Tony Hayward finally got his wish, he got his life back. The former CEO of BP announced his resignation yesterday. To honor the occasion, here’s a look back at some of his most memorable quotes…

June 1, 2010

There’s no one who wants this thing over more than I do, I’d like my life back.

May 30, 2010

The oil is on the surface, there aren’t any plumes.

May 18, 2010

I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.

May 14, 2010

The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume.

January 13, 2007

…[L]eaders must make the safety of all who work for them their top priority. My enduring priorities are, firstly, continued improvement in the safety of our operations all around the world.

July 16 2010

Responses to questions from the House Energy and Commerce Committee:

• I haven’t drawn a conclusion… it’s too early to reach conclusions.
• I had no prior knowledge.
• I’m not a cement engineer, I’m afraid.
• I wasn’t part of the decision-making process…
• I wasn’t involved in any of the decision making…
• I simply was not involved in the decision-making process.
• I was not part of that decision-making process…

April 29, 2010

To fellow executives: “What the hell did we do to deserve this?”

May 18, 2010

In response to the question Can you sleep at night?: “Yeah, of course I am.”

June 4, 2010

On his negative press : “I’m a Brit, I can take it.”

May 31, 2010

I don’t feel my job is on the line, but of course that might change.

I feel very small and freakishly large at once. Critical and insignificant. At the very center of things and at the farthest edge.

The cabdriver is a handsome, dark-eyed Hispanic guy, and I immediately strike up a conversation. How I get to the moment when I ask him if he parties, I don’t know, but I get there. He says yes and I say, With what? And he answers, Beer and pot. He asks me with what and I come right out and tell him. He pauses and asks if I have any on me and I say yes. He asks if he can see it and, without hesitating, I reach into my pocket, pull out a rock, and hold it up between the two front seats. He slows the cab, eyes the drug seriously, but says nothing. When I pull it back, he laughs and tells me he’s never seen it before, and I ask if he wants to hang out. He tells me sure, later, after his shift, and gives me his cell phone number.

A kind of peace breaks out behind his eyes. It spreads down from his temples into his chest, to his hands and everywhere. It storms through him—kinetic, sexual, euphoric—like a magnificent hurricane raging at the speed of light.

There will never be a time when I smoke crack that doesn’t end up with me on my knees, sometimes for hours—hunched over carpets, rugs, linoleum, tile—sifting desperately through lint and cat litter and dirt, fingering the floor, like a madman, for crumbs.

I am nowhere and belong nowhere. I can now see how it all happens—the gradual slide down, the arrival at each new unthinkable place—the crack den, the rehab, the jail, the street, the homeless shelter, a quick shock and then a new reality that one adjusts to. Am I now in the purgatory between citizen and nobody, between fine young man and bum?

I still know this will end badly, that it always does, and that I’m loading a gun and pointing it at my temple. But that voice, instead of being a deterrent, becomes part of the persuasion. On the other side of this bag is either a groggy day and a no-harm-done return to life or some kind of apocalypse. Lose nothing or lose everything. And losing everything sounds like a relief.

I can’t stop my body from rocking. I watch Mark get up to begin sweeping the glass and notice how his body rocks with mine, how our sway is synchronized—like two underwater weeds bending to the same current—and am both horrified and comforted to recognize how alike we are in the desolate crash that follows when the drugs run out.

I am only sticks and spasms. Money gone. Love gone. Career gone. Reputation gone. Friends gone. Hope gone. Compassion gone. Usefulness gone. Second chances gone. And if there had been any hesitation about dying, that’s gone now, too. I take a huge hit.

I remember the last lines of a book I believed I understood. When it feels like the end of the world, it never is. I knead these words like a rosary and write them in letters and speak them over the phone and into the wind in that field. I lose faith in them, but pray they are true. They are.

The New York Times and other major news networks, state BP and the Federal Government are once again at odds. BP claims that everything has been going great since they dropped a containment cap on the gushing well head on Thursday.

