The Lakers season came to amerciful end Sunday with a four-game sweep at the hands of the San Antonio Spurs that saw Howard tossed from the game after receiving his second technical foul.
However, the American critic Edmund Wilson famously dismissed the work as "juvenile balderdash", and Philip Toynbee wrote in 1961 that Tolkien's works had "passed into amerciful oblivion".
This masochistic exercise in conspicuous Conservative contrition is not quite over but is drawing to amerciful close, and Mr Lilley appears to have got the gist of what Britons think.
Only when she learnt that this merciful tactic merely caused a long summer of reshuffle speculation in the press did she see the merit of getting the carnage out of the way in July.
She said appeal judges decided to impose a four-year term after concluding that the 18-month sentence for offences committed over a 12-year period was "not simply merciful" but "unduly lenient".
As she showed me how to write a version of the Bismillah - the declaration "In the name of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful" - she revealed something astonishing.