Monday
The one upside to a rolling international crisis is that it can give backroom people a rare chance to shine. Witness, this week, the breakout stars of the Iranian diplomatic corps, who from two different diplomatic missions managed to poke fun at Donald Trump while maintaining the base-level decorum that so eludes the American president.
In Pakistan, the Iranian ambassador, Reza Amiri Moghadam, responded to questions about the ongoing blockade of the strait of Hormuz by the US with an elegant and irony-laden reference to Jane Austen. “It’s a truth universally acknowledged,” said the ambassador, in a reference that was almost certainly lost on his antagonist in Washington, “that a single country in possession of a large civilisation, will not negotiate under threat and force.” Oh, well played, sir!
Meanwhile, from the Iranian embassy in Ghana, a steady stream of trolling social media posts designed to turn Trump’s mockery around and send it back at him. After the US president’s recent spat with the pope, an excitable social media manager at the Iranian mission to Ghana posted a satirical note addressed to, “Dear Italy,” in which it offered itself as a replacement friend for the US.
“Your PM just defended [the] Pope and lost an ally in Washington, the Commander in Grief, yet the most ‘powerfool’ man on earth,” ran the post, which made up in rough energy for what it lacked in polish. “We’d like to apply for the vacancy,” it went on, and while some of the material could do with a tune-up, the subsequent list of Iran’s qualifications as a premium ally, including “7,000 years of civilisation, a shared love of poetry, architecture, and food that takes longer to prepare than Trump’s attention span” – absolutely landed.
There was also a decent gag about Iranian versus Italian ice-cream, and the onslaught continued this week with a reference to Trump, after his endless reversals on Truth Social, as “a one-man WhatsApp chat group”. Solid stuff and let’s not spoil the gesture with any pettiness about the reality of life under a theocratic authoritarian regime.
Tuesday
It’s finally hot(tish) out and the sun is shining, so it’s time to have our annual conversation about coffee. Do you enjoy an iced beverage which, after 10 minutes in your sweaty little hand, primarily consists of melt water? Do you enjoy a cup filled almost entirely with ice, so that you are paying approximately 40p per sip? As with one’s position on clowns or pineapple on pizza, there is no middle ground in this debate; you either despise iced coffee or are a wrong-headed fool, and I refer you for reference to a piece published last week on the website Gothamist, in which the writer James Ramsay went out into Manhattan in search of other summer hot coffee drinkers.
His position: that ice coffee neither refreshes, like a proper cold drink, nor energises, like real coffee. He shared with us the detail that cold drinks now make up 75% of all sales in Starbucks, a fact that, when we turn to look back on this period, might turn out to be the canary in the coalmine of where it all started to go wrong. Most of those cold drinks aren’t coffee, of course, but the iced matchas and strawberry refreshers that push up towards £7 a cup and fall into a category with what Larry David once referred to as “vanilla bullshit” drinks. So before you order it on ice, think about that.
Wednesday
Nike, the sportswear behemoth, would like those of us who go for a run and end up walking to, if not hate ourselves, exactly, then at least feel slightly bad about our underperformance. Since the launch of a new slogan in Boston timed to coincide with the city’s marathon – “Runners Welcome. Walkers Tolerated” – a sizeable palaver has kicked off from runners who like to take a break, or walkers who occasionally break into a run, or anyone whose fitness level is such that they feel “shamed” by the “elitist” slogan.
This week, Nike pulled the ad and replaced it with the more inclusive, “Movement is what matters”. This is a better sell, to my mind, but as ever with this kind of dispute one is left with an impression of a wild overreaction, with participants in running clubs thousands of miles away from Boston claiming to feel undermined and embarrassed by Nike’s slogan. Ignoring it is, apparently, not an option, anyway Just Do It (But Only If You Feel Like It; Otherwise Don’t Worry).
Thursday
The fifth and final season of the HBO hit show, Hacks, is under way and the best thing about it is Robby Hoffman. While the two leads limp towards the finish, the breakout star of the show since the previous season has been the actor and standup who you may or may not have been obsessively watching on YouTube, and who came to prominence a few years ago in the underrated FX show Dying for Sex.
The 36-year-old Hoffman, who grew up the seventh of 10 siblings in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community, first in Brooklyn, then in Canada, has the flat delivery of an earlier generation of comics and I would urge you to Google her routines hingeing on the words “no backsies”, and also “hard towel”. That the rest of this season of Hacks is as flat as a pancake is sad, but it’s been a good run and all good things etc, and we wait with excitement to see what Hoffman does next.
Friday
Madonna’s corset, at the time of writing, remains unrecovered, after the singer lost her wardrobe at Coachella off the back of a golf buggy. The vintage costumes were being transported from the stage to the car park after Madonna’s set with Sabrina Carpenter and included “archival” pieces that the singer is so keen to get back she launched an online appeal urging anyone with information to email her team.
While this definitely won’t solicit thousands of weird and unrelated messages to the email address she shared, I find myself thinking more about whoever was in charge of driving that golf cart. I very much hope they enjoy their time off and are familiar with how to launch a GoFundMe to make up for the sudden loss of income.