Kern County, for one, had seen its population swell by more than 60 percent in the last five years, and although health officers had cleaned up the squatter camps that once plagued the area, many migrants were still living in slums with inadequate sewers and drains, ramshackle houses, and litter-strewn dirt roads that would turn to mud after a hard winter rain.

NPR: 'Grapes Of Wrath' And The Politics of Book Burning

Li spat into the mud and handed me a hard hat.

NEWYORKER: Boss Rail

But mud, once thrown, is hard to wash off.

FORBES: Magazine Article

Lately, the mercury has crawled up into the 40s, turning hard-packed ice into an endless brown sea of mud.

NPR: Spring a Season of Dread for Troops in Afghanistan

"The bottom-line takeaway message that I got from the report is that a company can work hard on privacy issues and still get dragged into the mud, " Cutts wrote.

FORBES: More Evil Than Google?

Mud that adheres to a ball after it lands hard and rolls out makes the next shot unpredictable.

WSJ: 2012 Masters: Freddie Needs a Couple More Days

Back in the dusty yard of her home just below the school built from tyres and mud in Khan al Amar, Manar is concentrating hard on her homework.

BBC: Israeli threat to Bedouin villages

In the car park, twisted chunks of mud-covered metal lie at odd angles - what were once hard-saved-for cars, swept and up and smashed by the force of the blast that destroyed the building.

BBC: Oklahoma tornado: Resilience amid the ruins

The exhibition is bursting with innovative technology solutions, well logging solutions, mud storage solutions, downhole survey solutions, and, if you look hard enough, some financing solutions.

BBC: Aberdeen's pipeline of solutions

Sometimes, though, it comes down to the sort of game where hard grunt is the key - half the season is played in rain and heavy mud and Bath maybe just lack a little bit of dog.

BBC: Jeremy Guscott's Premiership preview