candy in the Senate to an orbiting sandwich. This is episode 275. I'm Greg Ross. And I'm Sharon Ross. In 1961, Goya's famous portrait of the Duke of Wellington went missing from London's National Gallery. The case went unsolved for four years before someone unexpectedly came forward to confess to the heist. In today's show, we'll describe one of the greatest art thefts in British history

Starting point is 00:00:43 and the surprising twists that followed. We'll also discover Seward's real folly and puzzle over a man's motherhood. We wanted to give a big thank you to everyone who's been sending us messages in response to last week's news about Sasha. We have really appreciated all the support and empathy that we've received and the many lovely words of encouragement and people's stories of their similar losses. We also learned that Brandy Sweet had started a project called Sasha Spottings, where she noted every episode that she heard Sasha in, and I hadn't realized that Sasha had actually managed to make it into 16 episodes, not for lack of trying on her part to make that number much higher.

Starting point is 00:01:33 We'll have Brandy's list in the show notes for anyone who wants to make sure that they didn't miss any of the cameo appearances. And thank you all again for being so caring. In the first James Bond film, released in 1962, Sean Connery is walking through Dr. Noe's underwater lair when he sees a painting on an easel and mutters, So there it is. That's a reference to a real mystery that had arisen shortly before filming began.

Starting point is 00:01:59 The painting is Francisco de Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington, and it had been stolen the previous summer from the National Gallery in London. The painting had been in the news even before its disappearance. In June 1961, an American art collector named Charles Beerer Reitzman had bid £140,000 for the portrait in an auction at Sotheby's. This brought an outcry from British art lovers who lamented such a masterpiece leaving the country, and Reitzman offered to sell the painting instead to the National Gallery, England's leading art museum, for the price he'd paid for it. That was arranged, and the portrait was unveiled in the

Starting point is 00:02:33 gallery on August 3, 1961. Eighteen days later, it disappeared. The portrait had been seen in place at 7.40 p.m. during the security guard's first patrol of the evening, but it was missing at roughly 10 p.m. during the second. It was assumed at first that it had been removed by a member of the gallery staff, and a search didn't start until 8 a.m. the following morning. The police weren't informed until 9.30 a.m., almost 12 hours after the loss had been discovered. They found that a window had been left open in the men's lavatory. Building renovations had been underway at the time, and someone had placed a builder's ladder under the window. Dirt on the windowsill matched mud in the courtyard, and similar marks of mud were found on the top of a gate leading into St. Martin Street. So it looked as though the thief had entered the gallery through this window, taken the portrait, and fled with it back down the ladder and over the gate.

Starting point is 00:03:23 This was the first theft in the gallery's 137-year history. The director offered his resignation, but it wasn't accepted. The media hyped the case, and the public, as usual, set about solving the crime, hatching theories, offering assistance, claiming knowledge, making accusations, reporting sightings, launching hoaxes, and taking credit. By a surprising coincidence, the Mona Lisa had been stolen from the Louvre 50 years earlier to the day. That led some observers to speculate that the thief knew

Starting point is 00:03:50 art history. In fact, it was just possible that both crimes had been committed by the same thief. A 20-year-old in 1911 would have been 70 in 1961. Or maybe the coincidence meant that someone was playing a joke. It did seem odd that the thief would choose such a recognizable painting. In his memoir, FBI Special Agent Robert King Whitman wrote, The art thieves I met in my career ran the gamut. Rich, poor, smart, foolish, attractive, grotesque. Yet nearly all of them had one thing in common, brute greed. They stole for money.

Starting point is 00:04:20 Yet this thief had chosen a painting so famous that it would be hard to sell and dangerous even to display. The authorities didn't have long to wonder about this. The first ransom note arrived ten days after the theft. It was sent to the Reuters news agency on Fleet Street and began, Query not that I have the Goya. It went on to describe various identifying marks and labels on the back of the painting. Then it read,

Starting point is 00:04:42 The act is an attempt to pick the pockets of those who love art more than charity. The picture is not, and will not be, for sale. It is for ransom, 140,000 pounds to be given to charity. If a fund is started, it should be quickly made up, and on the promise of a free pardon for the culprits, the picture will be handed back. None of the group concerned in this escapade has criminal convictions. All good people are urged to give and help the affair to a speedy conclusion. Over the ensuing four years, three further letters arrived at the exchange telegraph, each offering to give up the painting in exchange for a ransom to be paid to charity and the promise of a pardon. But the authorities refused to negotiate, and with the last note, received in March 1965, the thief seemed to be losing heart.

