Nigeria has suffered from mediocre leadership for as long as I can remember.
Cook will not be going to the Caribbean and has two months to sift the debris of a disastrous tour and work also on his batting after a mediocre return in both formats.
I and my female friends and colleagues working on Capitol Hill in the 1980s and 90s used to dream about a time when there would be just as many mediocre women in Congress as there are mediocre men.
In the late 1930s, he achieved great success churning out a series of mediocre if charming crime films, as the inscrutable Japanese detective, Mr Moto.
Last weekend one detected signs of panic in the ranks: much concern about so-called "secular stagnation" and "the new mediocre" with regard to the sluggish world economy.
In the end, even as an alternative, the election of a government requires more than some mediocre blokeish quips.
Even Matt Prior, who had a mediocre series with the bat by his standards, still shepherded his side out of trouble when it was needed at Old Trafford and The Oval.
Instead, nationalist and authoritarian regimes have been in power for most of the past quarter-century, pursuing state-capitalist growth models that ensure only mediocre economic performance.
When not being brilliant in Oscar-nominated fare, Julianne Moore occasionally likes to be mediocre in a jaw-droppingly bad genre film.
Richard Linklater's marvellous Boyhood has six nominations, but that is fewer than the decent but middling film The Imitation Game, about wartime codebreaker Alan Turing — and only as many as Clint Eastwood's fantastically dull and mediocre American Sniper, which has been hugely overrated.
The Dash would be terrific as a picture frame, if it weren't so mediocre as a picture frame.
