"This machine", he says, pointing to a champagne-coloured lion cub that is the fruit of six years of costly and painstaking research and development, "is completely useless".As it happens, uselessness is selling well this Christmas.
It was unbearable to watch Miliband (who might not be 100% my cup of tea in lots of ways, and some of his ideas are bonkers, but he is a genuine supporter of women and I'm sure he would put his hand on his heart and say he is a feminist) be lectured by Brand on the uselessness of the female vote.
For girls with mental disabilities, vulnerability to abuse, the assumption of uselessness and the education barriers is far greater.
For all his radioactive uselessness, you do get a very real sense that Nick could still somehow be sitting there in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse.
Rather than scrap the scheme, the government has diluted it to the point of uselessness.
Isn't this irrational, and further evidence of the uselessness of economic theory?Not according to a recent article* in the RAND Journal of Economics, which argues that such behaviour is readily explicable.
If dead trees are not harvested within 10 to 15 years of being killed, they will have rotted or burned to the point of uselessness.
The liveried footman, who demonstrated by his decorative uselessness his master's ability to consume a great deal of unproductive labour, was the ultimate status symbol.Prosperous and busy people employ nannies and cleaners to make life easy for themselves.
Last year it was "Schott's Original Miscellany", a collection of obscure and unrelated facts whose appeal lay in its very uselessness.
It is certainly unusual: countless former veeps have complained of the utter uselessness and frivolity of the position, or that it is not worth a bucket of warm spit (a remark ascribed to John Garner, Franklin Roosevelt's first vice-president).
The results are apparent on a walk down any American street more than 60% of Americans are overweight, and a full quarter of them are overweight to the point of obesity.Now, health advocates say, an ill-conceived redesign has taken one of the more successful public-health campaigns the Food Guide Pyramid and rendered it confusing to the point of uselessness.
