Word: mensa
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...wants to play in the same league as Bergman, Bunuel, Kurosawa, to create "true literature." On those occasions when he stops scaling Olympus and makes a popular comedy-drama such as Annie Hall or Hannah and Her Sisters, he feels a little cheap, like the Whore of Mensa (the main character and title of one of his funniest short stories) -- as if he has undersold his gifts to win easy acclaim...
FLORIDA. The nation's second busiest death row is accommodating an unusual new arrival: a pepper-haired, bespectacled genius named George James Trepal, who fed rat poison to the family next door because he considered them bad neighbors. It seems that Trepal, a science buff and member of Mensa, a social club for the high IQed, grew tired of his neighbors' loud music and barking dogs. He left a death threat on the door, and when that didn't work he slipped into the Carr family kitchen and laced some thallium nitrite into a pack of 16-oz. Coca-Cola...
...Trepal began handing over clues. No one in the small community of Alturas could conceive of a motive, until detectives began questioning Trepal. "Somebody wanted them to move out," he told police. "That was the reason they were poisoned." Next he began planning for his favorite recreation, the annual Mensa murder weekend, when the geniuses gather to solve their perfect fantasy crime. "When a death threat appears on the doorstep," he wrote in a booklet for the event, "prudent people throw out all their food and watch what they eat." An undercover agent, planted in Mensa to befriend Trepal...
...Compass began as a "storefront theater with educational intentions," the creation of two intellectual insurrectionists, Paul Sills and David Shepherd. The actors who gravitated to it made it into a proving ground for improvisational theater and a sort of comedy cabaret for Mensa members...
...controlled; she performs them each morning like aerobics. She is properly repelled by Tom, and improperly attracted to him. Improperly, because she has a perfect pal -- not a soul mate exactly, but a brain mate -- in Aaron Altman (Albert Brooks), a warm, supercompetent, underappreciated reporter, the Jimmy Olsen of Mensa. Aaron can spit out pertinent facts about Gaddafi, he can get drunk and sing along in flawless French to a Francis Cabrel tune, he can love Jane to pristine pieces, all to no avail. Poor Aaron. He lacks what this judicious, irresistible romantic comedy is about: the fatal attraction...