They are everywhere: in the US, AT&T (to pluck a random company) spent $500m on them in just five years, while the British state will soon be spending more on management consultants than on upgrading its nuclear weapons.
Every few minutes, in an act meant to resonate with the arbitrariness of death and survival, the crane's giant claw will pluck a random assortment of shirts, pants and dresses from the mound then release them to flap back down haphazardly.
Sometimes it hits home – in a later scene, the randy emperor is humiliatingly interrupted after he plucks a random beauty from his dinner table right in front of the despairing Josephine.
In some of the field events it feels like the organisers have simply plucked a few random passers-by to compete.
Lesson No 6: Don't complain that the media won't stop hounding whoever it is you admire – say, Corbyn, to pluck a name at random.
And yet, from Shakespeare's many clowns and fools down to Kingsley Amis's Jim Dixon, Sue Towsend's Adrian Mole, DBC Pierre's Vernon Little and Carl Hiaasen's Skeet (to pluck a handful at random), the comic tradition in English writing is vigorous and important.
That means scientists wishing to find out whether a particular batch is still potent cannot just pluck a warhead at random from the stockpile and try to explode it.
When else do we get the opportunity to try and connect, on the deepest level possible, with a random stranger plucked from the ether?
At the present time, many colleges are revisiting the question of their core curriculum, trying to figure out how to make it more than a random amalgam of courses plucked from the academic divisions.
Like an ominous sentence plucked at random from a Cormac McCarthy novel, these pictures tease you with a whole southern gothic milieu that the photographer politely refuses to elaborate.
A single example, plucked at random from a lifetime's supply: years ago, after I'd been bickering with a friend who was visiting my flat in London, she fell silent for several minutes and then, pointing to my wooden floors, observed, "You know that floor's laminate, don't you?" (It was laminate. I'd been lying to myself for years that it was pine).
