9/28/2005 12:15:00 PM|||The Zen Master|||I was surprised to read in the Times last night that Don Adams, the actor who so memorably played the bumbling secret agent Maxwell Smart on the classic TV show, "Get Smart," has died. Mostly, I was surprised to find out that he wasn't already dead--until I read his obituary, I would have assumed he died long ago. I mean, I watched that show relentlessly in reruns when I was only five or six, and it seemed even then like it belonged to such a distant past that he couldn't possibly still be around.

There was one bright spot in the standard recap of his life, however: apparently he starred on TV not only as my favorite character, Smart, who communicated via shoe phone and crushed hard on the beautiful Agent 99, but also as another loveable but incompetent crime-fighting, technology-embracing type--doo doo doo dah doo--Inspector Gadget! It makes perfect sense, I'm just sorry I didn't realize that when I was a kid. At the time, I guess I was too preoccupied with the details of all those intricate plots, but I would have loved to know that these two foolhardy lawmen were one and the same.|||112788142258972949|||Even being smart won't keep you alive forever