Ralph Hodgson, on ESP

1. Flushed with red; of a lively reddish color.

2. Excessively ornate; flowery; as, "a florid style; florid eloquence."

The Reverend Mr Kidney is a short round bowlegged man with black muttonchop whiskers and a florid face, like a pomegranate, into which he has poured a great quantity of brandy and lesser amounts of whisky and claret.

-- Tom Gilling, The Sooterkin

Even though avant-garde attacks on the Victorian bourgeoisie were florid in rhetoric, deficient in evidence, and malicious in intent, it does not follow that they had no objective grounds.

-- Peter Gay, Pleasure Wars: The Bourgeois Experience

Many were florid and overweight, too bulkily dressed and perspiring freely.

-- Robert Stone, Damascus Gate

The journalist Frank Crane would later glorify the . . . factory in florid prose as "a sermon in steel and glass," a "Temple of Work" in which machinery rather than an organ provided the music and the choir "was the glad laughter of happy workers."

-- RolandMarchand, Creating the Corporate Soul

Florid comes from Latin floridus, "flowery," from flos, flor-, "flower."

Alexandre Dumas (1802 - 1870)

1. Affording an abundant supply; plentifully furnished; lavish.

2. Large in quantity; plentiful, profuse; abundant.

3. Full of information or matter.

Here once again was evidence that, as Pope wrote of Homer, Armstrong's art "is like a copious nursery which contains the seeds and first productions of every kind, out of which those who followed him have but selected some particular plants."

-- Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz

She thought about the planets all day and wrote copious odes to them.

-- Paul West, Life With Swan

When the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) exfiltrated the defector and his family from Russia in 1992, it also brought out six cases containing the copious notes he had taken almost daily for twelve years, before his retirement in 1984, on top secret KGB files going as far back as 1918.

-- Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin, The Sword and the Shield

A sign of his ambivalence towards his mother is evident in his almost complete failure to mention her in his copious journals.

-- Peter Martin, A Life of James Boswell

Copious is from Latin copiosus, from copia, "plenty, abundance."

Or,

Ten thoughts that come to mind when you’re Afropunk and an excited white death metal fan posts Confederate flags on your MySpace Page (Vol. 1):

1. Start a flame war. Right fuckin’ now. Send the individual—who’s obviously out of his friggin mind—a panoramic postcard of the burning streets of LA Make sure there are plenty of running niggas, raped white women and raging fires in the photo. Also make sure to mention your cousin who went to the joint for shooting white people. If he asks why, what’s the anger for bro, send him a copy of Beloved.

2. Okay stop, take a deep breath, think about it. Get beyond the way you felt reading The Ethics of Living Jim Crow for the very first time…count to ten…

3. Now start again: instead of a riotous postcard— pick out a funny Boondocks one, something sobering yet witty, political yet polite ….and write on the back RACE MEANS NOTHING. Hate—black or white—is the real problem. Simple as that. In fact, mention that your best friend is young, gifted and white. Sign the card with: I just have a thing against dumb people…And flags built on tragic histories…

4. I really do have a best friend that’s young, gifted and white. He introduced me to Guns and Roses. The Guns and Roses that sang “niggers get out of my way.” I own all those G n’ R albums now. I love Guns and Roses. I like to believe that Axl Rose was merely singing “in character” on that song. Why? Because it’s easier to believe in him and his songs that way. And because he wore NWA caps. And anyone that likes NWA, must like niggers.

5. But maybe liking the word nigger and liking nigga music, has nothing to do with liking niggers at all.

6. Which explains Micheal Jackson. Or well, maybe on second thought, nothing explains Michael Jackson.

8. Read a Phillip K. Dick novel. Something nice and dark like A Scanner Darkly. Something about drugs and the streets. Imagine you’re walking down a street infested with a drug named Substance D. Imagine you’re wearing a scramble suit. Now no one can see who you are. You can be Michael Jackson. You can be Axl Rhodes. The scramble suit digitally scrambles your phenotype into a zillion configurations, erases your identity completely. Now you’re black. You’re white. You’re Asian. You’re Tiger Woods.

9. If black people had scramble suits, maybe they could be president. Maybe they could get a #1 song on rock radio. And Gnarls Barkley could leave the UK and come back home. Dressed like normal people instead of Wookies.

10. I love Wookies. I always wondered what they smelled like. And if there were weird racial slurs, or awkward moments between Chewbacca and Princess Leia on the Millenium Falcon.

Bonus Thought:

11. I love Gnarls Barkley. I love Deep Cotton. I love Iggy Pop , and Simon and Garfunkle, and Led Zepplin, and Frank Zappa, and Flannery O’Conner and damn it, every once in a while, I love America. There I feel better now. Until the next time…I try to catch a cab in New York.

