AdamSmith

Hillary kicked things off by going completely unrecognized at a Chipotle. Not to be outdone, Martin O’Malley kicked things off by going completely unrecognized at a Martin O’Malley campaign event. (Laughter.) And Bernie Sanders might run. I like Bernie. Bernie is an interesting guy. Apparently some folks really want to see a pot-smoking socialist in the White House. (Laughter.) We could get a third Obama term after all. (Laughter and applause.) It could happen.

Anyway. (Laughter.) It’s amazing how time flies. Soon, the first presidential contest will take place. And I for one cannot wait to see who the Koch brothers pick. It’s exciting. Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, Jeb Bush, Scott Walker. Who will finally get that red rose? (Laughter.) The winner gets a billion-dollar war chest. The runner up gets to be the bachelor on the next season of “The Bachelor.” (Laughter.) I mean, seriously, a billion dollars. From just two guys. Is it just me, or does that feel a little excessive? (Laughter.) I mean, it’s almost insulting to the candidates. The Koch brothers think they need to spend a billion dollars to get folks to like one of these people. (Laughter.) It's got to hurt their feelings a little bit. (Laughter.) And, look, I know I’ve raised a lot of money too. But in all fairness, my middle name is “Hussein.” (Laughter.) What’s their excuse? (Laughter and applause.)

You know what, let me set the record straight. I tease Joe sometimes, but he has been at my side for seven years now. I love that man. (Applause.) He’s not just a great Vice President, he is a great friend. We’ve gotten so close, in some places in Indiana, they won’t serve us pizza anymore. (Laughter and applause.) I want to thank our host for the evening, a Chicago girl, the incredibly talented Cecily Strong. (Applause.) On “Saturday Night Life,” Cecily impersonates CNN anchor Brooke Baldwin. Which is surprising, because usually the only people impersonating journalists on CNN are journalists on CNN. (Laughter.) ABC is here with some of the stars from their big new comedy, “Black-ish.” (Applause.) It’s a great show, but I have to give ABC fair warning—being “Black-ish” only makes you popular for so long. Trust me. (Laughter.) There’s a shelf life to that thing. (Laughter.)

Now, look, it is true I have not managed to make everybody happy. Six years into my presidency, some people still say I’m arrogant and aloof, condescending. Some people are so dumb. (Laughter.) No wonder I don’t meet with them. (Laughter.) And that’s not all people say about me. A few weeks ago, Dick Cheney says he thinks I’m the worst President of his lifetime. Which is interesting, because I think Dick Cheney is the worst President of my lifetime. (Laughter and applause.) It’s quite a coincidence.

Was so good to see, in today's news reports about people's reactions, the past public sniping & mean jokes give way to some sympathy and understanding apparently resulting from the interview.

Transcript: President Obama's 2015 White House Correspondents' Dinner Speech“I look so old, John Boehner has already invited Netanyahu to speak at my funeral.”

For reference: http://www.boytoy.com/forums/index.php?/topic/23485-whats-the-most-youve-spent-on-escorts-in-a-year/

Music to go mad by.