Starting point is 00:05:25 last note received in March 1965, the thief seemed to be losing heart. He lowered his asking price from 140,000 to 30,000 pounds and suggested that the money might be raised by putting the painting on exhibition and charging the public five shillings apiece to view it. When even that offer was rejected, the Daily Mirror stepped in and offered to arrange for the painting's exhibition if the thief returned it to them. Two months later, the paper received a receipt for a parcel at the left luggage station in Birmingham, and that turned out to contain the missing painting. The frame was gone, but that was easily replaced, and the few scratches on the portrait were repaired in less than a day. By May 27th, it was back on display among a larger exhibition of Spanish paintings. The thief sent two letters to the Exchange Telegraph complaining about the broken promise,

Starting point is 00:06:02 but at that point there was nothing he could do about it. And he seemed in no danger of being caught. In the four years that the portrait had been missing, not a single positive lead had been found. The gallery had even offered a reward of 5,000 pounds for information that collared the thief, and that remained unclaimed. So everyone was surprised when the thief turned himself in to Scotland Yard two months later, on July 19th. He was very far from a dashing art thief. He was a 61-year-old retired truck driver from Newcastle named Kempton Bunton, and he had a singularly undramatic reason for stealing the portrait. He thought old and poor people were being charged too much for watching television.

Starting point is 00:06:39 In the United Kingdom, you need a license to watch live television as it's being broadcast. Bunton resented this fee, and in fact he'd been jailed twice for refusing to pay it. His resentment turned to rage when he learned that the government was paying £140,000 to buy back a painting from an American. By Bunton's estimate, if that money had been properly invested, the interest could have bought 40 television licenses a week for the old and the poor. So he had decided to kidnap and ransom the painting. He told police that he hitchhiked to London and old and the poor. So he had decided to kidnap and ransom the painting. He told police that he hitchhiked to London and cased the gallery. He noticed that a ladder was strapped to the scaffolding near the men's lavatory.

Starting point is 00:07:14 He chatted with the guards to learn their schedule, and he bought a floor plan for sixpence. On the night of the theft, he'd simply slipped into the gallery through the unlatched window, lifted the portrait, and returned the way he had come. Afterward, he'd discarded the frame, wrapped up the painting, and returned the way he had come. Afterward, he discarded the frame, wrapped up the painting, and returned to Newcastle. He said, I did not look upon taking the picture as criminal, and what the hell if I did fail, it was no hanging matter, and at least the failure would bring attention to my aims. His ransom letters had asked for 140,000 pounds

Starting point is 00:07:38 because that's what the government had paid for Reitzman's portrait. Bunton didn't want that money for himself, he just wanted it redirected to pay for television licenses for the poor and the aged. He had never intended to keep or sell the painting, it was just a means to an end. When the authorities ignored his offers, he was increasingly indignant, but he had no way to force their hand, so he took up the mirror's offer to mediate the return of the painting. He thought that was the end of the whole affair, but shortly afterward he discovered that his son and daughter-in-law had seen a rough draft of one of his letters to the Daily Mirror. Evidently, he'd dropped it accidentally at their house. With the reward money still on offer, he'd worried that they'd have an incentive to turn him in, and so he'd gone to Scotland Yard himself and come clean. The police,

Starting point is 00:08:18 perhaps understandably, had some trouble at first believing all this. Bunton had been 57 years old at the time of the theft. He weighed 252 pounds, 114 kilograms, and he was claiming to have wrestled a 64 centimeter painting through an open window four meters above the ground. But at length, they charged him with larceny and released him on bail. The case went to trial in late October in Central Criminal Court, better known as the Old Bailey in London. It lasted 12 days. Bunton's lawyers organized their defense around a peculiar point of British law. The Larceny Act of 1916 said that stealing must involve the intent to deprive an owner of his property permanently. Bunton had never intended

Starting point is 00:08:55 to keep the portrait. He said, my sole object in all this was to set up a charity to buy television licenses for old and poor people who seemed to be neglected in an affluent society. His counsel argued that this meant his taking of the portrait didn't constitute a crime under the larceny statute. You could call it skullduggery, but there was no evil intent. This worked. Judge Carl Arvold instructed the jury that they couldn't convict Bunton of larceny if he hadn't intended to keep the painting. So they didn't. They found him guilty only of stealing the frame, which he hadn't returned. He served three months in jail. In handing down that sentence, the judge had also voiced a broader worry. He said motives, even if they are good, cannot justify theft. Creeping into public

