Every terrorist plot, successful or foiled, seems to lengthen the gauntlet of checks.
When it isn't carefully nudging you through a gauntlet of pre-canned explosions, the campaign often seems to forcibly slow you down.
Whether it's a gargantuan slice of saggy, cheesy pizza, a somewhat mysterious chicken bake, or an ice cream sundae, the food here always seems to taste amazing after an hours-long jaunt through the Costco gauntlet.
At his best, LaBute generates excitement by seeming to throw a gauntlet directly into the stalls.
Fortunately, when this information came to light, they were already drunk on the bottomless champagne they had enjoyed at their Valentine's lunch, so their inebriated state allowed them to take up the gauntlet that those make out rooms seemed to be throwing.
The intelligence minister also seemed to throw down the gauntlet to moderates, accusing them of joining the assault on Ayatollah Khamenei.
Arguably the most powerful of his many collections, the book threw down a gauntlet to lazy thinking, flabby verse; even, it seemed, to mortality itself.
Recorded in 1980, when James Brown's best work was behind him, it has always seemed to me the sound of a giant throwing down the gauntlet for one last time, a challenge to the young guns of disco, rap and hip-hop who were coming up behind.
Then, signaling to his band, he threw down the gauntlet: "For Free?," a great torrent of words from his landmark 2015 album, "To Pimp a Butterfly," that he seemed to aim straight at the dude, determined to overwhelm him with sheer lyrical dexterity.
The original assumption was that the more effective drugs, which seemed to better match FDA guidance for obesity meds, would be the ones that made it through the regulatory gauntlet.
