Our Daily Dead

NY Times
Don Adams, who played Maxwell Smart in the 1960’s sitcom “Get Smart,” combining clipped, decisive diction with appalling, hilarious ineptitude, died on Sunday at a Los Angeles hospital. He was 82.

The cause was a lung infection, his friend and former agent Bruce Tufeld said, according to The Associated Press. Mr. Tufeld said that Mr. Adams broke his hip a year ago and had been in poor health.

Maxwell Smart - in a way, his name was the show’s biggest joke - was a bumbling secret agent for Control, the good guys, who weekly foiled the plans of the evil cabal Kaos for world domination.

Inevitably, Smart’s ham-handed detective style landed him in hot water. Luckily, his faithful and beautiful sidekick, Agent 99 (Barbara Feldon), was as bright as he was dense, and could bail him out. (Smart was Agent 86: bartender’s code for cutting off service to a drunk.)

“Get Smart” twice won the Emmy for best comedy series, and Mr. Adams won three Emmys for best actor.

“Get Smart” ran on NBC from 1965 to 1969 and on CBS from 1969 to 1970. Years later, producers tried to recapture the show’s initial spark in the 1980 film “The Nude Bomb,” the 1989 television movie “Get Smart, Again!” and a revival on Fox that lasted seven episodes in 1995. Mr. Adams appeared in all the incarnations.

The original show spoofed the James Bond movies in an innocent, if sophomoric way, and one of its most winning characteristics was the seriousness with which Maxwell Smart again and again did and said things that were really stupid. Several of his lines became popular catchphrases, particularly with young people:

“Would you believe?” (Used when someone did not believe one of Smart’s prevarications and he was about to suggest another.)

“Let me handle it, 99.” (And then he would, and botch it.)

“Sorry about that, Chief” (When he reported to his boss, played by Edward Platt, after the inevitable failure.)

But Smart’s charm lay in his utter humanness, the opposite of Bond’s preposterous competence. In an interview with The Saturday Evening Post in 1966, Mr. Adams analyzed Smart: “He’s not superhuman. But he believes in what he does and he wants to do his best.”

His best was rarely good enough. Smart called into work with a dial phone on the sole of his shoe, and often got a wrong number. He wore jet shoes that shot him up, often into the roof. He was so security-minded that he would often swallow secret messages before reading them.

And we’re sorry to learn of the death of Don Adams, aka Agent Maxwell Smart (AKA agent 86) of the television comedy series “Get Smart.”

The show spoofed (rather well, and financially successfully) the James Bond
series. Agent 99, played by Barbara Feldon, was a strong, if occasionally dingy, sidekick to Max. (She also made a few adolescent boys hearts go pitter patter
.) Here’s your ODDquestion of the day: “What was Agent 99’s name?” Answer below.

Adams reprised the role in the 1980’s movie “Get Smart Again.”
Unfortunately, there are no legitimate copies of the TV series available, although HBO DVD
is said to be getting ready to release them.

As regards “Get” movies, our ODDfellows favorite is “Get Shorty,”
the prequel to this year’s godawful “Be Cool” (no one with a conscience would allows innocents to click on a link to “Be Cool.”) Actors in “Get Shorty” were John Travolta (the very cool Chili Palmer), Rene Russo (the very cool Karen Flores), Gene Hackman (the very slimy Harry Zimm), James Gandolfini (the very sinister Ray “Bones” Barboni), and James Gandolfini (the very pre-Tony Soprano “Bear.”)

The “86” of “Agent 86” was inspired by one of two meanings: “To cancel, as to ’86 a project’” or “Bartender code for a drunk, as in ‘He’s 86’ed.’” Your call.

Trick question: Agent 99 didn’t have a name. In one episode she called herself “Susan Hilton,” but
Max: That’s all right Susan.
99: It’s 99, Max. Susan isn’t my real name.

We’re off to fight rottenness.

NY Times
LOS ANGELES, Sept. 25 (AP) - Tommy Bond, who played Butch the bully in the “Our Gang” and “The Little Rascals” serials of the 1930’s, died on Saturday at a hospital in the San Fernando Valley. He was 79.

The cause was complications from heart disease, said his manager, Frank Marks.

Mr. Bond first played a member of the Gang named Tommy. After his first year he was dropped from the cast but returned later in the role of Butch, the archenemy of Alfalfa.

Mr. Bond appeared in numerous “Our Gang” and “Little Rascals” features before outgrowing the role. The show was notable for the natural way it treated its subjects, a group of poor children, and was one of the first to cast boys and girls, blacks and whites, as equals.

