Word: hobbyist
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...cubicle at an insurance company outside Philadelphia and chases trains. He sets up four video cameras on tripods beside the tracks and waits, listening to his scanner. "I come out every day because history happens every day," he says. Almeida, a father of three, is a railfan--a hobbyist who watches trains with the fastidiousness of a lab researcher. Over the past 15 years, he has shot hundreds of hours of video and tens of thousands of pictures. Call it what you will, it is hard to think of a more benign hobby...
Joshua Ramo was a hobbyist pilot who found himself mysteriously drawn to aerobatics, which he compares to aerial figure skating, with the following caveat: "When was the last time Kristy Yamaguchi burst into flames in the middle of a Salchow?" In No Visible Horizon (Simon & Schuster; 273 pages), Ramo, a former TIME editor, tells the story of his love affair with a sport that in a bad year, by his estimate, can kill 1 in 30 of its practitioners. Ramo buys a plane and learns to spin, loop, roll and do all three simultaneously at hundreds of miles per hour...
...took an active role in policing large mergers, in the name of protecting consumer interest. Under their watch, the mergers of Sprint and Worldcom, Office Depot and Staples, and United Air Lines and U.S. Air were all blocked. The FTC even blocked the merger of Meade and Celestron, two hobbyist telescope manufacturers who competed in a market totaling a few million dollars in sales per year. Retrospectively, it’s unclear what benefit, if any, the public received from these blocked mergers since most mergers of large, competing companies fail. For proof, look at the fates of MCI Worldcom...
...Bush team pounced. They relentlessly questioned the expertise of the expert witness, in which Brace wound up looking like a sort of hobbyist, able to voice his opinions only as "personal observations" based on his long experience in the field. (Or, as Bush lawyer Phil Beck put it disdainfully, "his years of travels.") And then they let him talk...
...considered signing up with a private teacher for another crack at lessons, but I know myself and my schedule well enough to imagine that teacher becoming my own personal Greek god of guilt. So I turn to that famous refuge of the half-assed hobbyist: the Learning Annex, New York City branch. I sign up for a three-hour, $39 course called "Instant Piano for Hopelessly Busy People." It's taught by Martin Moser, a sprightly ragtime fanatic. The course requires only that students be able to read music in the treble clef and be able to point to those...