In one 1947 cartoon here, the as yet unnamed Morticia is genuinely pleased when a gentleman from Railway Express appears with two pet carriers; she calls upstairs: "It's the children, darling, back from camp".
Watching Mariano Rivera warming up in the bullpen sent Darling back to 1995, when Rivera started (and won) a game against the A's, in Darling's final season as a major leaguer.
December 2003 The then transport secretary, Alistair Darling, backs a third runway at Heathrow in the aviation white paper but sets targets on noise and air pollution.
But now we are confronted with a creepy specter, Animal Planet meets "The Monkey's Paw": Obsessive pet owners bringing their little darlings back to life, for an endless parade of Frankencats and Dracudogs.
Alistair Darling stepped back today from a radical overhaul of Britain's banks when he ruled out caps on bankers' pay or breaking up the biggest City institutions.
When news broke of the first run on a British bank in more than a century, Darling was back in Edinburgh.
Extracts from Mr Darling's Back From The Brink: 1,000 Days At No 11 have appeared on the Labour Uncut website and the book is set to be serialised in a newspaper at the weekend.
As Darling pointed back to him, McKeon drew a line across the top of his jersey, seeming to tell Darling that if the borderline high pitch is a ball, the borderline low pitch should be a strike.
Ray Snape, York Alistair Darling's Back from the Brink (Atlantic Books), describing the rather poisoned chalice of his Chancellorship, is a gripping and dramatic read, which reverses the stereotypes about politicians being in it for their own gain.
The sad songs really pile on the misery: the lip-wobbling stoicism of Sharon Ridley's Changin', the crashing, heavily orchestrated anguish of Johnnie Taylor's What About My Love?, the way Barbara Mason gradually ratchets up the grief and the guilt on Darling Come Back Home.
Less racy is Alistair Darling's Back From the Brink: 1,000 Days at Number 11 (Atlantic, £19.99), a characteristically solid account of the crash – the banking system's and his own with Gordon Brown – written by a politician whose rare lack of ego was perfectly suited to the chancellorship he inherited just before the derivatives hit the fan in 2007.