...Midway through the first season, due to Harris' popularity on the show, he began to rewrite the dialogue. Allen approved his changes and gave him carte blanche as a writer. Harris subsequently stole the show, mainly via a seemingly never-ended series of alliterative insults directed toward the Robot, which soon worked their way into popular culture. When the show was renewed for its third and final season, it remained focused on Harris' character, Dr. Smith. While the series was still solidly placed in the middle of the ratings pack, the writers appeared to run out of fresh ideas, and the show was unexpectedly canceled in 1968, after 83 episodes... ...Bill Mumy said about Harris' guest role that in his first episode, "It was actually implied that this villainous character that sabotaged the mission and ended up with us, was going to be killed off after a while." Mumy added, "Jonathan played him as written, which was this really dark, straight-ahead villain." Mumy also said of Harris' work on Space, "And we'd start working on a scene together, and he'd have a line, and then in the script I'd have my reply, and he'd say, 'No, no, no, dear boy. No, no, no. Before you say that, The Robot will say this, this, this, this, this, this, and this, and then, you'll deliver your line.'" Bill also said of Harris' portrayal, "He truly, truly singlehandedly created the character of Dr. Zachary Smith that we know — this man, we love-to-hate, coward who would cower behind the little boy, 'Oh, the pain! Save me, William!' That's all him!" About the show's cancellation, Mumy said, "I don't know what happened. All I know is that we were all told we're coming back. Then, you know we got a call that we weren't." ...Harris reprised his role as Dr. Smith in the one-hour TV special Lost in Space Forever in 1998. However, unlike his costars in the original series (June Lockhart, Mark Goddard, Marta Kristen and Angela Cartwright) he refused to make a cameo appearance in the motion picture version of Lost in Space earlier that year. He announced, "I've never played a bit part in my life and I'm not going to start now!" (Bill Mumy also did not appear in the feature film.) Gary Oldman played the part of Dr. Smith in the film, but as a more genuinely menacing and less likeable character than Harris' on TV. An episode of The Simpsons has a cameo of "Dr. Smith" along with The Robot; multiple episodes of Freakazoid had a character of a cowardly "Professor Jones"; in both "Professor Jones" utters his catchphrase "Oh, the pain!" In case there was any question about the parody, numerous characters would ask him, "Weren't you on a TV show with a robot?" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_Harris

Horribly unfunny. One of the central reasons we need Loretta Lynch now.

Herewith. Umbrageous 1. Totally awesome. 2. Shady, super sketch. 3. Legit. 4. Trendy, but pretentious. 1. Dude, that movie last night was so umbrageous. 2. Don't go to the corner store, it's pretty umbrageous. 3. You wrestled a lion? That's umbrageous! 4. She always looks great, but I hear she's an umbrageous bitch. http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Umbrageous

lookin is way ahead of you in cutting me down to size, not to add subtler & more sly, just by his choice of Goldsmith. ...The combination of his literary work and his dissolute lifestyle led Horace Walpole to give him the epithet 'inspired idiot.' http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Goldsmith

http://billmoyers.com/2015/03/25/new-american-order/

Inside Obama's drone panopticon: a secret machine with no accountability An apparatus of official secrecy, built over decades and zealously enforced by Obama, prevents meaningful open scrutiny of 'signature strikes' http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/apr/25/us-drone-program-secrecy-scrutiny-signature-strikes

