But do it pat, John Whittingdale, quickly and cleanly, with one swift slash of the butcher's knife across that old, wise throat, not slowly and painfully, hung up on a hook and whipped, like all those women, in those films you like.
Sometimes the words have a punch-line humor: "Did you cheat on your wives?" But the longer you watch, the more they hang painfully in the air, stirring up our own unasked questions.
But the gears and the grease that keep this big machine humming are people who can be generally described with less glamorous adjectives: underpaid, uninsured, overworked and sweaty (not to mention often heavily tattooed, bearded, hung over and painfully burdened by loan payments for their M.F.A. degrees).
The situation in Washington escalated into sheer ridiculousness on Monday, with Haynesworth denying he was hung over at a practice last week and going on the radio to blame "haters" in the Redskins organization (who once hated him so much they signed him for $100 million) for all of his painfully obvious faults.
Dozens of faux propaganda posters, replete with smiling Maos and happy workers and beautiful women, hang on the otherwise painfully average walls of Private Party.
No one is paying much serious attention to Labour, a state of affairs to which most of the frontbench are painfully adjusting after 13 years of expecting the world to hang on their every word.
It may be painfully slow at first, but you'll eventually get the hang of it!
But most people I know are either scrambling harder than ever to hang onto their middle-class status or sliding slowly and painfully out of it.
That the carnage took place at a South Carolina institution founded in part by a man later hanged for planning a slave insurrection only makes the tragedy resonate more painfully.
Now if you want to hang your favorite classic painting in your personal quarters you can get painfully close -- and without spending a few hundred million to get the job done.
A replica of Kiki's magical black cat, Jiji, hangs in a cage out front, a broom is emblazoned on the bakery's sign, and the painfully delicious-looking pastries themselves come to life inside.
