Prodigy

Anne-Sophie Mutter has been famous for so long that it comes as something of a shock to realize that the great German violinist is not yet 35. Mutter, who gives a Washington Performing Arts Society recital at the Kennedy Center on Saturday at 5 p.m., with her favorite pianistic collaborator Lambert Orkis, is one of the most influential musicians of the final third of the 20th century.She's the one who made the world safe for prodigies; and she's made it OK for women in classical music to be babes.

Two years ago, a dejected Bishme Cromartie almost gave up sewing altogether. He had just received a rejection letter from the famed Fashion Institute of Technology in New York. "I just sat there and cried. You would have thought that someone died in my arms," the 21-year-old recalled. "I stopped sketching and sewing. ... I started questioning myself. " Cromartie had done everything right. A creative type, he earned A's and B's at Reginald F. Lewis High School in Hamilton. He had been designing since age 7, when his aunt showed him the basics.

The Prodigy on-line service has added about one-third of Electronic Realty Associates' listings to its Homes and Land Electronic Magazine service, which lists homes for sale across the country.The service included about 60,000 listings pulled from those advertised in 300 Homes and Land magazines, according to Robert Horning, vice president for business development at Homes and Land Publishing Inc.The addition of ERA listings signaled the first time a company or chain has made all of its listings available to the Homes and Land service.

The little orange pingpong balls are taking quite a beating, one after another being smashed off the racket of Tong Tong Gong as he practices with one of his three coaches. Though Gong learned the game as many others have, in the basement of his family's home, the 14-year-old from Ellicott City is playing a different kind of game these days. It is one that Gong hopes and his coaches believe will carry him to the Olympic Games someday — before he goes off to college. Since winning his first national 10-and-under tournament as a 7-year-old six months after he started playing, Gong has quickly ascended the rankings.

White Plains, N.Y. Some words trigger strong emotions. Say "Prodigy" to a home computer user and the reaction could be either love or hate.Some computer fans see the on-line service Prodigy as a convenient way to shop, play, communicate and get news over a personal computer. Others consider it a shallow, slow-running, glitzy service run by an oppressive bureaucracy."At first these controversies surprised us," said Prodigy spokesman Steve Hein. "Now it's clear we have active detractors versus active proponents."

Big Brother isn't watching.At least, that's what officials at Prodigy, a popular information, shopping and home-entertainment service for personal computer users, said this week as they tried to allay concerns the company was spying on its nearly 1 million subscribers.The joint venture of Sears, Roebuck and Co. and International Business Machines Corp. provides home computer users access through their modems to games, news and electronic shopping, banking and mail. Subscribers are required to obtain Prodigy's own software.

When recordings by a 12-year-old pianist named Evgeny Kissin first filtered out of Moscow about 11 years ago, a chorus of piano aficionados pronounced him the kind of talent who emerges once in a century. Kissin has made good on those early reports of his prowess. At 23, he is unquestionably the world's most talked-about and sought-after pianist.But perhaps the critical fraternity (and this writer was among the loudest) should have waited until the century's end. Hot on Kissin's heels comes another extraordinary Russian-Jewish .prodigy -- Konstantin Lifschitz, now 18 years old. His just-released first records, made when he was 13 and 16, show a talent that is in some ways as spectacular as Kissin's, a repertory that suggests a range that Kissin has not (yet)

Prodigy, an online news and shopping service, has informed members that it would start limiting members to 30 free electronic messages a month starting Jan. 1, --ing lingering hopes among some subscribers that the service may abandon those plans."

There's an angry electronic mob forming outside Prodigy, the nationwide information service for users of personal computer.Thousands of messages from subscribers protesting additional charges for electronic mail were clogging Prodigy's computers. But that stopped Tuesday night. Prodigy plugged the plug.Prodigy decided enough was enough and banned messages on its electronic network that criticized the charges. At the same time, the company kicked a "handful" of the dissenting subscribers off the service for taking their protest to advertisers on the network.

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. -- For Prodigy Services Co., it seems, no good deed goes unpunished.The joint venture of Sears, Roebuck & Co. and International Business Machines Corp. long has staked out a position as the family-oriented on-line service, where computers and humans try strip obscene and offensive messages from its network.That policy came back to haunt White Plains, N.Y.-based Prodigy last week, when a New York state court judge found the company exercised editorial control and therefore must defend itself against a $200 million libel suit by Stratton Oakmont Inc. over comments "posted" by a Prodigy subscriber on a computer bulletin board.

