Tate Modern became almost too popular for its own good, a heaving cultural souk – acutely in need of its planned extension – where art can occasionally be seen between massed heads and shoulders.
It's easy to sneer at the massed ranks of enthused new members that flocked to Glasgow's SECC for the conference as zealots and zoomers and - lo! - some folk did.
In the last few years it has been a constantly evolving task deciding which character in Joseph Heller's novel Catch-22 the England cricket team and its massed corporate hierarchy most resemble.
To the emotive strains of Over The Rainbow, and with the massed ranks of failed contestants behind her in skin-tight silver mini-dresses, the Sicilian law student still bore her number tag, 09, as she smiled into the crowd.
A week in, it is Labour who are feeling chipper about the early salvoes, even affecting pleasure at the massed ranks of business backers for the Conservatives on Wednesday.
But I was wrong, judging by the massed ranks of ecstatically expectant pre-adolescent girls at the multiplex this weekend.
Nuclear weapons are an effective way to make up for a lack of conventional military power as America readily appreciated when, in the 1950s, it used the threat of retaliation with its comparatively sophisticated nuclear weapons to hold off massed Soviet tank divisions in Europe.
When government leaders gather in Seattle in late November to launch a new push for trade liberalisation under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation, much attention is sure to be paid to the massed ranks there of green demonstrators, shouting loudly that free trade in general, and the WTO in particular, are ruining the global environment.As a general statement, this claim is plain wrong.
This was in open contradiction of Washington's insistence that Afghanistan's erstwhile rulers and their allies in the al-Qaeda network are still a powerful force, requiring massed military might to quash them.
Today, when people speak of a "national missile defence" for America, they usually mean a more modest shield, able to ward off a few missiles not a massed attack by Russia.Somewhere between these extremes lie two ambitious Pentagon efforts, whose exact status is hotly debated.
In reality, the situation in 1915 can best be compared to the regional ethnic cleansing and massed deportations that occurred during the course of the first world war.
