Um, this is the best story because it’s basically a Scooby Doo episode but with a punk rock band as the meddling kids, and there’s not really a haunted amusement park or a spoooooky clown or anything but there is an art thief! (The band themselves described the whole thing as a “Scooby Doo adventure,” too.)
So, you see, according to the BBC, what happened is that this painting worth $250,000 by the late New Orleans artist George Rodrigue was stolen in broad daylight by a guy who apparently doesn’t understand that video surveillance exists (but who also used the world’s most clever disguise, “looking just like 17 million other bearded white dudes.”) The gallery has released still images of this fella lifting the painting, called “Wendy and Me,” which depicts the artist’s wife and the artist himself as a Cajun folk creature, the loup-garou, which basically looks like a blue dog, (at least in this thing.) The band, Stereo Fire Empire, had just wrapped a show at the House of Blues when they ventured outside and came across said painting propped against a wall. Thanks to the awesome power of Facebook, one of their members had already been aware of the theft, and thus was totally like “egads zoinks!” when he realized what was in front of him.
The band then turned in the painting to the police, who will be doing their DNA science magic on this thing to try to ascertain the identity of the thief. Says bassist Elliot Newkirk, “We’re walking down the street with these quarter-million-dollar paintings in our hands, and they’re facing out and I’m like, ‘No! Turn that around! We don’t want people seeing that’.”
