Meanwhile, in the Gulf of Mexico, a feckless work crew tried to plug BP's underwater gusher with a junk shot, pumping pieces of rope, shredded tires and golf balls along with mud and debris into the blowout preventer.
Round 1: the slings and arrows of "Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary," with masses of plastic utensils and combs, old LPs, dangling eyeglasses, syringes, ladies' pumps, pieces of crockery and spools of thread.
In recent months, Facebook has expanded one of its innovative ad formats, "sponsored stories", which allows brands to pump puff-pieces into the "news feeds" of the brands' Facebook fans and their friends.
But to me, a child of the 1980s who spent every seaside holiday pumping 10p pieces into brain-squelchingly tough arcade titles like Defender and Gunsmoke, Flappy Bird is just a continuation of a particularly unforgiving approach to game design.
Before the nineteen-nineties, electric breast pumps, sophisticated pieces of medical equipment, were generally available only in hospitals, where they are used to express milk from women with inverted nipples and from mothers of infants too weak and tiny to suck.
Even in the action-adventure department — smack in the middle of gaming's wheelhouse — films have always outclassed games in delivering artery-pumping set pieces, endearing if flawed heroes and the sort of sumptuous, lush visuals that make you want to settle into the couch forever.
Arnie may be "beck" but he's slowing up; his circuit boards are spluttering and it looks like hoisting up his pump-action piece with one arm necessitates popping into his Winnebago afterwards for a bit of a lie down.
Its instrumental pieces pump out steady uptempo chords and then pile on discordant tunes and goofy noises, wrapping the delirious results in titles like "Metal Fingers in My Body".