George Bernard Shaw (1856 - 1950), Caesar and Cleopatra (1901)

A nickname; an assumed name; an epithet.

In addition to his notorious amours, he became distinguished for a turbulent naval career, particularly for the storms he weathered, thus bringing him the sobriquet "Foulweather Jack".

-- Phyllis Grosskurth, Byron: The Flawed Angel

At a small reception on the occasion of my twenty-fifth anniversary in this position, my good friend Izzy Landes raised a glass and dubbed me the Curator of the Curators, a sobriquet I have worn with pride ever since.

-- Alfred Alcorn, Murder in the Museum of Man

There was an omnivorous intellect that won him the family sobriquet of Walking Encyclopedia.

-- Eric Liu, The Accidental Asian

Sobriquet is from the French, from Old French soubriquet, "a chuck under the chin, hence, an affront, a nickname."

H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946),

Coarsely abusive, foul, or profane language.

Chaney would yell at him in his own particular patois -- an unapologetic stream of billingsgate far more creative than Marine drill instructors or master rappers.

-- George Vecsey, "Learning at Temple: Se Habla Chaneyism", New York Times, March 19, 2000

Its style is an almost pure Army billingsgate that will offend many readers, although in no sense is it exaggerated: Mr. Mailer's soldiers are real persons, speaking the vernacular of human bitterness and agony.

-- David Dempsey, "The Dusty Answer of Modern War", New York Times, May 9, 1948

The campaigns of the two Roosevelts were colorful and gave the press plenty of material but, generally speaking, deft humor seems to have replaced outright billingsgate.

-- George E. Reedy, "When Vilification Was in Flower", New York Times, July 15, 1984

Billingsgate is so called after Billingsgate, a former market in London celebrated for fish and foul language.

Homeland Security Boss Makes Pitch to Budget-Conscious Bin Laden

Days after cutting anti-terror funding for New York City, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff reached out to Osama bin Laden today to suggest that the al Qaeda boss in turn cut his terror funding for New York.

“Today I am slashing my department’s anti-terror budget for New York,” Mr. Chertoff wrote in a letter to Mr. bin Laden that was released to the media today. “Needless to say, this is a unique opportunity for you to slash your terror budget for New York.”

While Mr. Chertoff’s overture to Mr. bin Laden struck many in Washington as highly unorthodox, the Homeland Security chief told reporters that he was appealing to “the budget-conscious side of Osama bin Laden.”

“Just like me, Osama bin Laden has budgetary concerns, and that’s where the two of us are on common ground,” Secretary Chertoff said. “I can’t afford to protect everything, and he can’t afford to attack everything – so this proposal is truly a win-win.”

But even as Mr. Chertoff was explaining his proposal to the Washington press corps, Mr. bin Laden appeared on the Arabic-language al-Jazeera network to rebuff the Homeland Security Secretary’s deal.

“Here at al-Qaeda, we do not have any budgetary concerns,” a chilly bin Laden said in the broadcast. “We have a very low overhead.”

In Washington, Secretary Chertoff was philosophical about Mr. bin Laden’s response: “Oh well, it was worth a shot.”

Elsewhere, President Bush said he would deploy National Guard troops on the border of Canada to keep gay married couples from sneaking into the U.S.

William S. Burroughs (1914 - 1997)

1. A florid, brilliant style of music that emphasizes the technical force and skill of a performer; virtuoso music.

2. A showy or brilliant display.

But it was not just the bravura of his self-expression that gave him such a hold on his contemporaries.

-- Peter Ackroyd, "Oscar Wilde: Comedy as Tragedy,", New York Times, November 1, 1987

The straightforward narrative account is set down with old-fashioned punctilio in prose of classic distinction, singularly free of bravura, and marked by the hard clarity of outline that is one of Waugh's several manners.

-- Charles A. Brady, "Figure of Grace", New York Times, January 24, 1960

With his customary display of dramatic bravura, Sir Alan Ayckbourn is giving us twin comedies about a village fete and staging them simultaneously in each of the National's big, adjacent auditoriums.

-- Benedict Nightingale, "Witches of Updike Flying to London", New York Times, March 12, 2000

Bravura comes from the Italian, from bravo, "brave, excellent."

Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900)

Recent in origin; modern; new.

Electronic books, they say, are asking them to make a mental transition -- to veer from their ingrained appreciation for the printed books that fill our nation's more than 120,000 public, academic and special interest libraries -- to depend on a neoteric gizmo that disrupts the sacred union between man and book.

