C Map Thursday night's milonga (Spanish dance) at the Verdi is an eyepopper, with bandoneón (free-reed instrument) players and sharply dressed tango dancers circling the floor.

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, called the size of the arms package "an eyepopper," but said the organization did not "reflexively oppose arms sales to Arab countries."

Compounding the subterfuge is that the difference between this year's $11 trillion eyepopper and last year's number - $600 billion - is being used as evidence of a scary deterioration in Social Security's finances.

Tucked away in Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg's mostly unsurprising budget last week was one eyepopper: a gift of $200 million for the public hospital system's operating budget, money that will help pull the system out of its red ink.

Given the anxiety of holiday marketers, that number is in itself an eye-popper.

Very pretty, but not the eye-popper that the lathes here are."

Not stunning, not an eye-popper, but a pretty woman with soft brown hair and deep green eyes.

"The second home run was an eye-popper," Brett said.

What Weston thought was a mere routine call proved to be an eye-popper.

Another eye-popper was the Caesar salad, but this time good looks got in the way of good eating.

"The business we did in zero-coupon bonds and retail certificates of deposit last week was a real eye-popper."

The sampler of homemade ice creams and sorbets was an eye-popper.

The explanation is an eye-popper and a jaw-dropper, and a lollapalooza, too.

It is indeed an eye-popper: four jumbos arranged in a soaring show-biz shell.

Nice blog on the old eye-popper.

The next morning, early, Wireman and I stood in the Gulf - plenty cold enough to be an eye-popper - up to our shins.

It is the first eye-popper as you go, startled and hesitant, to your seat at the Helen Hayes Performing Arts Center here.

At Panama Hatties in Huntington Station, the holiday decorations will be subdued, but the Christmas day menu will be an eye-popper.

The central eye-popper in "The Coming Anarchy" - beyond Canada's "peaceful dissolution" - was that various stresses "will make the United States less of a nation than it is today."

The eye-popper of the moment was Altissimo, a dazzling red climber ascending the walls of the tearoom, a charming little house (formerly the billiard room) where tea, thin sandwiches and pastries are served in the afternoon.

It has jettisoned, among other things, the "Easter Parade" number that was the show's big eye-popper and interpolated (with considerable wit) "Let's Have Another Cup of Coffee" from the earlier Hart-Berlin collaboration, "Face the Music."

Mark Licari works in ink, but his image is an eye-popper: a cinematically scaled cartoon of a Rube Goldbergian digestive system, part mechanical and part organic, spewing out showers of insects, a few of which show up on nearby column in the gallery.

No one would mistake Mrs. Whaley's garden for, say, Longwood Gardens, but as home gardens go, the one she maintained for more than 50 years on a 30-foot by 100-foot plot behind her narrow 1754 white clapboard house at 58 Church Street, a block from the harbor in Charleston's historic district, has been a perennial eye-popper.