Starting point is 00:09:33 galleries to extract pictures of value so that you may use them for your own purpose has got to be discouraged. So, three years later, as part of England's Theft Act of 1968, Parliament closed Bunton's legal loophole and made it illegal to, quote, remove without authority any object displayed or kept for display to the public in a building to which the public have access. That made Bunton's borrowing of the portrait into a criminal offense, in case anyone was thinking of repeating it. Interestingly, the government might have addressed this legal anomaly 15 years earlier in the case of the Stone of Schoon, which we covered in episode 229. Four patriotic Scots had broken into Westminster Abbey

Starting point is 00:10:09 in 1950 and removed a historic symbol of Scottish independence. That might have offered an occasion to consider a new law to address the unauthorized removal of items from museums and galleries. But in the end, the pilfering Scots weren't prosecuted for reasons of political expedience, and the loophole remained open. In the case of the Goya portrait, there remained the puzzle of the crime itself. It still seemed unlikely that an overweight man nearly 60 years old could have wrestled an oil painting through a window, down a ladder, and over a wall. That puzzle was solved in a quiet bombshell in 1969,

Starting point is 00:10:40 when Kempton Bunton's 28-year-old son John was arrested for a minor offense and confessed that he was the one who had stolen the painting. He volunteered this because he was sure that his fingerprints would give him away. He'd been 20 years old at the time of the theft, working as a temporary van driver in London. He'd heard his father complaining about television licenses and the government's purchase of the Goya, so just before dawn on August 21st, he'd stood on a parking meter to get over the back wall of the gallery, used the builder's ladder to climb through the unlatched window, and found the painting standing on an easel in an enclosure at the top of the main stairs. He told the police, I went up to it,

Starting point is 00:11:13 took hold of it, and carried it back to the gent's toilet. He went back down the ladder, climbed over the back wall, drove the portrait to his furnished room in Grafton Street, and put it under his bed. Then he called his father and told him what he'd done. Kempton was shocked and anxious, but decided to use the theft as an opportunity to press his campaign against the TV license fee. He wrote the ransom notes, and when he feared that the truth might get out, he surrendered himself as the culprit. At the trial, his sons remained quiet because he'd told them to. He insisted on taking the fall for John, and he wanted to air his views about the TV licenses in court. Apart from taking the painting, John had been involved again only in March 1965, when his father had asked for his help in returning it to the luggage office.

Starting point is 00:11:50 So Kempton had been willing to go to jail himself rather than expose his son as the real thief. I guess that makes sense, and I wonder if also maybe mixed into that was, I mean, his son sort of did it for him. Yeah. For his father's reasons. Yeah, there's a, the main book I've read about that says that the author interviewed John Bunton, who says he's sort of, maybe not ashamed, but kind of embarrassed that this whole thing had happened. He was only 20 years old at the time, and it was

Starting point is 00:12:14 as much a lark or a piece of mischief as it was trying to help his father. He didn't have, I don't have any political opinions about this himself, as far as I know. The revelation that John was the thief is surprising, but it doesn't really invalidate the defense strategy during the trial or the justice of the verdict. John Bunton said he'd never considered destroying or selling the picture. He gave it to his father, who he said intended to use it as a tool in his campaign, and that it should ultimately be returned to the National Gallery. When John's involvement came to light in 1969, the authorities felt that John certainly seemed capable of taking the painting, as he'd described, but the director of public prosecutions concluded that his admission alone wasn't enough to prosecute him. Also, it would be hard to prosecute the father for perjury

Starting point is 00:12:53 because they'd have to rely on the evidence of the son, who was clearly an unreliable witness. So they took no action. In fact, all of this came to light only in 2012, when the National Archives released a file that identified John as the man who'd claimed to be the real thief. So John Bunton was never punished and went on to live a quiet life, though he'd confessed to one of the greatest art thefts of the 20th century. His father, Kempton Bunton, died in 1976, but he had one last victory of his own. In 1999, the government announced that pensioners ages 75 and over would receive their television licenses free of charge. Futility Closet is supported entirely by our incredible listeners. We want to thank everyone who helps us to be able to keep making the show.

