A lesser complaint: hair extensions. There are moments on 'All My Children' when half the women actors young and old seem to be afflicted by android Barbie creep. All those thick swatches of lifeless strands clustering lankly round ladies' necks! Like orange tanning spray this is a fashion fad that should be put out of its misery.

The new industries are brainy industries and so-called knowledge workers tend to like to be near other people who are the same. Think of the City of Hollywood. People cluster. This means you have winning regions such as London and Cambridge and losing regions. The people who want to be top lawyers in Sunderland are hoovered up by London.

Knowledge may give weight but accomplishments give luster and many more people see than weigh.

When I was at college I worked in a department store called Brit Home Stores which is a pretty lackluster department store selling clothes for middle-aged women. My job was to walk the floor and find anything that was damaged take it to the store room and log it.

Words today are like the shells and rope of seaweed which a child brings home glistening from the beach and which in an hour have lost their luster.

Some of the reasons John McCain lost in 2008 were his lackluster campaign his refusal to showcase Obama's extreme liberalism and thus his failure to demonstrate why he would make a better president than Obama.

The plainer the dress the greater luster does beauty appear.

The work of art just like any fragment of human life considered in its deepest meaning seems to me devoid of value if it does not offer the hardness the rigidity the regularity the luster on every interior and exterior facet of the crystal.

As in nature as in art so in grace it is rough treatment that gives souls as well as stones their luster.