When the news broke that thieves had successfully snatched the Swedish crown jewels from a museum near Stockholm, jumped on bikes and ridden down to a dock before leaping to a speedboat and racing to freedom – more accurately, to one of the hundreds of tiny islands in the 1,140 square kilometres of Mälaren Lake – you would have been perfectly within your rights to go “really? Huh” and move onto another story about, say, exploding condoms.
And that’s because we’re at a point where savvy consumers of the media are at a very real risk of heist fatigue. And that, dear reader, is because we live in a golden age of heists.
What sets a heist apart from a boring, common-or-garden robbery is the brazen, edge-of-the-seat excitement of it. Anyone can burgle something, but it takes someone with gumption, guile and a flair for the dramatic to pull of a proper heist.
And we’ve been getting that in spades lately. For example: the San Antonio Shark Heist!
“OK kid, where’d you stash the shark?”
It’s just been announced that the men who stole Miss Helen, a horn shark, from the San Antonio Aquarium in what we can only assume was a misguided celebration of Shark Week have been charged with felony robbery.
They stashed the shark in a baby stroller before moseying out of there, and it was two days before Miss Helen was found and returned to her watery home. And she’s fine, by the way.
But the fact that shark-napping ringleader had reportedly gained access to the aquarium weeks earlier by pretending to be a rep for the aquarium’s salt supplier who wanted to test that their water was OK – thereby getting several hours around the tanks and learning where one might stash a shark – is what turns this into a movie just waiting to happen.
Specifically, this movie.
Less filmic but still visually exciting is the story of Keith Jordan, the Texan man arrested and charged with the crime of stuffing not one, not one-and-a-half, but ten frozen steaks into his heist-pants at a Nashville WalMart.
Turns out a moped was not a good getaway vehicle for this thief. https://t.co/qIMYyDmCST
— WTHR.com (@WTHRcom) July 31, 2018
Having successfully pantsed the ribeye he fled the store and raced out into the rain and into what turned out to be a very short-lived period of freedom and fleeing on… um, a moped. Man, between the weather and the frozen meat, he must have been freezing.
“Between The Weather And The Frozen Meat” is also the name of my new hardcore band.
Frankly, we blame Oceans 8. Let’s face it: all today’s young people are continually one-upping each other in their desperate attempts to be as cool as Mindy Kaling.
Give it up, guys. It’s never going to happen.