New testing, however, has found suspicious leaks spewing hydrocarbon and methane from the seabed around the well. These developments have been subject to rigorous “monitoring” and as of today the leak remains closed.

National Incident Commander Thad Allen has done what every responsible bureaucrat would do in this situation, responding with a strongly worded letter to BP: “I direct you to provide me a written procedure for opening the choke valve as quickly as possible without damaging the well should hydrocarbon seepage near the well head be confirmed.”

The plan moving forward seems grim: “opening the well and letting crude flow freely into the water while BP works to funnel oil to ships on the surface.” BP is sticking to claims that the well will not need to be reopened, and the containment cap can stay in place until relief wells are completed within the next several weeks.

Another dark twist, if the well isn’t reopened we may never have an accurate quote of how much oil was flowing from the leak per day. This means that BP may potentially avoid millions, even billions, of dollars in fines.

The pattern is a familiar one, oil spews from the gulf and bullshit spews from BP.

Thank You Perez Hilton!

Thank You Kevin!

Thank You The Ellen Show!

Thanks T (From Yahoo Answers)!

Thank You Kevin Rose!

Thank You Alyssa Milano!

Watch the rest of the videos here.

LeBron James made the “decision.”

James, dressed in a pink and white checkered shirt and Hemmingway beard, towered over grand inquisitor Jim Grey like a lumber jack. The small children in the audience were all silent.

Some have later called this moment the low point of Western Civilization. The stage was set for a public execution.

LeBron James regrets to inform us that yes, he will be playing basketball in Miami next year.

Brought to you by vitamin water.

Dan Gilbert, owner of the Cleveland Cavaliers, was forced to watch the whole mess in real time. He was jilted, sobbing alone all over his fine mahogany desk. To his credit the man handled it like a true professional. He shot himself in the foot and put it on the internet and he wrote it in comic sans.

The letter reads like an impulsive rant from a heart broken lover. It was the only thing absurd enough to make LeBron James look like a winner again. Gilbert is Kramer. An old washed up raving lunatic. Look out Cleveland a storm is coming your way.

James’ shenanigans and the media circus that followed proved in our celebrity obsessed, sports crazed culture a single player can surpass a team, an owner, and a league in terms of sheer popularity. Lebron wants to go party with his Olympic boys. He wants to win a bunch of rings his way.

Unfortunately, we were all witnesses of the tragic comedy of television that was ESPN’s the decision. We are left slightly scarred by images of depressed fans in Cleveland, leaving the bars taking to the lonely depressed Midwestern streets plague by economic depression, smoking cigarettes and burning jerseys. So much intense coverage, marketing, discussion, analysis, advertising, and for what: a crummy cultural hangover.

Next time, LeBron James: just do it.

NASA

So apparently a shit-load of oil has been spilling into the Gulf of Mexico (courtesy of BP). Now NASA reports the oil will soon colonize the Louisiana wetlands:

The left-hand image contains data from MISR’s vertical-viewing camera. It is shown in near-true color, except that data from the instrument’s near-infrared band, where vegetation appears bright, have been blended with the instrument’s green band to enhance the appearance of vegetation.

The Mississippi River delta is located below the image center. The slick is seen approaching the delta from the lower right, and filaments of oil are also apparent farther to the north (towards the top). The oil is made visible by sun reflecting off the sea surface at the same angle from which the instrument is viewing it, a phenomenon known as sunglint. Oil makes the surface look brighter under these viewing conditions than it would if no oil were present. However, other factors can also cause enhanced glint, such as reduced surface wind speed. To separate glint patterns due to oil from these other factors, additional information from MISR’s cameras is used in the right-hand image.

What shall we do now? What shall we do? What shall we ever do? Feel like BP should turn the Gulf and the Mississippi River into “organic gas stations.” Just let people pull up to the beach and riverfront with their cars, go-carts, what have you – and let em’ fill up! They could spin it as a green initiative, an innovative undertaking. Shantih shantih shantih!

