Genius

Often considered the most popular entertainer of the 20th century--his extravagant performances set still-unchallenged attendance records--Liberace (dubbed "Mr. Showman" in tribute to his flashy theatricality) sued a London columnist in 1956 for implying he was gay. He won.

Re "Comic had ark of characters," Obituary, April 13 I first met Jonathan Winters in 1967 in Vietnam. Not many Hollywood people did USO visits to our remote location. We never hosted the Bob Hope-type entertainers. Winters was brilliant. Before the "show," some of us engaged him in what we would call just a conversation. Everything that was said turned into a joke or something original and funny. In some ways it was hard to determine just who Winters really was; the continuous on-stage personality or someone masquerading as a regular person.

English writer W. Somerset Maugham published a 1949 essay in which he pondered whether Dostoevski or El Greco was the greater artistic genius. He reluctantly came down on the side of El Greco after deciding that 16th century Spain was a more fertile environment for the flowering of inspiration than czarist Russia.

Leonhard Euler, a Swiss mathematician who continued to work on complex equations from memory even after he went blind, is honored in Monday's Google Doodle on the 306th anniversary of his birth. Euler, who wrote nearly 900 books over the course of his career on topics such as lunar motion, optics, acoustics, algebra, calculus, geometry and number theory, is one of the most prolific and important mathematicians of the 18th century, and possibly of all time. He was so prolific that a St. Petersburg, Russia, academy continued to publish his unpublished works for at least 30 years after his death in 1783.

"WITHOUT the composer, the performer would not exist," Alfred Brendel noted, and "no performer should be called a genius -- certainly not that faker Hatto or even Horowitz." ["Absurdities of the Keyboard," March 11] Brendel dared to express his less-than-total enthusiasm for the most legendary of pianists. Is it not the highest goal of a piano player to make audiences fall in love with the music? Outstanding pianists of the past were proud to be "crowd pleasers." Audience members were touched, moved to tears and brought to ecstasy.

When it comes to corporate greed, misguided political policies and the little guy getting the shaft, not much has changed in America over the last century or so. At least that's what the fine documentary "Genius on Hold," via its remarkable account of unsung telecommunications inventor Walter Shaw, so convincingly illustrates. Although writer-director Gregory Marquette gets a bit too ambitious in framing Shaw's ill-fated story within the context of the U.S.' greatest financial crises - the 1929 stock market crash and 2008's Wall Street debacle - the filmmaker mostly focuses, with great detail yet admirable economy, on Shaw's sad, twisty tale of battling telephone giant AT&T.

His band's latest album is called “Who's Feeling Young Now?,” but Chris Thile can now count himself a little older and wiser. On Tuesday, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation is set to announce this year's recipients of its so-called genius grants, a wide-ranging list of 23 overachievers that reportedly includes Thile, according to the Associated Press . The 31-year-old mandolin whiz first found fame with the teenage bluegrass trio...

Well, so much for the genius of Bill Walsh. By this time, Cornell is surely wishing that it had put Stanford on the schedule again for this year. Maybe Walsh should be concerned less with what happens during tailgate parties and more with trying to make first downs. GENE MILLER Huntington Beach

Phil Jackson has taken much criticism over the last couple of months for not doing enough to fix the Shaq-versus-Kobe situation. Many fans have blamed Phil for the Lakers' uninspired play. Well, let me tell you something! Getting Gary Sheffield to demand a trade and to make stupid statements is pure "Phil genius." It made everyone finally realize that the biggest baby in L.A. wears Dodger blue, not purple and gold. It's no coincidence that the Lakers are now playing the best basketball of the season.

Re: Nov. 20 Business Viewpoints Column, "Hail, Don't Jail, the Genius Behind the Virus," by Ira Flatow. Flatow gives the "phone phreakers" and (reputed computer virus instigator Robert) Morris (Jr.) far more intellectual credit than they deserve. The only lesson these delinquents have to offer is that unusual intellect does not necessarily ensure good character nor one's ability to ascertain acceptable social conduct and professional ethics. By his own account, Morris' "experiment" ran amok, so he isn't even a good computer scientist.

Comic great Jonathan Winters was struggling to make a name for himself in the early 1950s when a man at the nightclub where he was performing offered some life-changing advice. Winters had a talent for channeling the voices of celebrities like Gary Cooper and Boris Karloff but, the man observed, "All you're doing is shining their shoes. You'd best think up your own characters. " That, Winters told TV Guide many years later, was "the best hunk of criticism I ever got. " With his rubbery, moon-shaped face and pitch-perfect ear for speech patterns, Winters began to unleash a cavalcade of charmingly twisted characters, including a redneck ballplayer, a lisping child and a prissy schoolmarm.

