Word: savant
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...Idiot-Savant Handbook, by Ronald Patrick MacMurphy. In a few short pages (and huge bold type) the author explains how to remember what the weather was like every day for the last 100 years. My favorite, page 14: "May 27, 1932: It was cloudy." The book also explains how to remember what day of the week it was for every day of the last 500 years. For example, November 20, 1965 was a Saturday. The epilogue also tells you how to get on "60 Minutes" after memorizing the book...
...tough. She can be vulnerable. Whoopi Goldberg is a bundle of funny, appealing characters in search of an author. Bob Goldthwait is a stand- up comic of surreal mien who spits out his wit in the strangulated voice of an idiot savant after a go at the glue bottle. Both of these gifted comics are trapped in Hugh Wilson's Burglar, an affable movie that is all plot and no common sense...
...idiot savant has a long tradition in the U.S., much of it as victim. A typical 19th century savant, Tom Bethune was sightless and barely able to grunt monosyllables. But he had the ability to play complicated classical piano pieces by ear, and promoters exhibited him in vaudeville as an amusing freak. Since that time, savants -- retarded and autistic people who have inexplicable gifts, usually in art, mathematics and music -- have been the objects of diversion and exploitation. But at a unique institution called Hope University in Anaheim, Calif., they are being trained to reveal their surprising gifts and develop...
...young, but it is unlikely that any title in 1987 will top this one for mystification and intrigue. Fair enough: its subjects are the oddest achievers in the history of show business. Here is Blind Tom, born to slave parents in 1849. Sightless and retarded, this exemplary idiot savant could play most pieces on the piano, classical or popular, after a single hearing. Here is Harry Kahne, who could write five words on a blackboard simultaneously, holding chalk in his feet, hands and mouth. Here is Matthew Buchinger, who was a marksman, conjurer, artist and musician. Not exactly headline making...
...upscale drug. So it is salutary for a film to examine and embrace those anachronistic, ever-so-'60s extremes. Bliss wants to pose the biggest questions -- about life, death and the twilight state in between that passes for existence -- in the weirdest way. It fulminates like a bag-lady savant on the toxic dangers of technology and moral compromise. It has big, randy dreams about its hero's search for a bucolic haven on earth. Extravagant or exasperating, Bliss puts nobody to sleep. At its world premiere at last year's Cannes Film Festival, more than half of the international...