Vague

For now, Howard County Board of Appeals member Donald B. Messenger is resisting the County Council's order that he resign from the board."I've requested a meeting for next week," Messenger, an attorney from North Laurel, said Friday. "They may succeed, but there's a day to sit back and a day to fight. It's distasteful to me."County Council Chairman C. Vernon Gray, an east Columbia Democrat, declined to say if a date had been scheduled or if he was interested in such a meeting."It's not something I want to talk about," Gray said.

WASHINGTON -- Charging toward a showdown on the Senate floor, the White House formally responded yesterday to the House articles of impeachment, contending that they are unconstitutionally vague, illegally worded and completely false.But the president's lawyers declined to file motions that might have delayed the start of opening arguments, scheduled for Thursday."We believe the public has had enough of this," said Joe Lockhart, the White House spokesman. "We're at the final stage of this process, and we can do it two ways: We can do it fairly and expeditiously, or we can do it fairly in a process that's open-ended and takes months and months."

Richard W. Vague, the Texas lender who built Wilmington, Del.'s First USA Bank into the biggest credit-card company in the world, has quit in the wake of disappointing earnings and a consumer revolt.First USA's owner, Chicago-based Bank One Corp., said Vague quit "to pursue other interests." Chairman John B. McCoy said it was Vague's decision.The resignation was announced late yesterday, after Bank One's disclosure that its third-quarter earnings dropped because First USA posted flat profit instead of the rapid growth it had previously projected.

Eleven prominent Jewish philanthropies have begun an unusual drive for politeness among their own -- threatening to use their money and influence to strengthen only those organizations that can make their cases with a civil tongue.In an ad campaign to begin tomorrow in 35 Jewish publications in the United States and Canada, the foundations -- among them the Owings Mills-based Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation -- announce that they're stepping forward to "foster open, healthy debate that preserves and enhances the dignity of all segments of the Jewish people."

HELENA, Mont. -- Montana's one-of-a-kind daytime speed limit -- written in law as whatever speed is "reasonable and proper" and widely interpreted as wide open -- has been struck down by the Montana Supreme Court, prompting fears that the lack of even the vague limit will lead people to drive at breakneck speeds.In a 4-3 ruling on Wednesday, the court said the law was unconstitutionally vague and did not give drivers fair notice of what speed was fast enough to be illegal."The court held that based on speed alone you cannot cite somebody because they don't reasonably know what speed will violate the law," Beth Baker, Montana's chief deputy attorney general, said yesterday.

AUGUSTA, Ga. -- Jack Kemp, the Republican vice presidential nominee, yesterday blamed the "worsening situation" in Iraq on President Clinton's "vacillation" and failure to state clear objectives in the Persian Gulf."

At a 7th District congressional forum in Randallstown this week, each of the 19 candidates who showed up had two minutes to tell the public about his or her background and platform.Most of the more than 150 people in the placard-cluttered audience already had their minds made up, however; they appeared to be campaign workers and volunteers for one candidate or another.Then, three questions were posed to each candidate -- one on crime, one on the controversial Moving To Opportunity federal housing program, and the last on education.

The state's highest court has struck down Frederick's curfew, ruling that its wording, which is identical to Baltimore's curfew law, is too vague to be constitutional.The Court of Appeals decision Friday may trigger a legal challenge to Baltimore's year-old law because the ruling warns that a municipality may be liable if it uses an unconstitutional curfew to detain juveniles, legal experts said."What it means is any municipality, like Baltimore, that continues to enforce a curfew that could be unconstitutional is doing so at its own peril," said Deborah A. Jeon, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union.

This was the baseball season that didn't end, just went away."It was like taking a test in school and never knowing what grade you got," Johnny Oates said.Weird? Of course. But particularly weird for a guy such as Oates, a neat freak, a guy who can't stand it if his desk isn't spotless in the morning, if his things aren't organized, if all the loose ends aren't tied up."It goes without saying that I would like to have known how things turned out," he said.Oates isn't meant for a disordered world.

Let me say this about elevators: When those doors slam shut and we're hurtling through the bowels of a building and I'm squashed next to some junior account executive reeking of Drakkar Noir while a string version of "Penny Lane" echoes from the speakers, I am about this close to a full-scale freak-out.Men don't like to admit to a fear of elevators, of course. If you ask a man what scares him, he'll come up with something suitably vague ("I dunno, the future scares me . . .") before snapping his head back to the Knicks-Celtics game on TV.Or else he'll bark: "Me?

Winter in Baltimore will be colder than usual this year, with snow beginning around Thanksgiving. But it looks like next spring and summer, despite a rainy June, will be dry to the point of drought. I can say this with some confidence because The Old Farmer's Almanac for 2010 was released - as always - on the second Tuesday of September, and that's its weather prediction for our area. And I can be confident of this weather prediction - though it is somewhat vague - because The Old Farmer's Almanac is the oldest continuously published periodical in North America, and it boasts 80 percent accuracy.

