Last week, for example, Lizette Alvarez wrote skillfully about the racial issues that had emerged, noting that "race lingers awkwardly on the sidelines, scarcely mentioned but impossible to ignore".
But in the courtroom where George Zimmerman is on trial for second-degree murder, race lingers awkwardly on the sidelines, scarcely mentioned but impossible to ignore.
"The throng in front of the Finland Station blocked the whole square, making movement almost impossible and scarcely letting the trams through," recorded NN Sukhanov, a leading chronicler of the Russian Revolution who was waiting there that night.
"In a scarcely veiled effort to make abortion impossible," the newspaper added, "21 senators used the power of government to do something grotesque".
The memory is going anyway (as you would expect from someone who turned 40 during the season) but more significantly, the sheer quantity of memorable moments from a scarcely believable 2012 makes any selection impossible.
Why did you entrust your book to film-makers you had scarcely heard of to do something you believed impossible?
Solar passenger planes, blended wing bodies, hydrogen jets, algal oils, other biofuels: all are either technically impossible, commercially infeasible, worse than fossil fuels or capable of making scarcely a dent in emissions.
Since scarcely any objective data on best practices for OM in (specialty) hospitals were available it was impossible to select cases based on performance.
However many times you perform this trick, it is impossible to isolate the north (or the south) pole of a magnet.That observation is so commonplace that it might scarcely be thought noteworthy.