Jonathan Winters, who died on Friday at age 87, had a talent ideal for the small screen. Though he did appear in several comedic classics, including "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World" and "The Russians are Coming, the Russians are Coming," it was the less constrained world of TV that allowed him to flit and morph between comic bits at lightning speed. One of the first great venues on TV where the comic rose to prominence was on "The Jack Paar Program. " This appearance from 1964 demonstrates Winters' ability to improvise at a moment's notice, in this case with the prop of a simple stick.

In May 2005, DreamWorks Animation SKG and Aardman Animations announced that, following their collaborations on "Chicken Run," "Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit" and "Flushed Away," their next joint venture would be "Crood Awakening," a stop-motion comedy about a caveman living in a small village with a prehistoric genius. John Cleese of Monty Python fame and Kirk DeMicco ("Racing Stripes") were hired to write the script. And now nearly eight years later, a vastly different version of the tale is opening Friday.

From a distance, wearing plaid and slightly grizzled, Sam Lipsyte looks like a grumpy lumberjack -- although there are not many lumberjacks standing at the gate of Columbia University in Manhattan. And up close, it's clear he's not grumpy at all: Lipsyte has an air of restrained amusement that's perfect for one of America's best satiric writers. His writing often features arrested-development characters similar to Judd Apatow's heroes -- but Lipsyte's guys don't get gorgeous girls or happy endings.

MOSCOW - The acid attack on Bolshoi Ballet artistic director Sergei Filin was shocking when it happened and turned even more bizarre when police said it elicited a confession from a Bolshoi dancer known for playing the Evil Genius in one of the most beloved ballets of all, "Swan Lake. " Details came to light early Wednesday when Bolshoi soloist Pavel Dmitrichenko confessed to organizing the January attack, and police announced two other men confessed to carrying it out. "I organized the attack, but not to the extent of the damage that happened," Dmitrichenko said to Russia's Channel One. The dancer planned the assault for "personal resentment related to his work," the police said, according to reports in the Russian media.

On Tuesday, we offered you our thoughts on "Welcome Oblivion," the sensual new electro-rock album by Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor's latest band, How to Destroy Angels. And Wednesday we alerted you to the fact that Carly Rae Jepsen had canceled her appearance at this summer's National Scout Jamboree in response to an online petition asking the "Call Me Maybe" singer to "denounce the Boy Scouts' policy banning gay youth and parents. " What we neglected to mention until now, though, is that these two great North American artists have joined forces for an Internet mash-up that might be the best we've heard since the Freelance Hellraiser's 2001 classic " A Stroke of Genie-us . " First posted Monday on Reddit by a user calling himself pomDeter , "Call Me a Hole" pairs "Call Me Maybe" with "Head Like a Hole," from Nine Inch Nails' 1989 debut, "Pretty Hate Machine.

Think you're smarter than the average bear? Smartest bear in the den? Smartest bear somebody's ever met? You haven't met Stan Kasten. Zack Greinke said when he met privately with General Manager Ned Colletti, Manager Don Mattingly and Kasten prior to signing his six-year, $147-milliion contract, he came away dutifully impressed with the Dodgers CEO and part owner. “I don't want to make his head too big, but I thought Stan Kasten was like the smartest guy I've ever talked to,” Greinke said at his introductory press conference Tuesday.

Allegations that Fox's shelved game show "Our Little Genius" might have been rigged has prompted an inquiry by the Federal Communications Commission into possible violations of federal rules that govern quiz shows. Revelations of the FCC probe follows the News Corp.-owned network's decision last month to yank the highly promoted program from its schedule only a week before it was supposed to premiere. Fox took the unusual step after reality-show titan Mark Burnett, who was producing the program, informed the network that there was a problem with how the young contestants had been coached for the competition.

Most likely you've never heard of Walter L. Shaw. But it's just as likely that his inventions have been a regular part of your life.  Here are a few things Shaw invented: Call forwarding. Conference calling. Touch-tone dialing. The answering machine. A burglar alarm that calls the police. The White House "red phone" that provided an emergency link between Washington and Moscow.  OK, so you haven't used the last one. But still, it's an impressive list of stuff conceived by a man awarded 39 patents who eventually died penniless and relatively unknown.  Opening Friday is "Genius on Hold," a documentary that tells the story of Shaw that might be remarkable even if you didn't know it was made by his son, Walter Shaw Jr., one of the world's most notorious jewel thieves.  PHOTOS: Tech we want to see in 2013 Hyberbole?

When it comes to corporate greed, misguided political policies and the little guy getting the shaft, not much has changed in America over the last century or so. At least that's what the fine documentary "Genius on Hold," via its remarkable account of unsung telecommunications inventor Walter Shaw, so convincingly illustrates. Although writer-director Gregory Marquette gets a bit too ambitious in framing Shaw's ill-fated story within the context of the U.S.' greatest financial crises - the 1929 stock market crash and 2008's Wall Street debacle - the filmmaker mostly focuses, with great detail yet admirable economy, on Shaw's sad, twisty tale of battling telephone giant AT&T.