The Balkan works range from Edin Durmisevic's "Cocoon," a cluster of teenagers' plaster life masks that eerily recall the faceless dead, to Lea Bebek's "War Recipes," a darkly comic parody that calls for preparing meager rations on fires fed by old shoes.
Ma Joad's caregiving all along the arduous, discouraging, and increasingly dispiriting trek west expands to the circle of famished camp children who circle her trash fire, as she works up a meager supper in the Joad stew kettle.
How about the fact that California's record drought just got worse, given how the meager winter snowpack is gone and hence the fire danger is already at ridiculous levels?
Efforts have shifted from the search for survivors to providing relief to the homeless — many of them huddling in makeshift shelters and cook meager meals of rice and noodles over open fires or eat vegetables from their fields.
On Sunday, the New York Times reported that an intelligence official and general who has since been fired in what looked like a meager attempt at damage control was among a group of Saudi officials who broached international assassinations in private-sector meetings last year.
Left homeless by a fire, Hernandez, head in hands, surrounded herself with her meager remaining possessions: random shoes, pots and pans, cassette tapes and a large bottle of vegetable oil stored in laundry baskets, two dresser drawers and a Salvation Army plastic shopping bag.
To help fire up the economy, cut unemployment and help those living on meager pensions, Vietnam's central bank has reduced interest rates several times in recent months.
Their paganism is why the one family member who is able to help them after the fire — Ember's paternal Christian grandmother — refuses to offer assistance beyond her meager $50 gift, and could possibly have been the cause of the fire itself: Ember believes Anson set the fire after his parents discovered a borrowed deck of Ember's tarot cards.
On Saturday, Mr. Khan, whose carpentry shop in Kandahar, and thus his livelihood, had been damaged by American bombs, bought a meager amount of cookies from Ghulam Rasoul Faizi, a former professor who had been fired by the Taliban.
