Toronto Broad

Get Smart

// September 26th, 2005 // No Comments » // Events

Don Adams, the wry-voiced comedian who starred as the fumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart in the 1960s television spoof of James Bond movies, “Get Smart,” has died. He was 82.

Adams died of a lung infection late Sunday at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, his friend and former agent Bruce Tufeld said Monday, adding the actor broke his hip a year ago and had been in ill health since.

As the inept Agent 86 of the super-secret federal agency Control, Adams captured TV viewers with his antics in combatting the evil agents of Kaos. When his explanations failed to convince the villains or his boss, he tried another tack: “Would you believe…?” It became a national catchphrase.

Smart was also prone to spilling things on the desk or person of the Chief (actor Edward Platt). Smart’s apologetic “Sorry about that, chief” also entered the American lexicon. The spy gadgets, which aped those of the Bond movies, were a popular feature, especially the pre-cell-phone telephone in a shoe.

Smart’s beautiful partner, Agent 99, played by Barbara Felden, was as brainy as he was dense, and a plot romance led to marriage and the birth of twins later in the series.

Adams, who had been under contract to NBC, was lukewarm about doing a spy spoof. When he learned that Mel Brooks and Buck Henry had written the pilot script, he accepted immediately. “Get Smart” debuted on NBC in September 1965 and scored No. 12 among the season’s most-watched series and No. 22 in its second season.

“Get Smart” twice won the Emmy for best comedy series with three Emmys for Adams as comedy actor.

Get Smart was one of my childhood favourite shows. Good-bye, Agent 86.

Toronto undergoes simulated attack

// September 19th, 2005 // No Comments » // Neighbourhoods

Last Updated Sun, 18 Sep 2005 13:22:21 EDT
CBC News

Emergency crews pulled bodies from a Toronto subway station and office tower Sunday morning after a highly coordinated attack.

But it was only a test.

Passersby gawked behind police tape as dozens of officers in protective suits and gas masks carried victims to a decontamination site.

The scenario involved terrorists detonating two bombs in downtown Toronto’s financial district.

The first was a radioactive device contaminating a subway car.

The second simulated explosion minutes later was a hydrogen cyanide blast in a stairwell of the Royal Trust tower.

The test included about 250 people and cost close to $30,000. It was designed to test the city’s Joint CBRN (Chemical, Biological, Radiological and Nuclear) Response Team.

Website Redesign

// September 16th, 2005 // 1 Comment » // Just Stuff

Today I visited the website of a company I used to work for. It had been a part of my job to update their website, but the President of the company always wanted the site done using Front Page (so that he could edit it himself, if need be), and so it had an amateurish, “Front Page” kind of layout set up in frames.

Regardless, I made a few changes to the site while there and at least made the website xhtml compliant, no matter how it looked since he was not overly open to the idea of change.

Well today I saw that they’d overhauled the site and it looked pretty good. It would have been nice if I had been allowed to make it look good.

However, what I did see was that the company they hired to redo the site, did not make the site standards compliant. As a matter of fact, the site was backwards compliant and was all designed using tables and no css. They didn’t even have a doctype in their coding, and were using old html in the body.

I had to laugh. No forward thinking for this company. They probably didn’t even know what to ask the designing company for.

I guess that’s what happens when you’ve got the right people doing the wrong jobs. Ah well, they can just pay for it to be redone again in a year or so.