The black-painted metal unibody case feels fantastic, with just a small bit of plastic at the bottom to allow the aerial to do its job.

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Ideally I would like to plant deep beds of greenery clouds of box, ferns, a willow tree and maybe a magnolia, with a glossy black-painted metal bench somewhere.

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The green bits, the stems and leaves, began as porcelain too but were so prone to breaking that the artist now constructs them of painted metal, or tole.

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They have built a series of roadside markets, each with individual stalls that have a green-and-white Pakistani flag painted on sliding metal doors.

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The cell is a small, windowless room painted a nondescript beige, with a gun-metal gray floor and concrete sleeping platform.

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It shows only a metal ruler mounted on white canvas and painted yellow until the 62-inch mark, then white to 75, then green up to 100.

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In the main Beijing office, a homely red-painted house in a courtyard littered with bicycles, visitors would be handed staff cards printed on recycled paper and given metal reusable chopsticks, together with a lecture on how much of China's virgin forest was disappearing for wooden chopsticks every year.

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