Behind the Scenes Minis: This Monkey’s Gone to Heaven

Tracy talks about the events that happened in the gap between writing the latest Unearthed episode and recording it. Holly shares thoughts about art heists.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of iHeartRadio, Hello and Happy Friday. I'm Tracy V. Wilson
and I'm Holly Fry. This was our latest installment of
Unearthed All this week. Here is how this went. I

(00:26):
wanted to take time off around Christmas and New Year's,
so before leaving the office for Christmas and New Year's
I roughed out basically all of both parts of the episode,
and then the plan was to come back to work
on the first workday of the year, go through all

(00:48):
of my RSS feeders to pull out anything else that
I thought should be added to the episode that had
happened in the last two weeks of the year, and
then read through everything and then send it to Holly.
And I think three or four things that made news
at the end of the very end of the year
that were added. The Victorian Shoes was one of the
things that was added. That was actually something that I

(01:10):
saw the headline of while I was out, and I
emailed myself an email that just said Victorian shoes as
the subject line and a link to the article as
the body of it. So I got all that finished
up and I sent it to Holly, and I thought
to myself, Boy, wasn't it nice that I didn't have

(01:31):
to have a lengthy exploration of all of the ways
that the federal government is attacking my profession? And then
I went, wait a minute, have I missed anything that
the federal government is doing to attack my profession? And

(01:51):
that is when I learned that, while I was out
of the office and not really looking at the news,
that letter had been sent to Lonnie Bunch about the
Smithsonian and the threats to withhold funding. And then, as
we said in the episode, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting
voting to dissolve itself happened literally hours after I sent

(02:13):
you the second version of the outline to add in
the thing about the Smithsonian. There also is ongoing stuff
involving the Department of Education and how history is taught
and I still don't feel equipped to talk about that knowledgeably.
But I was like, well, I was hoping. I mean,
there's a bajillion trillion things going on in the world.

(02:34):
We've said that over and over, but like the ones
that are specifically related to the field of history and
how we do our work continue to be attacked, basically
attacked and undermined. I hate it. So that's how that's
going something. I don't know if you had anything to

(02:55):
add to that, Holly, I, Yeah, I was gonna make
a smart Alligi coming go really cause I love it,
which I obviously don't, but obviously not. Something I didn't
put in here was all of the art heists that
happened in the third quarter of or the third quarter.
There were just a lot of art heists and what
at the Louver, And I thought about having a whole

(03:19):
heist section and was like, that's not it's not exactly
what we usually talk about on on Earth. And then
I also was really not sure whether the number of
art heists was unusual or it was just the fact
that one of them was at the Louver and that
made everybody report on art heists for a little bit.

(03:40):
And I think it is more that there's a lot
of hot art heists happening all the time, and that's
from museums happening all the time, and that it wasn't
necessarily a particular spike late last year. It was just
they got reported a lot more late last year. Yeah,
this is another thing we did an entire season of

(04:00):
for Criminialia. Yeah, and I discovered you may know this already,
that there are a lot of people that are career
criminals that work in things like organized crime, that specifically
do art heists as a form of personal insurance. Wow,
because then if they get pinched for some other crime,

(04:24):
they can go, hey, you know that painting you've been
looking for for four years. I could tell you how
to get it back, but you have to let me
off these charges. Wow. And there's a lot of that
that goes on in the criminal underworld. Yeah, that to
me was like fascinating, And I had a similar thing
of like there are art heists going on all the

(04:44):
time and it's not even about because I've always wondered
like who is the person that has stolen art in
their home that they're just like, yeah, as a painting
that somebody stole from me, Like you have to be
so careful about who enters your home at that point. Yeah.
But a lot of it is and I'm sure some
of those exist, but a lot of it is stuff
like that where it's like it is being stolen to

(05:06):
be used later for barter. Yeah. Yeah, fascinating. I feel
like we've talked on unearthed before about somebody that got
sent to prison for basically using art as money laundering.
Although this might have been something that I read about
and didn't put in the episode, but it was basically
about how the way the world of collecting and selling

(05:31):
art works makes it an easy an easy thing to
use to launder money. Yeah, because you can basically walk
into the art dealer and say, I inherited this from
my aunt, it's been in it's been in the family
for centuries, and then there's cover for this transaction of money. Basically,

(05:52):
so anyway, anyway, lots of heists, didn't really talk about them.
Something that affected a little bit research is that the
BBC has gone behind a paywall for I'm not I
think it's everyone outside of the UK, but I don't
actually know for sure. But BBC News articles now behind

(06:13):
a paywall. So there are a number of articles that
I had bookmarked backed whenever they happened, and then when
I came back to them like now it's behind a paywall.
That included the Victorian shoes, so I had to go
find other Victorian shoe sources because I could not get
to the BBC article. Yes, I know that the publications
need to make money. That this is a reality of life.

