Musicians were stunned and saddened when Peter Stumpf, the principal cellist with the L.A. Philharmonic, revealed that the orchestra's 320-year-old Stradivarius cello had disappeared from his home in Los Feliz. I wonder what they think now. You see, the $3.5 million instrument wasn't purloined by an international theft ring, or even taken from inside Stumpf's home. He left it out overnight on the back porch, and it was swiped by a kid on a bike. The kid and the Strad are still missing, but the cops have a videotape.
Wait a minute DZZ, I thought liberal newspapers were supposed to mollycoddlee criminals, not victims.
Now I'm all confused. Or maybe you're just an idiot.
Posted by: Allan at May 7, 2004 10:01 AMIsn't his name Stumpf--no "R"?
Posted by: KateCoe at May 7, 2004 10:41 AMStumpf! Yep, my bad. Good catch Kate.
Posted by: Kevin Roderick at May 7, 2004 10:52 AMDon't know what Stumpf was thinking leaving this precious on the porch, but then again it's a routine occurence when the basses are loaded.
Posted by: joseph at May 7, 2004 01:58 PM"He had come home the night before with the cello in hand. He put the cello on the porch, opened the door and forgot to bring it in," said Police Cmdr. Michel Moore.
"I was so bewildered and so confused as to how this happened," Stumpf said.
It happened because you did a really, really dumb thing
Posted by: Joy at May 8, 2004 12:03 PMAmazing. Evidently some readers here have never, not even once, had an absent-minded moment. Never left a bag of groceries in the car, found themselves on the wrong freeway, forgot that a pot was boiling on the stove. It seems to me that this guy had the terrible luck to experience one of these lapses when a thief happened to be passing by, but I'm curious how the posters who happily call him a "moron" and an "idiot" manage their lives of constant perfection?
Posted by: Cathy Seipp at May 8, 2004 04:15 PMCathy:
I do dumb things all the time. Almost everyone does. But there's a world o' difference in what this guy did and leaving a bag of frozen food on the back seat.
Posted by: Joy at May 9, 2004 09:29 AMMaybe he's got issues. Didn't Jacqueline DuPre have some hostility towards her cello and she left it outside in the cold--not in it's case.
Or maybe the thief is some poor music-deprived child of the innercity who wanted a nice presnt for Mother's Day for his Mom, a refugee from Russia who had to leave her cello back in Minsk. So when Stumpf collects the cello, their eyes meet and their hands touch --and
Who do I call at Lifetime to sell this MOW?
The only difference is that his was an expensive moment of forgetfulness. We don't get to decide what we forget.
Posted by: savvy at May 18, 2004 04:55 PMNope. Moron it is, whether it is inner hostility or just plain forgetting the 3.5 M$ ax. The savvy excuse provider and the LATimes' not putting this story in the Darwin Awards section really make me think we are a society that has lost a sense for accountability. Clinton lies? OK. Rumsfeld screws up? OK. Sarin in the shell today? OK, Blix was right anyhow.
If I lost something that cost my employer that much they would (rightly) bust my kneecaps.
Solution: LAPhil should be run by the Mafia.
JJPerez
Posted by: JoePerez at May 18, 2004 05:18 PM

And yet, the Times still treats this irresponsible moron like he was a victim. That says a lot about how Times writers sees the world.
Posted by: dzzrtRatt at May 7, 2004 08:47 AM