Starting point is 00:13:48 And this week we're sending out a special thank you to Sami Koivu, our newest super patron. If you want to join Sami and all our other wonderful patrons who make this show possible, please go to patreon.com slash futilitycloset or see the support us section of the website. And I also want to thank everyone who sent in donations to the show, which are also really appreciated. So thank you so much to everyone who helps keep Futility Closet going. The main story in episode 269 was about how in 1631, pirates from the Barbary Coast abducted 107 people from the Irish village of Baltimore and pressed them into slavery in Algiers. Ken Murphy wrote, I just listened to episode number 269 about the sack of Baltimore.

Starting point is 00:14:40 When I'm curious about a place, I'll often check it out with Google Street View. I guess time heals all wounds, as the town folks seem to have a somewhat tongue-in-cheek attitude toward their history with the pirates, judging by this inn. And Ken sent an image of the Algiers Inn in Baltimore, whose sign shows what appears to be a Barbary Coast pirate. A story in The Sun from 2003 says that inside the bar, there is a framed poster that tells the story of the abductions and lists the names of all the captives who were taken from the village. The owner of the pub is quoted as saying,

Starting point is 00:15:13 We often get Algerians working in Cork coming down here. They've heard there's a pub here called the Algiers Inn and want to know why. So we explain the story to them and to the many other visitors from Europe and elsewhere. They are always fascinated. Yeah, I can imagine. I mean, anyone just passing by in the street, that's just a very unusual theme for a restaurant in that area, I should think. I would think so. John Levine wrote about the puzzle in episode 269, and it will include a spoiler. This was a bit of a futility closet coincidence for me as we got John's email just while I was working on the story from episode 272 on the Teganek giant found near Trumansburg,

Starting point is 00:15:52 New York, and John's email indicated that he works for Teganek Networks in Trumansburg, New York. We had heard from John previously, but I hadn't noticed his workplace earlier, but then I hadn't been right in the middle of trying to work out the best pronunciation of Teganek, which I personally found to be a rather intimidating looking word. John wrote, the puzzle in episode 269 depended on the expense of sending numbers by telegram one digit at a time. In 1866, U.S. Secretary of State William Seward, of Alaska Folly fame, sent the first coded International Diplomatic Telegram. The code was an 1803 cipher by President Monroe that used groups of digits. The 780-word telegram turned into 3,772 digits, which cost $19,540.40 and dug an

Starting point is 00:16:43 enormous hole in the department's budget. For those who are unfamiliar with Seward, he served as Secretary of State under President Andrew Johnson, and I think that for most people who have heard of him, it's usually as the person who was primarily responsible for the U.S. buying Alaska from Russia in 1867. Though many in the U.S. supported that decision at the time and Congress approved it by a wide margin, there were those who were quite critical of the purchase of the territory, which was given derisive names such as Seward's Icebox and Johnson's Polar Bear Garden. Interestingly, I learned when I was looking into this that the name that's most commonly remembered now, Seward's Folly, wasn't actually used until years later. I also saw the case made

Starting point is 00:17:26 that it really was only a minority of the press and politicians who were against the purchase, either because they thought of Alaska as a barren wasteland or because they were strongly opposed to anything supported by the controversial Johnson. But that minority was rather vocal, and it's often their derision that tends to be remembered today, summed up by the Seward's Folly slogan. Overall, Seward's purchase of Alaska came to be generally rather well regarded, as Alaska proved to have natural resources such as gold and oil, not to mention the rich natural beauty of the area, and significant strategic geopolitical importance to the U.S. Yeah, it's funny how just a slogan, just a phrase like that can sort of color history's perception of something. Yeah, I had always assumed that most people were sort of against the purchase.

