THE oil city of Daqing, in the bleak plains of north-eastern China, was once a proud symbol of the country's self-reliant spirit.
Yes, the Bond marque may have died with the Bug, but its legacy lived on in the form of a young warrior crossing the bleak plains of the planet Tattooine in a three-wheeler powered by a Reliant Regal engine.
This Macbeth has been cursed by a depth of vision, an ability to conjure up the rippling consequences of every action he undertakes, that eventually leads him to the bleak plains of existential emptiness.
The result is infuriatingly conflicted fare, buoyed up by brilliant performances, weighed down by old-school cliche, leavened by the bleak plains over which it casts its lonely, misanthropic eye.
But they opened the new bus factory yesterday, and people say that Lamar, a dusty wheat and feedlot community of 8,000 people on the bleak, arid plain of southeastern Colorado, is at last bound for better things.
It sounds bleak, or plain weird, but this is a book flecked with great wit and driven by a humanity that refuses to be ground down by the brutality of others.
For those who have never been there, Maui may appear surprisingly arid, compared with lush islands like Oahu, Kauai and the Big Island; its many resorts and condos tower over a comparatively bleak volcanic plain.
The Round-Up is set on a bleak Hungarian plain in 1868, when Austro‑Hungarian troops tried to break the unity of the Hungarian partisans by torture, interrogations and killings.
The southern and western lowlands consist of a bleak sandy plain with some salt marshes, while the northern and northwestern coasts afford a striking contrast, forming a narrow belt of date palms and vegetable gardens irrigated from prolific springs and wells that tap artesian water.
In the bleak Hungarian plains, that carriage driver, a man of around 60 (Janos Derzsi), and his daughter (Erika Bok) go through their Spartan daily routine, as a gale howls outside their hovel.
