Genius

For more than two years, Baltimore School for the Arts grad and creator of Wheely Good Smoothies Natan Lawson, 23, has been tirelessly churning out smoothies with pedal power - or letting his customers pedal for their own drinks. His colorful and efficient bicycle-powered blenders allow you to simply sit, pedal and enjoy. We caught up with Lawson to learn more about the personality behind the tasty genius. Biggest pet peeve? Driving behind someone waiting to make a left turn in the left lane on a one-way street onto another one-way street and they don't know they can on red. Anything and everything is sometimes my pet peeve, but that one makes me angry for no good reason.

It takes little effort to find severe problems with the character of Richard Wagner, the man who was born two centuries ago and, as he was the first to acknowledge, became one of history's greatest composers. It's much harder to dismiss his music, which is receiving extra attention around the world during this bicentennial year. Locally, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra is taking a close look at Wagner over the next few months. The focus starts this week with a program featuring, in concert form, Act 1 from "Die Walkure," the second of four operas that comprise "The Ring of the Nibelung," the epic filled with heroic and villainous mortals, giants, troubled gods, Valkyries on horseback, horned helmets, a mighty sword and, of course, a magical ring.

During William Donald Schaefer's first term as mayor I served as the Evening Sun's reporter covering downtown, so I had an intimate view into many of the projects that Mayor Schaefer has been praised for. There has been much written about these projects, but not much mention of what I consider to have been one of Mr. Schaefer's greatest skills: Picking talented people to implement them. Just off the top of my head I can think of Bob Embry, Sandy and Bob Hillman, Mark Joseph, Bernie Berkowitz, Walter Sondheim and many, many others.

Richard Ben Cramer had the gift of a great writer: an agile mind that generated entertaining books and magazine articles in topics as disparate as Middle East politics and baseball. The Chestertown, Md., resident, who died Monday at age 62, "had raw talent for writing and reporting and was just so damn good," said Tom Horton, a former Baltimore Sun colleague said in an obituary. "He was born to be a journalist and a writer. " His books ranged from "Joe DiMaggio: The Hero's Life," a biography of the Yankee outfielder to "What It Takes: The Way to the White House, a look at the 1988 presidential campaign," to "How Israel Lost: The Four Questions," which wrestled with the decades-long conflict between the young country and Palestinians.

I wish they hadn't decided to make a "movie" out of the wonderful play Jane Wagner wrote for her friend Lily Tomlin. I wish they had just set the camera in the cheap seats, turned it on and said, "OK, Lily, you can start now. We're going for coffee. Turn it off when you're done."But Noooo-ooooooo. A "movie," complete to jump cuts, "special effects," costumes, coy filmic conceits like split screens, snappy editing, all of which simply get in the way of the Tomlin genius.Cut the stuff! Shaddup with the tricks!

Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, by Harold Bloom. Warner Books. 832 pages, illustrated. $35.95. Spanning more than four decades, Harold Bloom's career as a scholar-critic of literature is a story in itself. Even at the outset, with his first three books -- Shelley's Mythmaking, Blake's Apocalypse and The Visionary Company -- he was a force to be reckoned with. Along with Northrop Frye, M.H. Abrams, W.J. Bate and Geoffrey Hartman, he was part of that critical mass of academicians who helped restore the Romantics to the esteem they had lost under the onslaught of Modernists like Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot.

'Genius in Disguise: Harold Ross of The New Yorker,' by ThomasKunkel. 497 pages. New York: Random House. $25 The best reason to read a literary biography about the editor of a humor magazine is to be entertained, at least every now and then. But there is little fun in 'Genius in Disguise,' the life of Harold Ross (1892-1951), founder and first editor of the New Yorker and a great eccentric.Ross was an unlikely person to create a sophisticated magazine. The son of a Colorado silver prospector, he dropped out of school in the 10th grade to become an itinerant reporter.

To the best of my knowledge, the very first person to link Brian Billick with the term "offensive genius" was - drum roll, please - Brian Billick. I know, I know - but please temper your shock and bear with me here. Speaking with the Minneapolis Star Tribune the day he was promoted to offensive coordinator in 1993, he said, "My job, literally, is offensive coordinator. Not offensive genius, not offensive mastermind, not offensive guru." While Billick might not have been so overt as to pass out business cards advertising his football intellect - he's more the wink-and-nudge sort, don't you think?

The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank By David Plotz. Random House. Random House, 288 pages, $24.95. The idea had a certain eccentric appeal: asking the world's smartest men to donate sperm for the evolutionary betterment of mankind. But it also represented certain drawbacks, and not just the image of Nobel Prize winners walking down hallways with plastic cups and Playboys. There were also inevitable fears about the creation of a genetically engineered master race.

GENIUS: THE LIFEAND SCIENCEOF RICHARD FEYNMAN.James Gleick.Pantheon.532 pages. $27.50.Not only does James Gleick think Richard Feynman was a genius, he thinks he "was the most brilliant, iconoclastic, and influential physicist of modern times." Considering the competition, that's quite a statement."No other physicist since Einstein so ecumenically accepted the challenge of all nature's riddles," he explains in one place. "Feynman developed a stature among physicists that transcended any raw sum of his actual contributions to the field," says at another.