Starting point is 00:18:11 Yeah, if we all know that phrase today, it must have some important meaning that maybe it doesn't. So while Seward may have been rather vindicated for that so-called folly of his, the matter of the extremely expensive telegram really was a rather large and embarrassing blunder. And it occurred at a particularly bad time for such an expensive mistake, as the recent American Civil War had left the government facing the largest federal debt in U.S. history to that point, equaling almost half of the gross national product. Seward had actually been very reluctant to use the transatlantic telegraph due to its very high cost and his acute awareness of the immense federal debt. But apparently there was a series of misunderstandings that led to his mistake. Seward had been asked by Wilson G. Hunt, one of the directors of the New York, Newfoundland, and London telegraph company, why the federal government

Starting point is 00:18:58 wasn't using the newly completed Atlantic cable. Hunt was rather dismayed to hear Seward's reply that the international rates were just tooed to hear Seward's reply that the international rates were just too expensive, and that Seward had actually canceled an earlier intended transatlantic telegram when he learned that it would cost several hundred dollars. But then some confusion occurred. Seward apparently erroneously believed that the government set its own prices for sending domestic telegrams. They actually were paying Western Union standard rates. And that during their conversation, Hunt offered to let him try using the new Atlantic cable under that same arrangement. Meaning, Seward thought that Seward could send a trial message and determine

Starting point is 00:19:37 himself the amount that he would pay for it. For his part, Hunt's understanding of the conversation was that when Seward objected to the high cost, they had agreed that Seward would send a written communication to the telegraph company explaining his objections to possibly induce the company to consider lowering the rates. Working under his faulty understanding of the situation, Seward sent the first transatlantic diplomatic telegram in code on November 23, 1866. The code used converted words into groups of numbers, and the telegraph company required that such codes had to spell out the numbers. So the number 387 became three words, three, eight, seven. Between that and the spelling out of some 88 different code symbols, such as cross and arrow, Seward's original 780-word message ballooned into 3,772 words.

Starting point is 00:20:26 Further, the telegraph company charged double for coded messages, meaning that in all, the telegram ended up costing almost $20,000, or more than three times Seward's annual salary. Seward was shocked by the bill for the sent telegram, which the telegraph company was not prepared to let Seward set his own price for. Lacking sufficient funds to pay for it, Seward asked one of the managers of the Telegraph Company to accept a partial payment based on the number of words in the original message. When that request was denied, Seward

Starting point is 00:20:53 just refused to pay the bill, and the case eventually went to court, where Seward lost. It amazes me that no one said, are you sure you want to do this? This is going to cost an astronomical sum. Maybe you haven't understood what you're getting yourself into here. But apparently no one did. Or not in a way that he understood, or he thought he had this other understanding that would supersede it, I suppose. Overall, I got the impression that whatever Seward's strengths may have been, codes and ciphers weren't one of them. He compounded the fiasco of the exorbitant telegram by releasing the plain text message of the coded telegram to the press, which would have enabled other governments to then break the code. And his unhappiness over the expense of using the Monroe

Starting point is 00:21:34 cipher caused the State Department to develop its first new code in 50 years, though it was an exceedingly awkward one designed primarily for economy and transmission. In the new code, the 23 words most frequently used in diplomatic communications were each assigned one letter of the alphabet. So for example, A stood for the, B stood for it, and so on. The 24 next most frequently used words were encoded with two letters of the alphabet, so that AK meant those and AZ meant such. Three letters were used for the rest of the diplomatic lexicon, and a fourth letter could be added to indicate things such as plurals or participles. Seward was delighted with

Starting point is 00:22:09 the new code, and it was used between 1867 and 1876, but it was actually a bit of a disaster. The telegraphers often just merged the different groups of letters together, and that meant that dispatches couldn't be read until correct copies arrived in the mail weeks later. The first of these encoded messages received by the State Department came from the American minister in Turkey and was just a long string of connected letters that couldn't be deciphered until an assistant clerk spent several days puzzling it out. And apparently at least some of these messages never did manage to ever get decoded. So while we may appreciate Alaska today, there are possibly some other decisions that could more correctly be termed Seward's Folly. And this story of the exorbitant

Starting point is 00:22:52 telegram was one of those stories that we were kind of surprised that we'd never heard before. And I also want to thank John for the very helpful links to articles about the telegram that he sent. I always appreciate links for stories to help me get started on my research, and even more especially those to somewhat obscure sources that I might not turn up on my own, such as in this case. So thank you to everyone who writes to us, and we always appreciate people taking the time to do so. If you have any comments or follow-ups that you'd like to send, please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. please send them to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. It's my turn to try to solve a lateral thinking puzzle. Greg is going to give me a strange sounding situation, and I have to try to work out what's going on, asking yes or no questions.

