Without the lush oasis of a World Cup or European Championship, parched fans find themselves marooned in a desert of cruel mirages and cactus spikes of vicious self-interest.
Perhaps in both cases they're just drinking image, so let's hope these bearded lumberjacks never find themselves parched in a desert where the water isn't bottled and labelled with an anchor and a harpsichord.
Although a new forecast from the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center suggests that this dangerous weather pattern could revive in the fall, many in the parched regions find themselves in the unlikely position of hoping for a season of heavy tropical storms in the Southeast and drenching monsoons in the Southwest.
At first I was disappointed by the pistachio landscape: the fields themselves were parched, and calling the dreary one-mosque villages of concrete houses and rusting machinery sleepy would be generous; this was Rip Van Winkle territory.
Huge stretches of mountain terrain and parched desert did not lend themselves to successful homesteading, which tidied up the East and Great Plains states in mile after mile of tidy if monotonous surveyor's quadrants.
While commercial farmers have found themselves giving up on parched cornfields and selling off livestock, many families have gone ahead with 4-H projects — the raising of a cow, the special watering of a prized gourd — for fairs they had committed to months before drought struck.
Their fledgling relationships are dramatised and interspersed with spectacular action sequences, juxtaposing the "nighttime" effect of deep space with the sunlit, parched alien planets on which the stars find themselves crash-landing.
Brown lawns aren't the same, in economic impact, as parched rangeland, desiccated farmland or ashen forests, but they make themselves felt nonetheless.
Liberals always seem to be haplessly scrambling to build consensus among themselves, with visible cracks appearing in the party like some drought stricken parched terrain.
We see then that the Swiss can save themselves by pushing their watches even further into orbit, like humanoids escaping a parched planet.
