ALMOST every day since mid-August, the Bahraini authorities have sent out batches of workers with paint-rollers to blot out, with grey smudges, the graffiti that have covered virtually every wall in the main streets of several of the drab Shia Muslim villages half an hour's drive from the gleaming skyscrapers of the capital, Manama.
He works the medium into hairy curls, tipsy graphs, smudges, swirls and clouds.
Though some are marked with splashes and smudges of glaze, all have an endearing freshness and even joy.The golden age of azulejo art came during Portugal's colonial expansion.
This is about America's imperial presidency and the fourth amendment, which it has trampled into irrelevant ink smudges.
Some indistinct striped smudges on the horizon could be zebra, a large, grey, pointed one a rhino.
This, say the critics, smudges his previous "moral clarity".
A FEW grainy smudges and computer-generated blobs are not much to look at.
Among other reasons, it disqualified forms for smudges, the wrong thickness of paper, and missing copies of identity cards, the great fetish of Ecuadorean bureaucrats.
If these are not answered soon, many more cases that turned on a few smudges left behind by a careless criminal or an innocent bystander are going to be dragged before the appeal courts.
The others presumably felt that the risk of tearing or smudges from oily, humid hands (albeit gloved) was an even greater worry than exposing a single precious page to continuous light.
Miners with lamps on their heads, survival kits strapped to their waists and black smudges across their faces sit by the side of the road, lighting up their first cigarettes after long hours underground.
