Word: geniuses
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...interview with Frank Beacham, Paul joked that a lot of people didn't know he played a guitar. "They think I am one," he said. He was something more: a genius of a tinkerer, with machines and music - the Edison...
...Just One More Chance In 1955, the first official year of rock 'n' roll, the hits stopped coming. A nice married couple was suddenly sooooo 1954. Paul looked less like a genius-guitarist than an irrelevant uncle. Paul and Ford did commercials for the Robert Hall clothing chain ("When the values go up, up, up/ And the prices go down, down, down") and Rheingold Beer. They broke up the act - and their marriage. (Ford died at 52 in 1976.) Paul pretty much retired. He survived quintuple-bypass heart surgery. It was one of the first operations of its kind - another...
...Nokia's real genius is simply in selling phones in more places than any of its competitors. From Indian mountain villages to towns on the dry plains of northern Nigeria, Nokia is everywhere. Supplying the end user with a smart phone in Western Europe and America is typically the job of cell-phone operators who will even subsidize the cost of a device in return for tying a buyer to a monthly plan. Not so in emerging markets, where users typically buy their phone independently. That means manufacturers need their own "very efficient distribution," says Sanford C. Bernstein's Ferragu...
...book is organized as a series of linked biographical sketches. One of them is of Humphry Davy, a cocky little guy who was born in Cornwall, England, in 1778. He was an apothecary's apprentice who practically frothed with genius and ambition. Over the course of his career, he postulated the carbon cycle, used electricity to isolate sodium and potassium and saved countless lives by inventing a safety lamp for coal miners. He also studied the health benefits of nitrous oxide - laughing gas. Oh, to be a fly on the wall while Davy huffed 18th century whippits with Robert Southey...
...Granted, there's not much here that's new. Pynchon, 72, has been playing variations on these themes since the genius trifecta of his early days: V., The Crying of Lot 49 and Gravity's Rainbow. Even the grace notes are familiar. Inane, invented song lyrics? Got 'em. Festive foodstuffs? Pass the chocolate-covered frozen bananas. Funny names? How about a drug dealer called El Drano? It's an anagram for his real name, Leonard. Which, let's be clear, is pretty funny...