what we have here is a $400,000 cheese heist

the game is afoot

To London:

Hundreds of truckles of cheddar worth more than £300,000 have been stolen from London cheese specialist Neal’s Yard Dairy.

A quick conversion of British pounds to American dollars tells me that this is roughly $400,000 worth of cheese, which… it’s a lot of cheese. So much cheese. An amount of cheese I cannot even picture in my brain as I sit here typing this paragraph. The best image I have so far is like if you press the button on a garage door opener and the motor starts humming and the door slides up and you suddenly realize that the whole thing is full of cheese. Just piles and piles of it. Wheels, wedges, the whole deal. What a mouse would think heaven looks like. About that much cheese.

Fraudsters posing as legitimate wholesalers received the 950 clothbound cheeses from the Southwark-based company before it was realised they were a fake firm.

A few notes:

• I like that we’re using the word “fraudsters” here

• That would be a good name for a minor league baseball team

• “950 clothbound cheeses” is a phrase that will be in my head for a while, I suspect

Moving on.

Neal's Yard said it had still paid the producers of the cheese so the individual dairies would not have to bear the costs.

It is now trying to deal with the financial setback, a spokesperson said.

See, this is the thing about a heist story. All it takes is two sentences like these to send me from “lol cheese heist” to “we must find the scoundrels who defrauded these poor people.” It’s why I loved the golden toilet heist so much. It was just some goofballs stealing something useless and valuable from rich people. Harmless on all or at least most fronts. It’s less fun when you are staring down actual victims suffering an actual loss. Let’s set up a task force. I’ll go to the arts and crafts store to buy us red yarn and pushpins for our crime wall.

We must capture the cheese fraudsters.

Patrick Holden, who owns the farm where Hafod cheddar is made, said: "The artisan cheese world is a place where trust is deeply embedded in all transactions.

"It’s a world where one’s word is one’s bond. It might have caused the company a setback, but the degree of trust that exists within our small industry as a whole is due in no small part to the ethos of Neal’s Yard Dairy’s founders."

This is nice and I had no clue the world of cheesemaking is so steeped in honor but I do need you to go back and read that whole quote in Ian McShane’s voice. Do it now. And then try to tell me you wouldn’t watch a movie where a man gets out of the game to devote himself to a quiet life of making cheese in the country but has to come back for one last job when thieves defraud his tight community of 950 cloth bound cheeses.

It dawns on me that this is pretty much exactly the plot of The Beekeeper but with cheese and cows instead of honey and bees. I suppose we were always going to get here. Get Statham on the phone.

But first, read this in Ian McShane’s voice, too.

"The amount of work that’s gone into nurturing the cows, emphasising best farming practice, and transforming the milk one batch at a time to produce the best possible cheese is beyond estimation.

"And for that to be stolen… it’s absolutely terrible."

Two notes in conclusion:

• I know that this cheese was probably stolen and rerouted to other sellers on the cheese black market as part of an elaborate operation but it really is much funnier to picture one dude doing it because he really freakin loves cheese

• If you clicked on that link way up at the top of this page and read the captions under the pictures then you would know by now that this dairy has a cheese-rotating robot named “Tina the Turner”

Give the robot a gun and have it partner with Statham to figure this out. It’s the only reasonable solution here.

STUFF I TYPED

— my weekly Five Spot newsletter, which features entries on Netflix’s sexy snowman movie, Eva Longoria’s sound investments, and Tom Hardy’s desire to punch Spider-Man

The Five Spot: A Few Questions About The Upcoming Netflix Christmas Movie 'Hot Frosty'

STUFF I CLICKED ON

— very good profile of Kieran Culkin by Rachel Handler with very good Emma Stone appearance 

— good blog about baseball players who only played briefly in the pros but still won a World Series ring

— Liz Shannon Miller wrote about What We Do In The Shadows, a good show

— stumbled across this old commencement speech by Bill Watterson

— here’s a Doctor Odyssey screencap I will be using as a reply to a lot of things 

— tough to argue with this list 

— butter bandits

— a rental car company is paying someone — not me — $2500 to eat Wawa hoagies 

— Phil Hartman mural

— Paddington is getting an official UK passport

— good for Frankie Muniz 

— Walter White is back to tell you not to litter

— Beef is back, too

— cocaine pizza

— koi-tastrophe

— “I Don’t Know Why Women Keep Laughing at Me When I’m Out Driving my Tesla Cybertruck”

— go birds and also go birds

— I first read “Edina jewelry” as “Edna Jewelry” so that is who I will assume committed this crime

— posted this in my Friday newsletter too but this movie looks too fun to not share again 

Okay, that’s it for this week. Please share and subscribe and try not to steal my cheese.