Word: vesuvian
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...Truman said, even if you don't mean it. The presidency is less an office than a performance: Who saw the gloom and glower behind Eisenhower's incandescent grin? This is why temperament descends easily into caricature: the feisty Give-'Em-Hell Harry, the cool-as-crystal Kennedy, the Vesuvian Lyndon Johnson. "We've taken temperament and turned it," warns presidential historian Richard Norton Smith of George Mason University, into "vaudeville...
...minimal amount of the simplest toppings into a cavalcade of flavor. The secret to eating a thin-crust Neapolitan pizza is to slash the pie into four pieces on the spot, fold a slice in half, and wolf it down before the crust deflates and the sauce makes a Vesuvian lava flow down your front. With every passing fraction of a second, the pizza loses a bit of its airy perfection. The other advantage of eating it right there by the oven is that you avoid having to share it with anyone back at the table. Unlike the gut-busting...
...Maybe the problem is the doc," posted one supporter on Blog for America, the official weblog of the Dean campaign, after watching Dean's Vesuvian speech Monday night. "The dinosauric yells were scary, and we probably lost many votes right there. I, a faithful supporter until yesterday, am beginning to question it all." Some went so far as to say the unspeakable: the candidate looked unpresidential, and there may be no more obvious observation than that to be electable, a candidate for President has to look like...
...tempting to dismiss all this turmoil as academic. One who decidedly does not is Harold Bloom, 64, the occupant of endowed chairs at both Yale and New York University, the author of 20 critical works and the editor of hundreds more, and a Vesuvian source of erudition and opinions. Bloom believes, among many other things, that a body of great literature of imperishable value exists, recognizable solely by its intrinsic aesthetic merits; further, that those who try to use or subvert the great works for extraliterary purposes, i.e., anything smacking of social engineering, are barbarians; and further still, that these...
...Vesuvian temper is legendary. One of his biographers, Theo Lippman Jr., reports that "he gave us ten interviews for the book [Muskie], and in the last one, we brought up the subject of his temper. He lost his temper." The Republican National Committee, as part of its research on Muskie, has an affidavit from a Maine telephone operator swearing that during a Muskie vacation a few years ago, a telephone repairman had to go up to the Senator's cottage three times to fix a phone that had been ripped off the wall...