Aborscht

What Did Qaddafi’s Death Smell Like? By Nicola Twilley, The New Yorker One of the installations at this year’s Art and Olfaction Awards consisted of four mortuary coolers, inside which visitors could smell the last four minutes of a famous person’s life. Last Friday, at the second annual Art and Olfaction Awards, in Los Angeles, four of the evening’s five Golden Pears went to traditional fragrances. Vegetal aromas fared particularly well. Black Pepper & Sandalwood (“a veil of Oriental spices”), Eau de Céleri (“a fresh celery blast”), and Woodcut (“an archetypal tale of man’s rape of the earth”) each claimed a trophy. Skive, an “animalistic” unisex homage to the process of thinning the backside of a piece of leather with a knife, took a fourth. The real excitement, however, lay in the Sadakichi Award for Experimental Use of Scent, which was new to the event this year. “It’s named in honor of a miserable failure,” Saskia Wilson-Brown, the founder of the Institute for Art and Olfaction, told me. That failure was the German-Japanese poet and critic Carl Sadakichi Hartmann, who staged the world’s first scent concert, in 1902. Using the recently invented electric fan, Hartmann planned to take his New York audience on an imaginary journey to Japan. The performance was supposed to last sixteen minutes; the audience booed him offstage after four. “He looked weird and he was effete and a philosopher,” Wilson-Brown said. “Poor guy—he kind of sashayed out in a kimono and the audience was just like, ‘What the hell is this?’ ” An initial pool of fifty Sadakichi submissions was whittled down to five. Perhaps because of the particular technical expertise that is required in blending and delivering odor, only two of the finalists worked alone. The centerpiece of the Australian artist Paul Schütze’s exhibition, “In Libro de Tenebris,” was a scented book with ink-blackened pages. It took Schütze a year of experimentation to develop a formula that captured his intentions—both practically, since the perfume had to disperse from room-temperature paper rather than a warm body, and also conceptually. The result, a smoky mix of leather, old books, and exotic spices, has proved unexpectedly covetable. Schütze is now diversifying into perfumery, and will be launching a suite of three scents in September. The other lone-wolf finalist, Dawn Spencer Hurwitz, was inspired by an exhibition at the Denver Art Museum to put smells to Matisse’s colors. The team entries included “Crime and Punishment,” a smell-accented theatrical performance by the gallerists at the Soap Factory, in Minneapolis (I wrote about their haunted-house smellscape last Halloween), and “Catalin,” which is intended to capture the aroma of man-made ecological doom. (The latter installation, which was named after a toxic early form of plastic, includes seven odors, all made with water from icebergs, ranging from “watery sparkliness” to “formless wet muck.”) The fifth and final entry, “Famous Deaths,” by a team from the Netherlands, consisted of four mortuary coolers, inside which visitors could smell and hear the last four minutes of a celebrity’s life. The anatomical peculiarities of olfaction made the Sadakichi category particularly difficult to referee. “A lot of us went back twice,” Bettina Hubby, one of the five judges, told me. “I certainly did.” Unlike vision, hearing, and touch, smell is not directly connected to the language centers of the brain; rather, it feeds into the amygdala and the hippocampus, which modulate emotion and memory. This explains why it often feels impossible to describe scents except as good or bad or like something else. Wilson-Brown provided a handful of evaluation criteria, focussed on how well the scent was integrated into and contributed to the success of the larger installation. (Unlike their counterparts in the perfume categories, the Sadakichi judges did not sniff blind.) Still, even for curators and artists who had worked extensively with smell before, the scoring process was a challenge. On the other hand, the influence of smell over emotion is precisely what makes it an exciting artistic medium. “With scent, you can create a really immediate, really visceral response,” Allison Agsten, the curator of public engagement at the Hammer Museum, in Los Angeles, and a Sadakichi judge, told me. This was certainly true of “Famous Deaths,” which ended up winning the final Golden Pear. The team deliberately chose deaths that were either visually familiar or easy to picture—Lady Di’s car crash, Whitney Houston’s overdose, Muammar Qaddafi’s beating, J.F.K.’s assassination. “Everybody has seen the Zapruder film,” Marcel van Brakel, one of the installation’s creators, told me. “But what we find interesting is what happens if you translate it in this way—does the perspective change? Are you able to get closer?” Frederik Duerinck, lead designer on the project, described the narrative scent arc inside the Qaddafi cooler. “You would smell the interior of his luxurious car when he was fleeing from Tripoli. You would smell the explosion, the moment he came under attack. You would smell the sewer pipe he was hiding in, and atmospheric smells like goat poo and desert dust.” Finally, just as the rebel mob closed in, you would smell adrenaline-filled sweat and urine. The team’s setup—corpse-size stainless-steel drawers, augmented with valves, speakers, and a tank of pressurized air—is, in a way, the anti-Warhol, an attempt to grab the benumbed viewing public by its only remaining sensitive part: the nose. Wander Eikelboom, another of the project’s creators, said that his team was prepared for their experiment to go awry. Visitors are equipped with a panic button before being slid into the coolers, which cannot be opened from the inside. “The button has been used much less often than we anticipated,” he said. http://www.newyorker.com/tech/elements/art-and-olfaction-awards-what-did-qaddafi-death-smell-like?intcid=mod-yml

My other hat was at the cleaners.

On the contrary! Amazing how many beauties slinking around the City are available for way below what would be their 'professional' market value. ...Just call me Hetty Green.