HMV Group has begun a radical downsizing programme that will see it shut almost one in 10 of its high street music stores as it struggles to recover from a dire, snow-blighted Christmas trading spell.
On April 1st, standing on a patch of mud in the Sierra Nevada that, in previous years, would have been a two-to-three-foot snowbank, Governor Jerry Brown responded to the dire results of the snow survey by announcing an extraordinary twenty-five-per-cent mandatory reduction in California's water usage.
While working in Hollywood in 1991, he was writing a science fiction novel, "when suddenly the first chapter of A Game of Thrones came to me, the chapter where Bran finds the dire wolf pups in the snow," he told the Guardian in 2011.
Seattle arrive with the best defense in the league for a game that could be played in several inches of snow if the most dire forecasts for 2 February come to pass.
Especially for New York City, some computer model forecasts were extremely dire, predicting upwards of 30 inches of snow – shattering all-time snowfall records.
Parliament will call on the Commission and the Council to provide emergency aid to thousands of migrants and refugees in dire straits due to freezing weather and snow in several parts of Europe.
He could have "warged" out to Snow (put his consciousness inside his dire wolf's body), or get resurrected by the Fire Priestess.
The weathercaster spiritualists with their end of the world, do or dire predictions and their hovered over, proprietary crystal snow balls, had it wrong for most places.
Dire adjectives fell away from forecasts like the last melting snow of spring.
All through December, the snow kept falling and the warnings got more dire: Travel is dangerous, roads are slippery so stay home (presumably until spring), the weather folks advised.
"It was dead of night, the Mayflower moving vans heading out through the snow for Indianapolis," said Mr. Nichols, echoing near word for word the dire keening of other fans.
