Word: amateurisms
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...Show, where he conducted absurd conversations with his dummy Pedro, his puppet Cecelia the chicken, or the blond-wigged Johnny, a face he painted on his hand, moving thumb and index finger to simulate a mouth. Born Wenceslao Moreno, he imitated voices as a child. He worked as an amateur bullfighter but, after being gored repeatedly, took up circus juggling. Later his ventriloquist act achieved worldwide fame. In his mid-80s he appeared on the Muppet Show and Late Night With David Letterman; he also toured briefly in the musical Sugar Babies...
Callahan started to take pictures regularly in 1938, when he was a shipping clerk at Chrysler in Detroit with an amateur's interest in cameras. A brief workshop with Ansel Adams, who passed through town in 1941, confirmed photography not just as his profession but in some sense as his calling. Callahan decided he was an artist, and it turned out he was right. Within seven years he had made some of his most enduring pictures, held the first of a long line of exhibitions and saw his work on the walls of the Museum of Modern...
When Japanese amateur astronomer Yuji Hyakutake first caught sight of the comet through a pair of binoculars on Jan. 30 (it was his second comet discovery; the first came just a month earlier) there was no reason to think it would be especially bright. But when professionals calculated the orbit, they realized that Hyakutake would be approaching to within a mere 9.3 million miles of Earth, only 40 times as distant as the moon...
Hyakutake's status as a return visitor makes it ideal for amateur stargazers but a bit less enticing to scientists. Comets are believed to be leftover material from the formation of the solar system 4.5 billion years ago. Millions are still orbiting lazily in a halo called the Oort cloud, far beyond Pluto, where they are perfectly preserved. It's only occasionally that one changes orbit and plunges into the relative warmth of Earth's neighborhood. And the more often a comet returns to be heated, the more its structure and chemical composition are altered...
Eventually, they found two with Suponcic's phone number. One featured a topless brunet wearing only a string of pearls and offering phone calls for "as low as 87 [cents] per minute." The other showed a blond woman advertising "hot amateur wives ready for you from there [sic] own bed." Yikes...