Open thread 204
One of my favorite news stories this week is a local one: IKEA Nederland has denied permission to play hide and seek in its stores.
I totally get this. What amuses the heck out of me is the sheer numbers: thirty-two thousand people signed up on Facebook for a game of it in the southern city of Eindhoven. My local IKEA in Amsterdam was the target for nineteen thousand, and Utrecht came in third with twelve grand.
Another titbit of local news is that the rogue owl of Purmerend has been captured. Runners at an athletic center in the pleasant Noord-Hollands town were targeted for weeks by a large and aggressive eagle owl. The papers dubbed the creature the TERROR OEHOE (pronounced "oohoo"), and reported how locals were being encouraged to protect themselves with umbrellas.
What do these stories have in common, apart from the Dutch?
They're both about intrusions: the playful crowd intruding on corporate space, the wildness of the owl intruding on human territory. Small intrusions are fine: five hundred people playing hide and seek in a Belgian IKEA last year, flash mobs, the silly waddling oppossums I saw while delivering newspapers as a teenager, urban beekeepers. But then suddenly it's tens of thousands of people, too many for the targeted shop to safely hold; suddenly it's "a brick laced with nails" coming after you silently through the air. It's the urban mountain lions that take out a jogger or two every year few years in Western states; it's protestors staging #blacklivesmatter die-ins in suburban malls.
On the other hand, these intrusions are only outsized until you see them against the things they're intruding on. IKEA is a huge global company, one of many huge global companies who have encroached on our physical, legal and cultural commons, hijacking everything from the idea that the market square is a public space to the conversations we have about race. And the outsprawling of our urban spaces has given much of the natural world very little choice but to engage with us. Where else can they go? What corner of the world is free from our presence?