Word: inventor
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...theater and film at Hunter College, managed to arrange a meeting at Ma Maison restaurant in Los Angeles early in 1983. Something about her encyclopedic knowledge of his life, combined with her gushing admiration, persuaded him to keep talking. Welles recounted his weird childhood. His father was a failed inventor who became an alcoholic, his mother a failed pianist who died when he was nine, and his older brother a schizophrenic. At 18 months, Orson was "discovered" by Dr. Maurice Bernstein, a family friend, who pronounced the tot a genius and supplied him with a violin, paints and a puppet...
...girl eventually gets a leash around Macon, who wants his wife back but breaks a leg and has to move in with his brothers and sister. The Learys are a close family of bottle-cap manufacturers who play a private card game called Vaccination and can boast of an inventor grandfather who had high hopes for a motorcycle that could pull a plow and a hybrid flower that closed in the presence of tears. "Florists will be mobbing me," said the old man. "Think of the dramatic effect at funerals!" Sister Rose is so organized that she alphabetizes her kitchen...
...current boom in neon brings its history full circle. Although the process of passing an electric charge through a gas such as neon or argon inside a sealed glass tube had been known for some time, it became commercially viable in 1910, when a French inventor named Georges Claude developed a long-life electrode. One early practical application: a giant white Cinzano sign over the chimneys of Paris. After being introduced into the U.S. in 1923, neon flourished for nearly two decades, especially as an accent for fantasies: movie houses, cocktail lounges, casinos. In the 1950s, when television took visual...
...again plunges into the hottest craze. The movie takes place in a glittery jungle of Danskins and weight-lifting machines, a Los Angeles health club whose members pursue the perfect pecs. No one could be more gratified by the sight of this new mating ritual than Arthur Jones, the inventor whose sophisticated Nautilus machines have turned body building into sweaty chic...
...nonexistent town. Allende's Rosa the Beautiful is obviously a stand-in for Garcia Marquez's Remedios the Beauty, famed for her spectacular ascension to heaven with the family laundry. The job-hopping Nicolas in The House of the Spirits doubles for One Hundred Years' mad inventor, Jose Arcadio Buendia, who strives to manufacture the philosophers' stone and photograph...