Tongue

When it comes to President Obama's policies, House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) is happy to tell the American people what to think. But he draws the line at asking his constituents and others to abandon the belief that the president is a foreign-born Muslim. Boehner's selective tongue-tiedness insults the president and encourages the denial industry. In an interview on NBC's "Meet the Press," Boehner was willing to concede that he believes Obama is both a native-born citizen and a Christian.

“The Company You Keep,” the new film directed by and starring Robert Redford, also features an impressive supporting cast including Julie Christie, Susan Sarandon, Sam Elliott, Chris Cooper, Brendan Gleeson, Stanley Tucci and Nick Nolte. In its story of a group of 1960s radicals who are being flushed out of hiding after decades living underground, the film provides a platform for a range of actors of a certain age and associated with a certain era. But with costars Shia LaBeouf, Anna Kendrick and Brit Marling, the film also makes a strong springboard for a younger generation of actors as well.

Bill Spawr's last little trick Saturday with his Breeders' Cup Sprint entry Amazombie was to tie the gelding's tongue to the bottom of its mouth with a white bow. Veteran trainer Spawr, a horseman since his teens who arrives at his barn at 3:15 a.m. daily, found tying the tongue keeps the horse easier to handle at critical moments when it might tend to lose control. With that, Spawr, 72, handed over the star horse of his lifetime to decorated jockey Mike Smith , who guided the 5-year-old from a runner-up spot at the top of the stretch to a dramatic victory by a neck over Force Freeze.

Archie Thompson, the oldest living member of California's Yurok tribe and the last known active speaker raised in the tribal language, has died. He was 93. Thompson died March 26 at a Crescent City, Calif., hospital after an apparent stroke, according to his daughter Sherry O'Rourke. "It's our language that truly gives us our identity as Yurok people," said Thomas P. O'Rourke Sr., the tribal chairman and Thompson's son-in-law. "He is very much responsible for preserving not just a way of life, but the identity of a people.

I strongly feel that your wise-cracking sportswriter should apologize for his insulting remarks and perhaps he should also order his food carefully as even quiche may be made from Iowa products. MRS. W. T. HUNT Iowa, Class of '38 Tucson

"Tongue," as partially defined by Webster's, is a "system of terms used by people sharing a culture." How felicitous, then, that locally based dancer-choreographer Stephanie Gilliland should appropriate the word for her new dance company, whose culture is marked by a devotion to fanatical risk, zealous energy and superb movement skills. Tongue creates a crash-and-burn experience that leaves the viewer gasping for breath.

Yale scientists say they can stimulate sweet, sour or salty tastes by manipulating the temperature of the tongue. By warming or cooling certain areas of the tongue, they said they can produce "thermal taste" similar to tastes caused by sugars, acids and other chemicals. Barry Green and Alberto Cruz showed that nerves on the tongue that respond to chemicals in food also are vulnerable to temperature. But the nerves sensitive to temperature are only found in certain areas of the tongue.

A man whose tongue was nearly cut off in a fight at a Hollywood apartment was listed in stable condition at a hospital Monday, police said. Jose Garcia, 29, was attacked by a man who knocked him down during a fight in the building at Clinton Street and Heliotrope Drive at 12:45 a.m. Monday. The assailant slashed at his face with a knife or broken bottle, said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Arthur Reyna. The assailant fled in a red van, heading north on Heliotrope, Reyna said.

A woman bit off the tongue of an alleged rapist, who was arrested at a hospital emergency room where he went for treatment. Police found the suspect's tongue at the woman's apartment Friday morning. Officers say they arrested 32-year-old Ronald McGowan of West Covina, who is a registered sex offender. Physicians at the Rancho Springs Medical Center could not reattach his tongue.

As Dan Kish moved through the parking lot of the Blind Children's Learning Center one recent morning, people nearby could hear the clicking of his tongue. Kish, 31, is blind and, like a bat or a whale using sonar, he listens to echoes from his tongue clicks to determine whether objects are near or far, large or small. In familiar surroundings, Kish might click once a minute. If he is in a strange place, he will click repeatedly. Or, if he wants to pinpoint an object, he might scan the area, clicking from right to left.