(06:36):
I have various thoughts on whether paywalls are the best
way to do that, but they do absolutely become a
hindrance to these kinds of episodes, especially when there's some
kind of find that is not in the BBC. It's
in some small local paper. And the only way to
get that small local papers one article that's the only

(06:59):
coverage of it, yeah, is to subscribe to that paper
for a year. Like, that's just not something that we
can do. I do subscribe to various publications and also
some podcasts and podcast networks as a paying subscriber. I
recognize that it's important to support journalism, but like we
cannot do all of them, and not all of them

(07:23):
that we might need are available in like library resources
that we can have access to. Yeah, I do love
the Victorian Shoes is such an evocative thing to consider
that I'm like, someone needs to write a movie based
on this one thing. Yeah, it doesn't have to do
anything with the reality of how those shoes got there,

(07:44):
but there's a good story there. The last thing that
I did not include in the episode because it isn't
it's not really an update to anything that we've done

(08:06):
an episode on. It's an update to something that I
have said on the show, which is that we used
to get a lot of requests to do an episode
about the Dion quintuplets. Oh yeah, these were quintuplets have
a pretty upsetting life story involving being removed from their parents'

(08:30):
care and basically turned into an amusement park part attraction.
And when we were asked about that previously, my answer
had been that two of them were still living and
they had made it really clear at that time that
they just wanted their privacy, and so it felt wrong

(08:50):
to do an episode about them when their whole life
story is about being absolutely stripped of their privacy and
they still they wanted privacy. It just it seemed wrong
to be like, well, we're going to do a podcast
on you anyway. Y. Yeah. It's like somebody going, I've
been exploited my whole life, and then somebody, yeah, you know,

(09:11):
we're not exploiting you, We're explaining how you were exploited.
It is it still feels really icky and are there
are a few topics that have a similar aspect like
that that are subjects that I've been reluctant to do
because it's like, you know, this person's story involved them
being gawked at without them having any control over it,

(09:33):
and I feel like the episode would be glawking further
and I just it feels bad in this particular context.
So long story short, it's not actually short at all.
The last surviving Dion quintuplet, a net Dion, died on
December twenty fourth, twenty twenty five, at the age of
ninety one, and a couple of people sent articles about

(09:55):
this having happened. But this does not mean we're going
to do a Dion Quint's episode now, because it runs
into the same sort of thing that we have talked
about on the show not very long ago, that it
can be really hard to try to do an episode
about someone's life when they have just died. Some of
the complexities that can come up with that include surviving

(10:17):
family members who are fresh in their grief. Yeah, and
for whatever reason, feel like the episode did not serve
their loved one well. That has happened on our show before,
was not a great experience, did not like going through
it for us, and felt bad that this person felt

(10:37):
like that we had hurt them with our episode. There's
also a period of time that needs to pass between
something happens and between when a person's life happens and
being able to look on that with an appropriate level
of historical remove and context, and like that amount of
time has not passed when the someone just died last year.

(11:01):
So that is another thing that makes it complicated. Maybe
at some point, at some point in the future there
we may do an episode. Maybe not, I don't know,
but it is not on the immediate list right now.
If people are wondering now that the last survivor of
them has passed on, that did not it does not
mean that there is now deon quintuplets at the top

(11:22):
of the episode to do list. No. Also, they've gotten
a lot of coverage anyway. Yeah, there's a lot, which
isn't to say that's always an excluder for other things
that we've talked about, but yeah, it we just feel
like piling on in a space where we don't need to. Yeah,
we're not going to offer up anything insightful that hasn't

(11:44):
been considered already. Yeah, there are definitely times where I'm like,
I don't feel like I have anything new to add
to this story. Yea, and this might be the case here.
So anyway, Holly, did you have anything else that you
wanted to talk about from unearthed animal burials? Oh? Yeah,
I'm fascinated by some of them, like the dog with

(12:05):
the dagger is great, also evocative imagery. Yeah, and it
just made me think about, you know, the way people
manage these things and how I always perhaps it's very
naval gaizy, but I always think about how things that
you know, we in the collective we I mean like
not me myself, but modern humans will be perceived down

(12:29):
the road, including things like you know, animal burials in
backyards and yeah, jars full of ashes and yeah, all
of the ways that people manage the passing of their
beloved pets and their remains. It just makes you think
about all of these things. Yeah, the the macaques at

(12:53):
the animal cemetery that we talked about. Something that really
struck me was like how many burials there are at
the ceremony or at the cemetery. I don't know why
I said ceremony, but like that so many animals apparently
pets had been or maybe not, if not pets, like
animals that people were living around and felt like needed
to be buried in an animal cemetery, that there were

