The situation in Egypt has become an obsession and wherever one goes in the Strip, grim predictions are made about a return to a Mubarak-era blockade.
Let's cut this up, like a pile of bad debt, into various strips, and, as the rating agencies did to various slices of subprime-mortgage debt, take the top layer and, abracadabra, rate it triple A. Throw out the other strips, the grim probabilities — the crime, the decaying infrastructure, the hardship all around, the heroin and the syphilis.
Private Eye satirises it in its cartoon strip "It's Grim Up North London".
Otherwise, the facts on the ground spell out something that goes well beyond the decline of the West: it's the decline of a system in the West that, in these last years, is being stripped to its grim essence.
Both men looked grim, as if the league had stripped Bennett of the team rather than agreeing to let him relocate it.
Mr. Freud's dingy studio became his artistic universe, a grim theater in which his contorted subjects, stripped bare and therefore unidentifiable by class, submitted to the artist's unblinking, merciless inspection.
Overall, the North West is still breaking into the new territories of modern industry, its old cotton towns symbolically overshadowed by the grim gritrock Pennine escarpments that have been stripped of their trees by two centuries of industrial smoke.
The winter was grim, and they celebrated Thanksgiving in 1872 with strips of frozen seal entrails.
It caught the attention of Dwight Garner, who raved about it in the Times, finding in its grim portrait of veteran and immigrant life (flophouses, strip-mall kitchens, jails) "the finest and most unsentimental love story of the new decade".
The grim news on on employment came as the Netherlands was stripped of its prized AAA credit rating despite the country's recent exit from a year-long recession.
