What might be parching to one species risks drowning another.
Tim Daw, who spotted the parch marks, said: "I was standing on the public path looking at the grass near the stones and thinking that we needed to find a longer hosepipe to get the parched patches to green up.
Although that includes money to send drinking water to parched communities and to carry out other relief efforts, most of the funds are for long-term water projects that won't be finished for years.
(This imagined drought is severe enough to force a parched Pennsylvania to invade New York).
The Museum of Modern Art lives in Queens now, and so do a disproportionate number of artists, writers, dancers and musicians -- including the novelist Jonathan Safran Foer, who is only the latest in a long list of Washington-spawned talents (from Duke Ellington to Paul Taylor) who fled the capital's culturally parched environment to reach full bloom in the enriching concrete of New York.
The top notes in the soundtrack are arid metallic clicks, snips, squeaks and creaks, the chatter of wrenches and wire clippers, as bombs are defused in air so parched as to seem combustible itself.
("Hungover citrus" was one unofficial description of the overly elaborate process, and there really was a parched crunchiness to the dish that suggested it could have done with some Gatorade).
Ten years in the making, "Dell City," like Nick Brandestini's "Darwin," immortalizes a dusty slice of vanishing Americana, delivering a parched ode to hard work, endurance and desert dreams.
Government officials say reaction to the drought has been swift, and they denied that there had been an exodus of farmers from parched cropland to the cities, where they could search for jobs.
