In the height of the rains from March through May, the trails become unpleasantly muddy.

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But many PO voters felt unpleasantly surprised by other reforms, if only because their party's manifesto carried little hint of the pain ahead.

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Crime is up, with an unpleasantly large increase in murders.

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This will yield an unpleasantly tough hunk of meat.

WSJ: Mom-and-Pop Pulled Pork

But the events in Romania unpleasantly echo those in Hungary, where the prime minister, Viktor Orban, used his thumping election victory in 2010 to weaken independent institutions and pack his placemen into senior jobs.

ECONOMIST: Romania and democracy

But Taiwan was also an unpleasantly repressive place.

ECONOMIST: History may have judged Chiang Kai-shek too severely

It is a common, if sad tale, that when oil prices get unpleasantly high, presidents of both political parties have on occasion (and perhaps more often than we know), appealed to Saudi Arabia to increase production.

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But only a quarter of patients take it when prescribed, says Sanjay Kaul of Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, because of an annoying but relatively harmless side effect: Niacin makes people turn beet red and feel unpleasantly hot.

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Gardening is said to be a calming pursuit, yet here you are scribbling down the 800-number from an infomercial touting the guy who injects compressed gas into gopher holes and ignites it, causing a thousand divots to shoot violently into the sky, along with the remains of unpleasantly surprised gophers.

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