(13:15):
a lot of them. Yeah, it's fascinating. It's fascinating to me,
especially because those those animals, those macaques, were buried with
the kinds of things we associate with human burials in
some cases, which to me is just wild because it
not only says like this was a perhaps a beloved
pet or an animal that was very revered, even if

(13:37):
it wasn't maybe domesticated as a pet, but that the
people doing those burials are also thinking about the soul
and after life of that animal, right in a way
that we don't always associate happening. Yeah, which is just
super fascinating to me. Yeah. Yeah, we had lots of
good animals. Cats in Asia, cats in China. Uh huh huh. Pets,

(14:03):
They're good, They're good. I also love I'm very fascinated
by the Dictionary of Ancient Celtic. Yeah, I'm very fascinated
by that and the fact that when it's complete, it'll
only have about a thousand words in there, because that's
how many, Like a complete dictionary is still really limited
in how many examples of it there are. Yeah, I mean,

(14:24):
I I this is a silly perhaps a silly way
to consider it. But I was thinking, like, there are
fictional languages that have been come up with. Oh sure,
I said that awkwardly, for like entertainment things. Yeah, but
have more vocabulary available than that. Yeah, you know, if

(14:46):
you think about things like Klingon or hotties where people
love to talk about those fictional languages, there's a lot
more than there than we know about ancient Celtic. Right, Yeah,
it's just wild. Also, the Bayou Tapestry, it's gonna come
up again really soon. Yeah, really Yeah. I had a

(15:07):
thought where I was like, should I go see it?
Because oh, are you definitely going? Okay, great, I do
have a trip plans to the UK. It's planned in
that theoretically it's happening. I have concretely booked anything, but
it's too early. It won't be there, the exhibit won't
be happening yet, so I would need to make another trip. Yes.

(15:30):
When I discovered that was the case that the Bayue
Tapestry was going to be on loan, I immediately texted
two of my closest friends and said, like, let get
your calendars out, we're going to have a discuss it. Yeah,
when we went to Paris back in twenty eighteen, twenty nine,

(15:50):
twenty nineteen, I think we went to Paris. I went,
I saw the Unicorn tapestries. Yeah, I love them so much. Yeah,
I mean I I have. I always wanted to see
the Bayou tapestry, and it is by you is a
little bit removed, like it's a hike to get there
from Paris. So it's always been a little bit of

(16:11):
like a oh am, I gonna finally just bite the
bullet and like book a trip and make that happen.
And now it'll be like, well it's gonna be in London.
That's easier. Yeah, I'll go see the British Museum and
pay my respects to Mike the Cat. It'll be wonderful.
I want to just say, as a side note, as
a child, I never would have imagined myself as a
person that went to Europe really yet, Like that was

(16:37):
not a thing that was within our family's means mine either,
But I was very much like I'm gonna figure this out.
You guys are on your own. Yeah, kind of a
jerk way to look at it. I also developed a
fear of airplanes, something that I probably partially got from
my mom, who was very very open about the fact

(16:57):
that she was scared of airplanes. But then also I
told us story recently on the show about being told
about hijackers that might kill you when I was in
Sunday school and a child. That left an impression also,
So I did not travel anywhere by air until when
I was in college and I went to a conference
and I had a bad experience in a frightening way

(17:19):
on the way back from that trip and did not
get on an airplane again for more than a decade.
And even then I traveled my air mostly for work.
And I still like the idea of going to Europe,
the idea of going to like a country on the
other side of the ocean, any of that was just

(17:40):
not something I ever imagined myself doing. So I just
wanted to say I am incredibly, profoundly grateful that this
show and listeners to our show enabled that in a
lot of ways. For me, Almost all of my trips,
with the exception the trip, with the exception of my honeymoon,
every trip that I have made outside of like North

(18:02):
America and the Caribbean has been for the podcast. So
thank you everyone for you know, making that a possibility
in my life. Yeah, recognize a lot of people don't
get to do it. Most people don't get to do it. Yeah.
I feel very, very spoiled that I could text people
and be like, when are we going? I don't care
what else we do. We'll do whatever she want in London,

(18:25):
but we're going for this all right, right, you know
we'll get to you all. It'd be great, see friends,
It'll be cool. We will whatever is coming up on
people's weekends. I hope it is going as beautifully as possible.
We have started the new year now. I think a
lot of us were hoping that the new year might
be a little better than last year, and it's We

(18:47):
instead had immediate chaos within days of the year opening.
So everybody hope everybody is hanging in there doing as
well as possible, and we will be back with a
Saturday Classic tomorrow and something brand new on Monday. Stuff

(19:08):
you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
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