Word: magicianly
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...There are two kinds of geniuses," the eminent mathematician Mark Kac once remarked. "An ordinary genius is a fellow that you and I would be just as good as, if we were only many times better." The other kind Kac called magicians. "Even after we understand what they have done, the process by which they have done it is completely dark . . . Richard Feynman is a magician of the highest caliber...
What made Feynman a magician, though, was not any one of these achievements by itself, but the way he went about them. One of the common-nonsensical premises of quantum physics is that particles can travel from one place to another without traversing the space in between, and Feynman's thought process seemed to go from problem to solution in just about the same way. He rarely studied what was already known about a problem before attacking it. He was more interested in getting the solution than in doing the problem according to the rules, and he often ended...
...Genie makes dozens of eyeblink metamorphoses: a Scotsman, a Scots dog, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Senor Wences, Ed Sullivan, Groucho Marx, a French waiter, a turkey, the crows from Dumbo, Eddie (Rochester) Anderson, a rabbit, a dinosaur, William F. Buckley Jr., Robert De Niro, a stewardess, a bashful sheep, Pinocchio, a magician, a Jean Gabin-style Frenchman, Sebastian the crab from The Little Mermaid, Arsenio Hall, a finicky tailor, Walter Brennan, a TV parade host and hostess, Ethel Merman, Rodney Dangerfield, Jack Nicholson, a talking lampshade, a bee, a U- boat, a one-man band and a quartet of cheerleaders. Many...
...Willy Wonka booth, a magician dressed asthe mythical chocolate factory owner entertainedpassersby. Wonka representative Richard Gower saidhis company's newest venture is "Radical Red andBoppin' Blue Razzberry Nerds...
Salvatore Ferragamo, a stocky, wavy-haired Italian shoemaker who first apprenticed himself to a cobbler when he was nine years old, was a magician who worked with feet. He well understood the talismanic power of shoes, their ability to enchant and arouse, to dazzle and intrigue. He created shoes that were walking fantasies. But at the same time he was a craftsman who understood how a pair of ill-fitting shoes can ruin a day and how a pair of clunky shoes can make a duchess feel dowdy...