Monday
Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it, per the Whitehouse, simply one of “thousands of used car lot balloons?” floating innocently across American airspace? Any week that starts with a Whitehouse briefing reassuring us that “this is not an invasion of the aliens”, promises to be a good week, and then it promptly gets better. Liz Sherwood-Randall, White House homeland security adviser, continues: “I mean, it’s funny, but it’s not funny” – setting up the crucial first act scepticism that guarantees, per the law of disaster movies, the subsequent annihilation of the entire planet and all civilisations upon it.
Meanwhile, the spy balloons, or whatever they are, continue to waft across the central plains of North America. In the last two weeks, three UFOs have been downed by the military, including one over Alaska, one over Canada’s Yukon territory, and one, on Sunday, over Lake Huron – areas, judging by amateur footage taken by members of the public, dense with Walmart car parks of unknown strategic significance.
In recent years, the Pentagon has channelled increasing resources into investigating military UFO sighting, while trying to save face by rebranding them with the less batshit-sounding acronym, UAPs, or “unidentified aerial phenomena”. Time, once again, to buy beans and bottled water.
Tuesday
A less mysterious flying object gripped New Yorkers for the second week in a row, as Flaco the owl, who escaped from Central Park Zoo on 2 February after his enclosure was vandalised, remained at large in the city. Flaco, a 13-year-old Eurasian eagle owl, has been enjoying a magical journey this week – the life rights to which have surely been snapped up by Pixar – and won thousands of supporters anxiously cheering his progress and lamenting his setbacks.
Last week, concerned zoo staff put a rat in a cage and left it on a Central Park lawn, hoping Flaco might figure out how to grab it. (Flaco, who has lived his entire life in captivity, stared at it dumbly.) Concerns increased as the days went by, the temperature in New York plunged, and Flaco entered his second week without food. But lo! At the weekend, he appeared to cough up some rat remains, the city erupted in joy, and since then there’s been no holding him back.
All of this has been documented, with much crowd-sourced Flaco footage, by the excellent Twitter feed, Manhattan Bird Alert.
Further highlights from his fabulous journey: when he took a jaunt down Fifth Avenue; when he survived the harassment of blue jays. And when – we may be veering into whimsy here – he was in the vicinity of Central Park’s second most famous bird, Geraldine the Great Horned Owl. You know how this ends.
Wednesday
What was needed in this, and to be honest in most situations, was Tom Cruise, who one imagines might be as at home rounding up an owl as defeating the aliens. Instead, Cruise and his cohorts in Hollywood were busy this week at the Oscar’s luncheon, an unedifying chuckle-fest at which everyone pretends to be having fun and not making a desperate final lunge for the Oscar.
Cate Blanchett has been on one of the most intense Oscar campaigns, for her movie Tár, that I have ever seen. I love Blanch, I really do, but there is not a podcast, not an entertainment insert, not a college newspaper or local breakfast show that that woman hasn’t been on since before the first Chinese spy balloon went down.
And here is Cruise, with a shaggy new ’do and deep tan, looking, let’s be honest, a little gamey – although, I maintain, still hard to resist. I’ve seen all the photos and there’s not a single one in which Cruise, working the room and agreeing to selfies with everyone, is not pushing up against his inserts with a full-beam smile that must be the facial equivalent of bench pressing 200lbs. It’s the kind of stamina we expect from our legends and I raise my hat to him.
Thursday
Reeling from the resignation of Nicola Sturgeon, the head of the Scottish National party, and her good-humoured speech on Wednesday, the departure of Scotland’s first minister still qualifies as only the second most shocking news story of the week – the first being the removal of a fly-tipped freezer by a council in Margate, and the inadvertent ruining of a new artwork by Banksy.
The tableau, spray-painted on a wall, which Banksy confirmed was his work, depicts a ’50s-style housewife with a black eye apparently disposing of her abusive husband’s body in the now missing freezer. This searing commentary on domestic violence was less arresting than the efficiency of the council, a body that, spooked by the coverage, promptly turned over the freezer to a gallery for safekeeping. As a piece of performance art, Thanet council’s critical response to Banksy’s increasingly banal and obvious output should be submitted for consideration to the Turner prize committee.
Friday
More bird news. I left an old bit of carpet on my terrace and two pigeons moved in. There’s a mum and a dad – we’re being heteronormative about this – and for the past week, as spring weather descended on Manhattan, the dad has undertaken a Trojan effort of stick collection, flying back and forth between the 13th floor and street level to furnish his missis with the ultimate nest. It’s gross, obviously. There’s pigeon shit everywhere. I let my children provide water for them, but I draw the line at crumbs – I’m not convinced New York rats can’t scale the outside of a building. And yet, while I can’t bring myself to join the small but vocal subgroup of New Yorkers who insist we need to revisit our feelings about pigeons, I have softened. The nesting pair are rather beautiful and we await the arrival of their brood of ugly little squabs with bated breath.