Think of Dorry Segev and Sommer Gentry as intellectual magpies. The glittery ideas they filch from fields as diverse as swing dancing, systems analysis, water skiing and medicine seemingly have little in common. But Segev and Gentry weave them together into a strong yet flexible structure designed to protect fragile lives. Segev, 41, is a transplant surgeon at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, a pianist who studied at Juilliard and a former computer prodigy. Gentry, 35, an assistant mathematics professor at the Naval Academy, was a doctoral student when she caught the public's attention by designing a dancing robot.

If you're a regular attendee at the author appearances at the Enoch Pratt Free Library, you've seen a fair share of geniuses. Junot Diaz and Dinaw Mengestu -- who today received "genius" grants from the MacArthur Foundation -- have appeared in recent years at the Pratt. Diaz entertained a packed auditorium at the 2009 CityLit Festival, and it was gratifying to see so many young faces in the crowd, eager to hear his words. He is best known for " The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao," and more recently released " This Is How You Lose Her . " Mengestu, who lives in Washington, appeared at the Pratt in October, 2010, as Gregg Wilhelm of the CityLit Project reminded me. Mengestu's novel, " The Beautiful Things That Heaven Bears," was among the books considered by the One Maryland One Book program as it looked for a work that outlined the immigrant experience.

This weekend, Rob and I flew to Aiken, South Carolina, to attend the wedding of our friends, Maxine and John. After missing our morning flight, enjoying a beverage at City Café while we waited for the next flight, landing in Charlotte and driving the nearly three hours to Aiken, we were not exactly in peak condition when we ran in (late) to the rehearsal dinner. We made apologies, and because we were in the South, were met with two plates of food kept warm for us, two cocktails kept cold, and nothing but warm forgiveness for our Yankee lateness.

Apple has gone on a very public tax strike. Months after reporting the second-highest quarterly profits in U.S. history, America's favorite company is refusing to bring home more than $60 billion of offshore funds in protest of the taxes it would have to pay. Apple paints its predicament as unfair. Yet Apple's funds did not build up offshore because its iPhones, iPads and Macs are so much more popular overseas than they are at home. Though more than two-thirds of its retail stores are in the United States and Apple sells more products in the U.S. than in any other nation, it reports to shareholders that it made 24 cents in pre-tax profit for every dollar of sales in the United States, compared to 36 cents profit on every dollar of sales abroad.

Jason Hisley, the lead pasry chef and designer at Flavor Cupcakery in Bel Air, will appear as a contestant on the April 12 episode of the Food Network's "Sweet Genius. "  In "Puzzled Genius," Hisley and his opponents are asked to use pink lemonade a flamingo-desired dessert in one challenge, tackle a "favorite childhood puzzle" for inspiration in another and, finally, working with "Sweet Genius" host Ron Ben-Israel, make cakes with jackfruit and galangal. Hisley is a Food Network veteran.

The most towering figure in Hollywood history wore ill-fitting clothes, including shoes several sizes too big, and never said a word. Beginning Saturday, he'll be spending a year at Baltimore's Charles Theatre . Charlie Chaplin, a British expatriate who became the first Hollywood superstar and made a series of films — as writer, director and star — still as astonishingly delightful today as they were in the 1920s, is the subject of...

As Jimmy Neutron says, "What good is being a genius if you can't even go out on a school night?" Grade-school particle physicist Jimmy has the ability to communicate with advanced civilizations but not the wherewithal. His mom says, "If your father and I haven't met them first, they're strangers." But Jimmy Neutron has his ion the prize, so he figures out how to get out of his room long enough to save the world when aliens begin stealing parents from Jimmy's hometown, Retroland. Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, (starring the voices of Martin Short and Andrea Martin)

COSTA MESA, Calif. -- Masoud Karkehabadi is dazzled by the mysteries of the brain, excited at the thought of a career spent unraveling its intricacies. The pre-med student knows he has the mind for it: He tutors other students in algebra and upper-division anatomy.But it's the childhood fantasies of "Peter Pan" that bring fire to his eyes.At 10 years old, Masoud is a genius wrapped in the body of a boy.His IQ rests somewhere above 200, and as a sophomore at Orange Coast College he carries a class load twice as heavy as the average student.

Unlike the frequent school redistricting that puts parents in a frenzy every few years, the realignment of legislative districts for the federal, state and local governments only happens once every 10 years. But perhaps for that very reason, emotions surrounding it can run almost as high. That time is upon us now, and we've begun to hear the predictable (and often valid) claims of partisan manipulation. The high-profile piece is what will happen to the congressional districts, which the state legislature will determine in a special session that begins Oct. 17. Republican Roscoe Bartlett, who has represented Western Maryland in the U.S. House since 1993, figures to be the big loser.

Even though there's something like 981 cooking competition shows out there (an estimate), we're still intrigued by Food Network's "Sweet Genius. "    The host/judge, acclaimed chef Ron Ben-Israel, is intriguingly mysterious and off-the-wall : ordering the chefs to cook frozen desserts with hard-boiled eggs? OK, then! Each episode features a new group of four pastry chefs competing for culinary glory ... and $10,000. Baltimore's Anisha Jagtap , 26, the pastry chef at Puffs & Pastries and the owner/chef at Baltimore Burger Bar, shows what she's made of on Thursday's episode (10 p.m.)