Our Gang 4-pack DVD: The Our Gang Story; Little Rascals Greatest Hits; Our Gang Comedy Festival #1; Little Rascals Varieties.
Best of Our Gang Vols 1 & 2

Child actors
are being called up. Today there is one less earthly member of “Our Gang,” Tommy Bond, who played “Butch” in the Little Rascals-Our Gang comedy series from the 1920’s into the 1940’s has died. Somewhere in the universe he scampers with “Pete the Pet.”
He’s also headed for the “National Comedy Hall of Fame.”

Only a few members of the child-actor group that worked magic for Hal Roach
, went on to any adult notoriety. Jackie Cooper
and Spanky McFarlane had marginal post-pubescent careers.
. So here’s your ODDquestion of the day: “Actor Mickey Guitosi joined the “Our Gang” series as an Italian-American (what else?) character. By what name to you best know him?” (Answer below—He’s related to today’s opening quote and Butch’s role in the comedy series.)

Butch was a bully; here’s a link for dealing with bullies
. If you’re feeling a tad Old Testament
, here’s some retaliatory ammo
.

“Mickey Guitosi” = ( drum roll
please) Robert Blake
. In “The Treasure of Sierra Madre,”
Humphrey Bogart gets rid of a beggar Mexican boy, played by Blake, trying to sell him a lottery ticket. Bogart becomes a bully and flings a glass of water in the boy’s face.

“Beat it. I ain’t buying no lottery tickets.”

NY Times
Theodore X. Barber, a psychologist who became a leading critic of hypnosis after his scientific studies concluded that the power of suggestion often worked nearly as well, died on Sept. 10 at a hospital in Framingham, Mass. He was 78 and lived in Ashland, Mass.

The cause was a ruptured aorta, his family said.

Dr. Barber developed what became careerlong studies of hypnosis in the 1960’s, while conducting research at the Medfield Foundation, a private psychiatric research center in Massachusetts.

Earlier, in a series of experiments performed door to door, he and other researchers found that they could induce sleepiness by suggestion alone, without the swinging watches or formal protocols used by hypnotists. Power of suggestion worked effectively on about 20 percent of the people tested, although another 25 percent had no reaction.

The results stimulated Dr. Barber’s interest in the hypnotic state, and he examined people who could be easily or deeply hypnotized. In the 1970’s, he helped identify a small minority - 2 percent to 4 percent of the population - who were especially responsive, and he then studied the group. With other researchers, he found that the people most susceptible to hypnosis included those who were “gifted fantasizers” or “amnesia prone.”

John F. Chaves, a psychologist at the State University of New York, Stony Brook, said Dr. Barber’s studies “took a lot of the magic away from hypnotism,” but explained a great deal about phenomena traditionally associated with hypnosis, including memory and concentration.

In 1969, Dr. Barber published a book, “Hypnosis: A Scientific Approach,” that Dr. Chaves said “placed hypnotic phenomena in the mainstream of social psychology.” Also in the 1960’s, Dr. Barber’s research introduced the Barber Suggestibility Scale, a method of evaluating patients and measuring their responsiveness to a range of suggestions. The scale is still in use.

Theodore Barker, expert on hypnosis
has entered the ultimate state of relaxation. Barber found a strong correlation between those that claimed they could be hypnotized and their responsiveness to suggestibility. From this came the Barker Suggestibility Scale
. We ODDfellows scored at the upper end of “so naive, they put spammers on their Christmas card list.” We think impulse shopping should be an Olympic event. We think there is no question that we are involved in a weather war
. The person in the mirror definitely talks back to us.

We did go to a website that promises to hypnotize you over the Internet
. We tried it, but kept falling asleep and waking up in a pool of drool; however, there are these charges on our credit card that we can’t quite explain.

Time to do the title
Lemon slice test ( Imagine looking at, feeling, picking up, and slicing a lemon in half. They must then picture themselves squeezing some of the juice into a container, smelling it, and drinking a little. Those who are aware of salivating after performing the exercise once are more likely to be good hypnosis candidates than those who do not salivate more than usual). Won’t it be great if we not only ODDly salivate, but can actually make lemonade? We just love doing experiments we can then eat. We’re thinking of getting into lobster neurobiology
.

Enjoy your weekend. We plan to jump in giant piles of leaves and rejoice in smashing pumpkins
. Ta Ta.