Starting point is 00:23:39 This is from listener Jesse Schlaud. A man has two children. He has a sister who has one child. He's genetically the mother of his sister's child? Has he changed genders? No. So he's always been a male? Yes. He's the mother of his sister's child, even though he's a male? Yes. Are all the individuals a male? Yes. Are all the

Starting point is 00:24:26 individuals involved humans? Yes. All of them? Yes. Okay. I'm just very confused here. By the mother of his sister's child, do you mean the

Starting point is 00:24:41 individual who donated an egg to that infant, to that baby? I'm not sure what you mean the individual who donated an egg to that infant, to that baby? I'm not sure what you mean. Well, I tend to think of a mother as somebody who their egg developed into an infant. No, I understand that part. Are you saying that that is what happened in this case? No, that's not what happened. Did he somehow carry his sister's child?

Starting point is 00:25:08 No. But you would use the word mother. Yes. And this would be shown by a genetic test. Yes. So you're not, you don't mean mother, you know, in some kind of... Poetic. Yeah, I mean, he mothered her, you you know i mean no genetically a blood test would show he's the mother of his sister's child um you said he had fertility problems

Starting point is 00:25:34 is this related to the fertility problems the reason that he had fertility problems like he has some chromosomal abnormality or something like that? No. Okay. So the reason for his fertility problems are completely irrelevant to this puzzle? Like I don't need to work out what kind of fertility problems or what caused his fertility problems? That's true. Okay. Let's back up.

Starting point is 00:26:04 His sister has a child, correct? Yes. Does it matter what gender the sister's child is? No. Does it matter how old the sister's child is? No. Does it matter how the sister's child was conceived? No.

Starting point is 00:26:17 Or carried? No. Or given birth to? No. Okay. Would the genetic test just be wrong? It would be a very boring puzzle. No. No. I'm also perplexed that the genetic test could show that he was the mother.

Starting point is 00:26:39 I didn't know genetic tests could identify you as the mother or the father. And you mean mother rather than just parent. Yes. Okay. Are he and his sister identical twins? No. Are he and his sister, do they have some other descriptor of their relationship besides being brother and sister, fraternal twins? No.

Starting point is 00:27:03 Anything else? Just like a regular brother and sister that's right okay so there's nothing else about their relationship that i need to know no is there anything that i need to know about any of the other parents in this puzzle no and their relationships to anybody genetically or otherwise no i'll say that, I want to give you a hint without giving anything away. What brought about this state of affairs is that Jesse had another condition that was treated.

Starting point is 00:27:38 Jesse's the man with the fertility problems. Yes. And he had a... An unrelated, unrelated to fertility. Did he somehow get like an organ transplant or something from his sister? No, but you're on the right track. Did he...

Starting point is 00:27:52 So he had another condition that was treated? Yes. Not by an organ transplant, though? Correct. Okay. Okay. Did he take into his body material from another person? Yes.

Starting point is 00:28:09 Okay. Oh, hmm. So did his sister donate something? Yes. His sister donated something to him. I'm assuming blood wouldn't do it. No, but you're very close. Bone marrow?

Starting point is 00:28:25 Yes. Oh. That's exactly right. Jesse writes, 13 years ago, at the age of 24, I was diagnosed with fairly advanced acute leukemia. The best course of treatment was a bone marrow transplant from a related donor, and luckily my younger sister was a perfect match. Siblings have a 25% chance of matching. The transplant was a success, and I've been cancer-free for 12 years.

Starting point is 00:28:45 Since my sister was the donor, our bone marrow and blood are now genetically identical, XX chromosomes and all. This explains why a blood test would show me to be her child's mother. Wow, that is absolutely fascinating and a very, very happy ending. I'm glad it worked out well for everybody involved. Thank you, Jessie. Thank you. And if anybody else has a puzzle they'd like to send in for us to try, please send it to us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. And if you would like your puzzle to be given by one of us in particular, you can put that in the subject line for us. Futility Closet wouldn't still be here without the support of our wonderful listeners. Thank you. If you become a member of our patron community, you'll also get access to more discussions on some of the stories,

Starting point is 00:29:46 extralateral thinking puzzles, outtakes, and peeks behind the scenes of the show. At our website, you can graze through over 10,000 exceptional esoterica, browse the Futility Closet store, learn about the Futility Closet books, and see the show notes for the podcast, with links and references for the topics we've covered. If you have any questions or comments for us, you can email us at podcast at futilitycloset.com. Our music was written and performed by the exceptional Doug Ross. Thanks for listening, and we'll talk to you next week.

Futility Closet - 275-A Kidnapped Painting

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