Category: All Posts

Talk to the Hands

Watch this and fall in love with Shari Lewis.

The way the kids in the audience reacted was how I felt as a young boy watching Shari. A documentary celebrating the life and work of the late and very talented ventriloquist/puppeteer has some upcoming screenings.

I’ll take exception with the assertion in the trailer that, “In the early days of television, there really were no kids shows.” Howdy Doody began in 1947, as did Fran Allison’s Kukla, Fran, and Ollie puppet show. Crusader Rabbit was pitched as a limited animation TV cartoon series in 1948. Bob Clampett’s Time for Beany puppet ensemble first aired in 1949. The 1950s brought a flood of TV shows for kids.

That quote in the trailer continues with, “for Shari to come along… have puppets… comedy… I just knew this was different.” Shari was certainly special, but I wouldn’t say her act was essentially different from other ventriloquists. Edgar Bergen and Paul Winchell used dummies. Señor Wences and Shari talked to themselves with hand puppets.

Blogger Tralfaz says, “She was like the nice older girl down the street.”

https://tralfaz.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-six-year-old-who-loved-shari-lewis.html

Shari wasn’t just nice, she was sexy. She had appeal beyond the kiddie set that, unfortunately, never took off. The dads in the audience must have paused to take in more than a passing glance. Everything about Shari Lewis was, in a word, attractive.

Phyllis Naomi Hurwitz, aka Shari Lewis

Tralfaz has this quote from a 1963 news item, reacting to the cancellation of Shari’s NBC show:

Childhood’s loss, however, may well turn out to be a gain for adult audiences… It will undoubtedly come as a great shock to the summer theater audiences who go to see “Indoor Sport” to find Shari, the perpetual ingenue with pony tail hairdo, playing a young matron with divorce on her mind—and without a note to sing or a hand puppet named Lamb Chop or Hush Puppy to talk to.

So what happened? Why wasn’t there a big primetime network TV breakthrough for Shari in the Sixties? Her greatest success was entertaining kids, and yet NBC canceled her beloved children’s show, while CBS kept Captain Kangaroo going year after year. This conundrum is something I hope the documentary can explain.

The Shari Lewis Show replaced the long-running Howdy Doody. Robert Crumb thought Howdy Doody was creepy and unsettling, whereas Paul Rubens loved the show and he took inspiration from it when creating Pee-Wee Herman. Which reminds me that I need to revisit and rework my posts regarding my unintentional role in getting Morty Gunty’s WOR-TV show in New York canceled.

Welcome, Sleazy Bankers!

The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced that reputational risk will no longer be a component of examination programs in its supervision of banks.

https://www.federalreserve.gov/newsevents/pressreleases/bcreg20250623a.htm

We’re now seeing Trump’s influence on the Fed. I predict that a year from now he’ll appoint his operative, Michelle Bowman, to replace Jay Powell. Neither of them is an economist, but Bowman’s credentials are, as Trump would put it, “very weak.”

https://www.cnbc.com/2025/06/23/fed-governor-bowman-favors-july-interest-rate-cut-if-inflation-stays-low.html

Apple Cores

Windows XP on a Compaq Presario 5300

For fun, I’m going to power up my one remaining Windows XP system. It was purchased on the day that XP was released, October 25, 2001. The end of support for Windows XP didn’t bother me. It gave me a reason to buy a 64-bit computer.

Support for Windows 10 ends on October 14, and that bothers me. In addition to my Windows 11 laptop computer, I have two desktop and two laptop systems running Windows 10. They aren’t very fast, especially the three running on mechanical hard drives, but they continue to be useful. None of them meet the TPM hardware requirement for Windows 11. Dave Plummer explains.

Microsoft’s historical pattern is to release new features, often of dubious value, that are easily exploited and then have to be patched after being discovered in the field. Do I believe that TPM will provide essential, lasting additional security? Nah, the hackers will find ways around it. The protection is immaterial anyway, as the real threats aren’t from weak security on home PCs, but hacked data centers. Remember the Solarwinds event?

https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/feature/SolarWinds-hack-explained-Everything-you-need-to-know

I don’t plan to abandon my Windows 10 systems when support ends, but at some point I will need to replace my primary desktop system, a Dell tower with an Intel i5 and 8 GB of memory. What will I get?

I have never owned an Apple product. I was kept away by the cost and the lack of hardware options resulting from Apple being a closed system.

My first desktop system was a no-name white box with an AMD 40 MHz processor, 4 MB of memory and a 160 MB hard drive. It came with DOS and Windows 3.1 on floppy disks that I had to install myself, which was my preference. I bought it with the intention of opening the case. An Apple system would have cost twice as much and opening the case would have voided the warranty.

Having first bought a cellphone thirty years ago, when Windows 95 was new and mobile phone service was analog, I delayed getting a smartphone for as long as possible. After so many years of eschewing Apple computers, I wasn’t interested in embracing its phone ecosystem. So I went with Android, but I did that by following Apple’s integrated system lead and buying Google Pixel phones.

I’m very tired of updating and restarting Windows, so in a weird way I’m looking forward to October 14. Although I’m always looking for a good deal, cost is less of a concern than it was. Perhaps I will finally consider going with Apple. Dave explains some of the technology that makes their latest systems so wicked fast.