Worse than that, they're a bottomless time-sink, aggressively attention-consuming at all hours of the day or night, and they make the world your workplace.
It may be that the U.S., even during the attention-consuming eviction of Saddam, will have to create another regional coalition of free nations to deal with the nuclear danger posed by North Korea.
But the man at the top of the pay scale is Rodriguez, whose knack for consuming attention has never been more obvious.
If you can, get hold of wild sorrel, it's abundant in parks and alongside canals all over the country, but pay attention to picking and consuming safely.
In fact, if you have to choose the primary breeding ground for the various business misdeeds now consuming national attention, New York, I'm afraid, is the place.
A few seats away, a race had broken out between Ivan Chen, 9, and Simon Shen, 11, consuming the attention of the crowd.
The move has spawned fresh conflict in a government that has held power for only two months, consuming its attention in the midst of pressing economic, food and energy concerns.
But with other priorities now consuming the attention of Trump's transition team, Cubans in south Florida wonder if the president-elect really intends to deliver on the pledges he has made to rein in Obama's new accord.
With immigration policy and the violent Mexican drug wars consuming the attention of policy makers, the cartoonish confrontation of north and south in the ring has found an eager audience in California, home to 37percentt of the nearly 12 million Mexicans estimated by the nonprofit Migration Policy Institute to be living in the United States.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan consuming the attention of national security planners in Washington, the Bush administration's interest in Somalia was driven primarily by fact that a handful of Qaeda operatives responsible for attacks in the Horn of Africa were thought to be hiding there.