-- Charlotte Moore, "Bedtime for binderies?", Austin American Statesman, July 28, 2000

His new label specializes in alternative country or Americana -- music with a sense of tradition and a neoteric edge.

-- Christopher John Farley, "Back To Country's Roots", Time, June 11, 2001

Neoteric derives from Greek neoterikos, from neoteros, "younger," comparative of neos, "young, new."

High-Tech Device Could Protect Defense Secretary from Retired Generals, Congress

The Pentagon has ordered what it calls “a state-of-the-art high-tech missile defense shield” to protect Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld from future attacks, Mr. Rumsfeld confirmed at a Pentagon briefing today.

The defense shield, to be built at a cost of $147 billion, is believed to be the first major antiballistic missile system constructed specifically to protect an embattled Cabinet member.

Increasingly coming under fire from retired generals and congressional critics, Secretary Rumsfeld had hoped that his obfuscating use of the English language would be sufficient to protect him from further attacks.

But with more frequent calls for his resignation in recent weeks, the Defense Secretary realized that some sort of antiballistic missile shield, like the one being considered to protect NATO countries from a potential Iranian nuclear threat, was in order.

At the Pentagon briefing, Secretary Rumsfeld demonstrated how such a missile defense shield could be used to protect his job from future assaults, using miniature models of antiballistic missiles, missile silos and Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del).

“The minute Joe Biden appears on ‘Meet the Press” and starts flapping his gums about my resigning, I shout ‘incoming!’ and the defense shield knocks him off the air,” Mr. Rumsfeld chuckled. “He won’t even know what hit him.”

If the missile defense shield succeeds in protecting Mr. Rumsfeld’s position, military analysts say, similar systems could be implemented to protect the jobs of presidential advisor Karl Rove and Vice President Dick Cheney.

Elsewhere, actors Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie announced today that their new baby Shiloh said her first self-important words.

Charles Bukowski (1920 - 1994)

1. Any of various small sea birds of the family Hydrobatidae, having dark plumage with paler underparts; also called storm petrel.

2. One who brings discord or strife, or appears at the onset of trouble.

But far from a 'pet' of the Communist regime, Gorky, the "stormy petrel of the revolution," also condemned the revolution early on as a "cruel experiment" with the Russian people "doomed to failure."

-- Valentina Kolesnikova, "Maxim Gorky: Hostage of the Revolution", Russian Life, June 1, 1996

Of the unpredictable and constantly angry Paracelsus, for example, the stormy petrel who convulsed the staid medical establishment of the sixteenth century by demanding radical reforms in clinical thinking, he wrote: "This first great revolt against the slavish authority of the schools had little immediate effect, largely on account of the personal vagaries of the reformer--but it made men think."

-- Sherwin B. Nuland, "The Saint", New Republic, December 13, 1999

Lenin, the stormy petrel of the Social Democratic party, was facing more serious opposition than ever.

-- Michael Pearson, "Lenin's lieutenant", Guardian, September 29, 2001

. . .restless and indomitable, scouring like a stormy petrel the angry ocean of debate.

-- Lytton Strachey, Eminent Victorians

Stormy petrel is an alteration of earlier pitteral, probably so named in allusion to St. Peter's walking on the sea, from the fact that the bird flies close to the water in order to feed on surface-swimming organisms and ship's refuse; called stormy because in a storm the birds surround a ship to catch small organisms which rise to the surface of the rough seas; when the storm ceases they are no longer seen.

Calls Conditions at World Body ‘Intolerable’

Days after a United Nations panel issued a report roundly criticizing practices at the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo, President George W. Bush said today that the Guantanamo facility should remain open but that the United Nations should be closed.

Mr. Bush’s plan to keep Guantanamo open but close the United Nations seemed likely to fall far short of the recommendations that the U.N. panel put forth.

But at a press briefing at the White House, the president remained steadfast in his position that the U.N. should be closed, calling conditions there “intolerable and possibly in violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

“The United Nations regularly issues reports, which we are then forced to read,” Mr. Bush said. “This practice of making us read things is tantamount to torture.”

“Day in, day out, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations is forced to listen to the endless ramblings of foreigners, many of whom do not speak English at all,” Mr. Bush continued. “He is forced to wear those ear-thingies in his ears to understand them, and after hours of having those on, his ears start to hurt bad.”

Mr. Bush said that the United Nations has carried out other inhumane practices for years, including “making people get resolutions approved before they can go and invade other countries.”

The president concluded his remarks by congratulating Iraq on forming a new government, adding, “Now it is your duty to do what all governments must do: eavesdrop on your people.”

Elsewhere, a new study shows that apes are capable of planning ahead, except for the ones who work at FEMA.

Jeannette Rankin (1880 - 1973)