The Uchinaaguchi class opened with a "good morning. " " Ukimi soo chii ," said the teacher, Chogi Higa. " Ukimi soo chii ," the students repeated. For student Tokie Koyama, the greeting was a bittersweet echo of her childhood on Okinawa. "It makes me cry," she told the class. "I miss home. " Famous for its military bases and World War II battlefields, the Japanese island chain of Okinawa is also home to a language as different from Japanese as English is from German.

Megan Fox is many things, most obvious among them beautiful. She's a new mother, she doesn't necessarily want to be famous anymore, and she believes in leprechauns . She's also familiar with speaking in tongues. Yes, speaking in tongues , something she's been doing since she was about 8 years old attending a Pentecostal church in Tennessee, she reveals in the February issue of Esquire . "I have seen magical, crazy things happen. I've seen people be healed," says the 26-year-old actress, mom to 3½-month-old Noah.

Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See A Novel Juliann Garey Soho Press: 30 pp, $25 Gird yourself: Greyson Todd, the narrator of Juliann Garey's "Too Bright to Hear Too Loud to See," is a bipolar studio executive, and sharing his head space can be a fascinating, grueling trip down the path of mental illness. Greyson shades toward the antihero, asking you to hate him nearly as much as he hates himself. He offers little quarter for the timid. Still, I could not help emerging from Garey's first novel with a deep sympathy for Greyson and admiration for his creator.

Our local leather-heads are off to rough training camp starts. The players are holding up fine under barometric pressures in oppressive heat - the problem is at the leadership level. Fresh-start Jim Mora, looking to change UCLA's cozy-club culture, took his team to swelter box San Bernardino to get away from all the distractions. "No friends, no girlfriends, no parents," Mora said. He should have added "no radio shows. " Mora became the distraction Thursday, a day after going on KLAA-AM (830)

Until very recently, I'd never actually eaten Yotam Ottolenghi's food. I'd certainly cooked a lot of it, but I had never been to one of his London restaurants. I knew the Israeli-born chef strictly from his two cookbooks, but that was enough for me to admire how he could take seemingly ordinary ingredients and make them add up to something more vivid than you'd ever imagine from reading through a recipe. His cooking has a clarity and authenticity unusual in a world where chefs work harder and harder to amaze with daring technique and surprising ingredients.

Did the devil make her do it, or was it her publicist? Normally, it's a compliment to say that a female singer performed like a woman possessed. But that may not be the case for singer Nicki Minaj's Linda Blair-like turn — minus the head-twisting and projectile vomiting — at the Grammy Awards, particularly among Roman Catholic viewers. In an over-the-top unveiling of her latest single, "Roman Holiday," toward the end of Sunday's telecast, Minaj acted out a prime-time exorcism on herself (or perhaps her alter ego, Roman Zolanski)

Phil Jackson spoke, and it lasted longer than 33 seconds. The day after the Lakers coach abruptly ended his postgame news conference, he provided reasons for why he appeared so irritated in the wake of the Lakers' 88-85 victory Sunday over the Clippers. "I was just disgruntled," Jackson said Monday. "There's nothing to say about a game like that. To rant or rave, I just didn't want to get involved with that."

Dubbed the "proxies with moxie," Mitt Romney's congressional backers have been crashing Newt Gingrich's events to offer a counterpoint to the former House speaker's remarks. It's an unusual tactic to begin with, but their collisions with Gingrich's testy spokesman, R.C. Hammond, have made their sparring into the campaign trail's version of must-see TV. Gingrich said he doesn't mind their presence, which he said is a sign of desperation by Romney. "They send a member of Congress, we send R.C. It's a slight overmatch — R.C.'s a little bit more informed than they are, but nonetheless, it's fine with me. He can send as many members as he wants," Gingrich told reporters.

Lucking Out My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York James Wolcott Doubleday: 260 pp., $25.95 James Wolcott, takedown artist extraordinaire, is a byline that sends shivers of schadenfreude up the spines of fellow writers - at least when he's writing about someone else. A literary journalist who blows raspberries at mandarins, he's a mainstay of Vanity Fair's luxurious editorial lineup, his flashy prose outshining those gleaming, Mephistophelean ads peddling fantasies of the lucky one-percenters, his crap-cutting manner adding a bracing machete-whoosh to the magazine's day-spa elevator music.