Word: mud
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...personal style. There are high-backed upholstered sofas from Spain, a chandelier from the Netherlands, Chinese wedding cabinets, black-lacquer tabletops from Vietnam and Burmese art. In place of the pinks and reds so common in the subcontinent, there is a palette of avocado and chocolate, indigo, ebony, mud and ivory...
...teff, a cereal used to make the flat, spongy bread injera. As a warm July rain falls on a patchwork of smallholdings half a day's walk from the nearest road, the women harvest yams, the men plow behind sturdy oxen and fat chickens, goats and cows roam outside mud huts. And yet for all the apparent abundance, this area is so short of food that many are dying from starvation...
Ralph Fiennes, head nearly shaved, thin frame draped in mud-brown haberdashery, stands in an implied graveyard and works his mouth into a sour scowl as he says he doesn't mind the smell of corpses. "A trifle on the sweet side perhaps, a trifle heady, but how infinitely preferable to what the living emit, their feet, teeth, armpits, arses, sticky foreskins and frustrated ovules." Fiennes enumerates these body parts with slow precision, and in a tone of crescendoing disgust. It might be a litany of curses, a bill of criminal charges brought against a species about to be condemned...
...Provencal and Italian. They pervade the region's history, politics, folklore and sense of itself, from the 11th century down to the present day. Catalans like to think of their culture as both older than most of Spain's (Barcelona was a great medieval city when Madrid was mud huts) and newer as well -- the roof on which the rain of north European avant-gardes fell before its patter reached the rest of Spain. If there's one artist who exemplifies this, it's Miro, in whose work the archaic and local got fused to the new and unpredictable, with...
...faith the Afghans once had in their government. "Russia came here with 150 thousand troops, and you know what happened," says businessman Mohammad Akbar Bhai. "Even if you bring one million troops in Afghanistan, the West cannot win. What we need is honest government. If a river starts in mud, everything downstream will be dirty...