Jennifer Feeney admits it wasn't the best way to break up. She was at an Orioles-Yankees game with a guy she'd been dating for two months. He was from New York, a Yankees buff, and she was a hometown Orioles girl. They often engaged in ribbing, but at the game, her new beau got on a Baltimore-trashing roll. "The entire game, I'm sitting there with my new guy listening to him bash the O's with all the other Yankee fans sitting around us," the 24-year-old Canton resident writes. "He then started going off on how crappy our city is."

I LOVE this town. Nobody who dies in public has to stay buried. Eddie Norris gets out of the federal slammer, and now he's looking to be a radio star. Larry Young's banished from the state legislature, spends purgatory on the radio, and now talks about another political run. Rafael Palmeiro gets caught with steroids in his system, and last night he was back at the ballpark. Around here, who says there's no life after death? I admire these guys. No kidding. If I'd been humiliated in public the way they have, I'd spend the rest of my life in my room, curled in the fetal position.

WASHINGTON - The National Security Agency intercepted two brief messages on Sept. 10 that warned that some kind of event would happen the next day, but the agency did not translate the messages until Sept. 12, a senior intelligence official said yesterday. The messages said in Arabic: "The match begins tomorrow," and "Tomorrow is zero" day. They were detected by the Fort Meade spy agency as its satellites and computers eavesdropped on phone calls and electronic messages worldwide. Intelligence officials cautioned, however, that the messages were so vague that even if the NSA had translated them before the attacks Sept.

"Where are you going," Melisande asks of the older man who has found her lost, alone and frightened in a dark wood and asks her to come with him. "I don't know," the man says. "I'm lost, too." In a way, these lines from Claude Debussy's only completed opera, "Pelleas et Melisande," define the mysterious drama that follows. Everyone in this haunting work is lost; some know it, some don't. By the end, Melisande, on her death bed, says, "I don't know what I know." She's not alone. Some audiences are frustrated by the vagueness of "Pelleas et Melisande"; they crave clear-cut characters, motivations, denouements -- and more direct music to delineate those elements.

Eleven prominent Jewish philanthropies have begun an unusual drive for politeness among their own -- threatening to use their money and influence to strengthen only those organizations that can make their cases with a civil tongue.In an ad campaign to begin tomorrow in 35 Jewish publications in the United States and Canada, the foundations -- among them the Owings Mills-based Harry and Jeanette Weinberg Foundation -- announce that they're stepping forward to "foster open, healthy debate that preserves and enhances the dignity of all segments of the Jewish people."

Richard W. Vague, the Texas lender who built Wilmington, Del.'s First USA Bank into the biggest credit-card company in the world, has quit in the wake of disappointing earnings and a consumer revolt.First USA's owner, Chicago-based Bank One Corp., said Vague quit "to pursue other interests." Chairman John B. McCoy said it was Vague's decision.The resignation was announced late yesterday, after Bank One's disclosure that its third-quarter earnings dropped because First USA posted flat profit instead of the rapid growth it had previously projected.

For now, Howard County Board of Appeals member Donald B. Messenger is resisting the County Council's order that he resign from the board."I've requested a meeting for next week," Messenger, an attorney from North Laurel, said Friday. "They may succeed, but there's a day to sit back and a day to fight. It's distasteful to me."County Council Chairman C. Vernon Gray, an east Columbia Democrat, declined to say if a date had been scheduled or if he was interested in such a meeting."It's not something I want to talk about," Gray said.

WASHINGTON -- Charging toward a showdown on the Senate floor, the White House formally responded yesterday to the House articles of impeachment, contending that they are unconstitutionally vague, illegally worded and completely false.But the president's lawyers declined to file motions that might have delayed the start of opening arguments, scheduled for Thursday."We believe the public has had enough of this," said Joe Lockhart, the White House spokesman. "We're at the final stage of this process, and we can do it two ways: We can do it fairly and expeditiously, or we can do it fairly in a process that's open-ended and takes months and months."

HELENA, Mont. -- Montana's one-of-a-kind daytime speed limit -- written in law as whatever speed is "reasonable and proper" and widely interpreted as wide open -- has been struck down by the Montana Supreme Court, prompting fears that the lack of even the vague limit will lead people to drive at breakneck speeds.In a 4-3 ruling on Wednesday, the court said the law was unconstitutionally vague and did not give drivers fair notice of what speed was fast enough to be illegal."The court held that based on speed alone you cannot cite somebody because they don't reasonably know what speed will violate the law," Beth Baker, Montana's chief deputy attorney general, said yesterday.