The various outlines at present stuffed into drawers are based on degrees of compromise by both sides and suggest that few of the "insuperable" questions are really insuperable.
Of course, there was the incident of the out-of-sync offerings with Brown giving Obama a pen holder carved from the timber of an anti-slave ship — "a gift wrapped inside a present stuffed inside a thoughtful gesture," as Stewart put it — and getting a DVD box set in return (a snub wrapped inside a put-down stuffed inside bad manners).
Presenters Cristen Conger and Caroline Ervin, who created and presented Stuff Mom Never Told You for seven years, have a new podcast.
He always presents stuff we didn't know before and a p.o.v.
It displays enough randomly presented stuff to give new life to the attic metaphor.
It's like a museum, presenting stuff that's already been done".
When I met with Cross earlier this year, he said he chose that approach because he was trying to do something genuinely different — not just bolt social discovery onto existing products, which usually means presenting stuff that was already in your Twitter feed, but really use social and interest data to recommend content that you wouldn't have seen otherwise.
But once you've opened your presents, stuffed yourself full of turkey and battled with the children over a particularly testing game of charades, the day can get a little, (dare I say it without renouncing my stocking rights for the rest of my life?) dull.
A more elaborate way to assess the integration of contextual and acoustic variation is to experimentally manipulate the context, for instance by presenting stuffed predator models before the playback, or, alternatively by first presenting some calls, and then later some others.
"It is a difficult area when you come to present the stuff," agrees Cocker.
