Come the Speaker's final whistle, the few remaining sentient beings left in the chamber were wishing they – like Nessie - didn't exist either.
In Buddhism, this compassionate resolve is expressed in the vow of the bodhisattva: "As long as space remains, as long as sentient beings remain, may I too remain and dispel the miseries of the world".
"While I have always tried to maintain Chinapol's political neutrality," Dr. Baum told The New York Times in an e-mail at the time, "some violations are so egregious that I cannot, as a sentient being, remain neutral".
Such images have been circulating throughout popular culture for more than a century, and at this point few sentient people remain unaware that photographs can be, and often have been, altered to amuse, advertise, propagandize and deceive, as well as to increase aesthetic palatability.
Now I don't want to get all Ed Balls-Antiques Roadshow on you, but I defy any sentient creature to remain dry-eyed watching choirmaster Gareth Malone transform a few dozen women on a Devon military base into a group able to sing together in beautiful harmony.
They will remain in cyclic existence until all sentient beings have reached liberation.
While the discovery of an alien civilization has eluded all efforts so far, there are reasons to remain optimistic about the prospect of detecting a signal of sentient origin this century.
"If all sentient beings in the universe disappeared," he writes, "there would remain a sense in which mathematical objects and theorems would continue to exist even though there would be no one around to write or talk about them.
In the abortion debate, the question of when sentient human life begins, not the question of what's convenient, must remain primary.
