It is summer and what journalists call the silly season - when the news is full of frivolous stories while everyone takes a vacation - is upon us and its geographical heart this year is undoubtedly in Chicago.
In the city's Millennium Park to be precise where a group of protestors has taken to staking out Anish Kapoor's Cloud Gate sculpture insisting a man is trapped inside the landmark known to locals as The Bean.
The Man in Bean campaign has gone viral with tens of thousands of followers on social media prompting Chicago alderman Brendan Reilly to release a statement saying he was "happy to confirm that a man has not been trapped inside Cloud Gate (aka ‘the Bean’) for the past 21 years".
Alderman Reilly said the campaign had led to his office being inundated with messages calling for the man to be freed and proving to be "a distraction for my office from the real work we do".
It comes as Kapoor today launched a slightly less frivolous campaign teaming up with environmental campaigners from Greenpeace who hung his work BUTCHERED on a Shell platform in the North Sea.
It took seven climbers, who scaled the platform off the English coast, to secure the 12 meter by 8 meter canvas on the structure then pump 1,000 liters of blood-red liquid into the fabric, creating a vast crimson stain described by a spokesman for the stunt as a "visualization of the wound inflicted on both humanity and the Earth by the fossil fuel industry".