Word: hobbyists
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Developed by Bruce Johnson, a local computer hobbyist, the program saved the life of Clyde Ritter, 73, when he fell into a diabetic coma, and rescued another older resident, whose hands had become stuck in a window...
...Steinway grand yet are relatively easy to use. The boards can produce a dazzling range of musical effects, sounding jazzy or elegant at the flick of a button or a switch. And though top-end pro keyboards can cost upwards of $3,000, general consumer models for the "hobbyist" market usually go for a couple of hundred dollars. Besides having model numbers that make them sound like racing cars, boards like the Yamaha DX7IIFD look like the instrument panel of a new Ferrari prototype. The Roland E-20 ($2,500) even has a liquid-crystal display window that flashes such...
...police are everywhere with spotlights. No sleep again. Just after midnight they find a grain car with a narrow porch. Twenty minutes later, the freight pauses to add an engine, and aliens from the Mexican border clamber aboard frantically. Finally, the clickety-clack commences for the last time. A hobbyist road-named the "Gentle Giant" defines this moment. "You face nature, and the train is your friend," he says. "All your senses are alive. You'll love your wife, your children and your home better." Three weary faces framed in a sunrise breaking behind the westbound freight seem to agree...
...this weird object about? Plainly, a satire on commodity culture, the bulimic gorging of mass-produced imagery that is built so firmly into our social responses by now that we cannot, or will not, see its inherent strangeness. Mach is not just a fine-art version of the reclusive hobbyist who makes Eiffel Towers or Brooklyn Bridges from a million spent matches. He wants to turn surplus against itself -- not in the friendly way of Kurt Schwitters or Robert Rauschenberg but with real bloody-mindedness. A Million Miles Away posits a world in which things are carried along, bobbing like...
Only occasionally do weddings in 1983 approach that standard. The stunt wedding remains common enough, of course. It is usually performed with traditional vows, however, for the same reason that a dancing dog generally does the foxtrot; the bizarre does its best work in conventional forms. There are the hobbyist enthusiasms: the nudist nuptials, for example, and the ceremonies for skindivers performed underwater. In April a couple were married while circling above California's Santa Monica mountains, scrunched down with the minister in a single-engine Beechcraft Sierra. The rest of the wedding party, including the mother...