Before basically inventing the hit stand-up special, with the 1960 Grammy-winning album “The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart” — that doesn’t even count his pay-per-view event broadcast on Canadian television that some cite as the first filmed special — he was a soft-spoken accountant who had never done a set in a nightclub. That he made a classic with so little preparation is one of the great miracles in the history of comedy.
Newhart was a master of the slow build and used silence and his stammer as power tools.
Newhart went straight to the top. Unlike other comics, he didn’t have years of playing small gigs to refine his act before hitting it big. He went from nowhere to a #1 album and had to learn his craft in the spotlight.
Newhart repeats the hilarious story about how his wife met Don Rickles. The Newharts and Rickles became lifelong friends. Rickles was an insult comic who spewed racist jokes at a time when a person could do those things, and it was clear they were demonstrating how racism was stupid. But offstage, Don Rickles was, by all accounts, a kind and gracious man—the opposite of his onstage persona.
Newhart shrugs and does not explain how he and Rickles became close friends. But I think a big part of it is that they were both good men who played Rat Pack shows but were not interested in the boozing, philandering lifestyle. They were family men.
I recently upgraded from a 27" 14-year-old Apple Cinema Display to a 34" Dell ultrawide.
Until now, I’ve always run a simple windowing setup: Most of the time, I’m using one app, and it’s maximized to fill the whole screen. When I want to switch apps, I Cmd-Tab between them (that’s equivalent to Alt-Tab on Windows). Often, I use two apps, and I tile them side by side when I do.
But that strategy is not going to work for me on a 34" display because the individual app becomes too big to take in.
If I’m working on just one application, I think I’ll have it centered, full height, 2/3 or 3/4 of the width of the screen. We’ll see how that works out over time. But what goes on either edge?
How do you manage your ultrawide lifestyle?
I use the computer for basic productivity, the web and social media. I’m not a gamer and I don’t generally watch videos or listen to music on my desktop.
I already use Raycast for window management, so I don’t need pointers to software such as Raycast, Moom, or Magnet. However, if there are particular applications you love for window management on ultrawide displays, please let me know.
By the way, I searched the Internet for tips on making the transition and found reddit.com/r/ultrawidemasterrace, where people share tips and photos of their ultrawide setups. 34" seems huge to me, but it barely qualifies for that sub. For example, check this out: a 49" display with another monitor mounted above it.
“Dexter” is returning, with Michael C. Hall as the titular character.. Good news! The character died at the end of the previous miniseries (spoiler for 2-year-old TV show soz) but there are ways they can retcon this. It’d be a cheap trick, but I don’t care if it brings the show back.
Rob Beschizza/Boing Boing: “The New York Times wanted to summon one of its favorite characters: an everyday Dem so upset with the Left that they were going to vote for Donald Trump instead.” They quoted “Anna Ayala, notable to [the Times] only for being a 58-year-old who voted for Joe Biden in 2020 but now likes the other guy.”
But Ayala is “the famed criminal who put a human finger in a Wendy’s chili among various other escapades.”
(Corrected to fix typo, credit Rob, post to correct place. Oy.)
It started as a a joke on X, with user @rickrudescalves claiming Vance revealed in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy that he lubed up two couch cushions and had sex with them when he was a teenager. It went very viral and a lot of people believed it because, I mean, look at the guy, it seems like something he would do. The Associated Press, however, made the mistake of trying to debunk all this, declaring in a headline that Vance has never fucked a couch. But as many pointed out, can they actually prove that? How do we know? The AP has since deleted the post, but I think we, as a nation, should keep loudly discussing this until November.
If you’re participating in get-out-the-vote campaigns, remember that Election Day is when voting ends. For absentee ballots, voting starts Sept. 21. So, get-out-the-vote campaigns start in September.
Julie and I are quite enjoying the TV series “Evil,” which is of the paranormal investigator genre, like “The Night Stalker” and “X-Files.” In this case, the paranormal investigators work for the Catholic Church.
We’re partway through Season 1.
Did “Night Stalker” and “X-Files” invent the genre of the paranormal investigator, or was that trope already around and established?
Today I found my reporter’s notebook for South by Southwest 2007. That was the event where Twitter hit its first tipping point. I remember cruising around in a taxi with a friend who had a 17" MacBook open on his lap, connected with a wireless modem, watching Twitter for news about parties.
The notebook has a page of notes about voicemail messages. Remember voicemail?