The 'ad captandum' argument may be painfully vivid in sound bites from politicians on TV news programs.

All around Lindsay and the dozen other customers spread the racked and desolate landscape of Mars, relayed live from the Martian surface in painfully vivid 360-degree color.

Everything seemed to be revolving slowly around him, painfully vivid.

To many outsiders, this seems a miniature utopia, where racial barriers have been eliminated, but the gaps are painfully vivid if you look just a bit more closely.

At the time I did not ascertain which it was, since a faint rattle from Jana's trunk reconcentrated all my faculties on him in a painfully vivid fashion.

And the orchestra's strings played unusually well in a painfully vivid account of this morbid masterpiece.

In any event, Sept. 11, 2001, illustrates the challenge in painfully vivid form.

The amber glow of the artificial lights made all the colors painfully vivid, like a travel-vu from a G-star system.

Robert Bianco of USA Today wrote that "the seven-part Generation Kill is what you'd hope for from the people behind The Wire: an honest, barely adorned, sometimes painfully vivid representation of life as we live it now.