Missing

It's been over a decade since the highest-value art heist in history took place at the Isabella Gardner Museum in Boston. Two men dressed as police officers gained entry into the museum after midnight, tied up the museum guards, and in a brisk pace, gathered a small group of pieces with a combined value of nearly $500 million dollars, and left by car.

So much time has passed without a call for ransom, or any mysterious appearance for private sale or auction.  Has a wealthy collector with exacting tastes built a private viewing room for the stolen treasures? Was the culprit one of the disguised police officers? Were those two hired exclusively for the heist?  If so, have they stopped looking over their shoulders and settled into legitimate trades?

The Concert by Johannes Vermeer 

(one of only thirty-four paintings he completed in his short lifetime)

The paintings were cut from their frames

The Gardner Museum is offering a reward of five million dollars for information leading to the recovery of their artwork. The stolen work; a Vermeer, a Manet, three Rembrandts, five Degas sketches, a Chinese vase and a bronze finial remain missing.

From their website:

The museum continues to issue the call to the holders of the works to conserve them in recommended temperatures and humidity levels.

Staff picks

You work with someone long enough, you get to know their pet peeves.

You work with someone long enough in a children's bookstore, you get to know their pet peeve titles.

S. took issue with Shel Silverstein's The Giving Tree

"So I should give and give until I'm a stump?"

L. and J. shared the same disdain for Robert Munsch's Love You Forever

Mommy as a spying stalker

Rocking with old Mommy

SM was genuinely puzzled by the popularity of Taro Gomi's Everyone Poops

27 pages of WE GET IT!

 For me, Marcus Pfister's The Rainbow Fish was the pebble in my shoe. Supposedly promoting sharing and kindness,  the fish has to give his shiny scales to the other fish in order to be accepted and liked

(buy your friends and forget about being unique).

Overhead lighting

I'm loving the lighting at the newly remodeled 

Pump Room at the gorgeous hotel, Public, in Chicago.

Ludwig

Electric

What is soul? It's like electricity - we don't really know what it is, but it's a force that can light a room.

—Ray Charles

Novel idea

Yes, the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado. My wife and I went up there in October. It was their last weekend of the season, so the hotel was almost empty. They asked me if I could pay cash because they were taking their credit card receipts back down to Denver. I went past the first sign that said, Roads may be closed after November 1, and I said, Jeez, there's a story up here.

—Stephen King on writing The Shining (Paris Review No. 189)

When I placed my head on the pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think...I saw - with shut eyes, but acute mental vision - I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with some uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous Creator of the world.

—Mary Shelley, on her dream that inspired her novel, Frankenstein (preface, Frankenstein)

One night, I was lying in bed and I was channel surfing between reality TV programs and actual war coverage. On one channel, there's a group of young people competing for I don't even know; and on the next, there's a group of young people fighting in an actual war. I was really tired, and the lines began to blur in an unsettling way. That's the moment when Katniss's story came to me.

—Suzanne Collins, on writing The Hunger Games (School Library Journal)

In 1964 I'd read a story about a man catching a 4,550 pound shark off Long Island and thought,

'what if a shark that size showed up and wouldn't go away?'

—Peter Benchley, on writing Jaws (interview, Ft. Meyers Magazine)