MINNEAPOLIS - There are point guards who are made and those who, for the lack of a better term, are born to orchestrate because of their smarts, their vision, maybe just their innate nature. The Timberwolves possess each kind. On their coaching staff, they have Rick Adelman and Terry Porter, who played a combined 24 NBA seasons at that position because of their diligence and lessons learned. On the court, they have Ricky Rubio, who home video will show seemingly possessed an understanding of the game's angles and textures from nearly the moment he learned how to dribble.

To properly understand the forces that shaped Dylan Bundy, and the journey that molded him into the best high school baseball player in the country, it's best to begin by talking about the red Oklahoma soil and the father's hands that toiled in them out of love. A decade before the Orioles selected Bundy with the fourth pick in the 2011 amateur draft, he was a stocky 8-year-old kid growing up in the tiny, no-stoplight town of Sperry, Okla. His family lived on 20 acres of dry, flat land, land that could have been farmed but was not. Instead, Dylan Bundy's father, Denver, who worked for Ford Motor Company in nearby Tulsa, looked at his vast backyard one day, and where some men might have envisioned rows of corn or cotton, he pictured a pitching mound.

A month shy of his 16th birthday, Ty Hobson-Powell made history Sunday when he walked across the stage at The Lyric as the youngest person ever to graduate from the University of Baltimore. Hobson-Powell gave up a fledgling basketball career when he began college three years ago, commuted more than an hour each way from his home in Northwest Washington after transferring last fall from Howard University and once completed 27 credits in a single semester while shuttling between classes at Howard, Montgomery College and the Internet.

I'm late on this, but it wouldn't be right if I didn't mention Mobb Deep's Prodigy coming home yesterday after serving a three-year bid for gun possession. This wasn't the H.N.I.C.'s first prison stint but let's hope it's his last. Prodigy is a legend in the game, and based on the lack of New York rappers making noise, his gritty voice is needed more than ever. Welcome home, P. Here's a throwback: "Keep It Thoro" from 2000's H.N.I.C. Bonus clip: Prodigy speaks after his release.

On a misty afternoon, the vista beyond her windows — the peaceful West River, lashed to life by a brisk and sudden rain — might as well be the Galway Bay of song or a fog-shrouded inlet of the Irish Sea. Such Celtic scenes lie 3,000 miles to the east, but to Maggie Sansone, they feel no further away than a tune she can't shake from her mind. "Sometimes I look out there and think, 'Those are the same waters that reach out and touch Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man," says Sansone, a Shady Side resident who happens to be one of America's top performers on the hammered dulcimer, an instrument that dates back 2,000 years and can — in the right hands — make sounds as primeval as haze on a lonely moor.

Jay Winer says he knew his son Jason had found his passion in 1987, after a weekend of watching the teenager play Puck in a Friends School of Baltimore production of "A Midsummer Night's Dream." In attendance for each of four performances, Winer and his wife, Sharyn, noticed that their son's speech and movements became slower with each staging of the play. The slowdown reached the point where after the final night's curtain, Winer asked his son if he was OK. "And you know what he said?"

The Times Mirror Co. has teamed up with Prodigy Services Co. to provide stories from three of its largest newspapers over the Prodigy on-line computer network beginning early next year.The agreement, linking the Prodigy network with a newspaper chain with nearly 3 million daily subscribers, initially calls for making issues and other information available from the Los Angeles Times, Newsday and New York Newsday in the Southern California and New York regions.Under the letter-of-intent announced yesterday, the three Times Mirror newspapers would provide local services, including current newspaper articles, data bases of previously published material, expanded analyses and background information on news stories, restaurant reviews and directories of community and educational services.

Success came fast and furious for guitar whiz Derek Trucks. At 9, he was hailed as a slide guitar prodigy. As a teenager, he was touring with his own band. At 19, he joined the Allman Brothers as a full-time member. He even toured with legend Eric Clapton. Now 30, Trucks has spent just about half his life on the road, either with his own band or supporting the Allman Brothers. His career took off quick and has never slowed down. Saturday, he headlines the Hot August Blues Festival in Oregon Ridge Park.

Daniel Price has been playing music by ear since he was a toddler. When he was 6 years old, he flawlessly performed Johann Strauss' "The Blue Danube" on the piano. And by age 9, he could pick up just about any song after hearing it only once. He plays without sheet music. The 16-year-old Rosedale youth has been blind since the age of 1. "Whenever I hit a note, I could tell by the sound what it was," he said while sitting in his home studio this week. "Music came easily for me." Although Daniel makes it sound simple, his extraordinary talents go well beyond anything his music instructors have ever witnessed.