Phillip Morris graced San Francisco with a new piece of colossal art (aka: a billboard) on Howard at Van Ness. The minimalist ad, created in conjunction with the West Hollywood, CA based creative agency the Billboard Liberation Front, simply states “My Life, My Death, My Choice.” According to Phillip Morris’ chief marketing officer,

This bold message of independence and demanding life and death on your terms fits with the current zeitgeist of anti-establishmentarianism and post-post-modern rage at the repressive state demanding a healthier you and your environment.

Word. Never knew the old geezers at Phillip Morris understood me so well.

Adrien Field

By Noah Kalina

Adrien Field was born in Moorestown, NJ and moved to New York City in the mid-2000s to attend Gallatin School of Individualized Study at NYU where he contemplated concentrating in “Social Climbing” before he dropped out. He runs TheFieldNotes.com, a popular fashion and life style blog, and is a contributor to the print and web edition of Vibe Magazine, the urban quarterly founded by Quincy Jones.

Why did you drop out of NYU?
I couldn’t wake up in time for classes. More so, I was bored and I didn’t like being with other students. I didn’t feel like one of them. But I do like to learn when it’s for the sake of gaining useful knowledge. I couldn’t give a brown lump of poo about Macroeconomics, but certain things fascinate me like ancient Roman history. I also love languages. I speak French fluently and studied Italian at NYU.

What are your favorite items in your closet?
I get obsessed with certain pieces for a few weeks at a time. Right now I love these white and gray Cheap Monday leggings I bought from Inven.tory that had a red carpet moment so they can’t be worn out to an event again. I have a blazer that I studded myself, which I wore more than any other item in my closet all season.

Your three favorite places to shop in NYC:

1. Tokio 7
2. M&J Trimmings
3. Inven.tory

What makes a good party?
Exclusivity, passed champagne and hors d’oeuvres. Good publicists.

What the hell happened to your novel?
That’s a whole drama but I think it’ll be resolved if a certain project I’m waiting on goes through. I had finished the second and final draft last summer and had an agent but when he left his agency, there was no one there that felt strongly enough about the novel to represent it. It’s incredibly hard for a first time novelist to get published and I don’t want to go down the self-publishing route. I feel that it’s a quality piece of entertainment that can and will be published traditionally.

Will you share your favorite paragraph from it?

“Nice to meet you,” she said in her breathy voice that seemed to lack clear distinction between words so that they came out in one languorous wave. Just like that, she turned around and disappeared. He always felt chastised by this type of behavior, which was actually the norm among the social set. While it was his natural instinct to want to talk, people at parties generally cut conversations short and limited their interaction with one another to maximize their socializing potential. They key was to make sure as many people as possible saw you at the party, or in this case, in the VIP tent.

He figured that Theresa had been attracted like a moth to the crowding photographers and camera flashbulbs but had been disappointed when she stumbled upon him and two girls she didn’t know. Theresa was something of a new-guard socialite—one without piles of family money but that had cultivated a persona by attending almost every event that had a Patrick photographer and forging connections with other young influential people who could advance her somehow. As it was said about her, she’d attend the opening of an envelope if she was sure there would be a photographer. He almost had to admire that type of fierce dedication.

What are you reading right now?
I have about ten books on my nightstand. I’m trying to plow through Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, but when I’m in the mood for something less bombastic, I’ll reach for Candace Bushnell. I’m rereading One Fifth Avenue because I love her witty style and find myself mimicking it in my own work. My favorite author of all time though is Tom Robbins.

What’s your alcoholic beverage of choice?
Sober is the new drunk, except when it’s not and then it’s strictly champagne.

Are you dating anyone?
I’m going to join a nunnery if I don’t get any action soon.

Finish this sentence, Terry Richardson is…
Overrated and incredibly creepy-looking.

Barack Obama is…
Better than any of the other options.

Roman Polanski is…
Probably a victim of the US legal system and the unthinking public that likes to pillory intellectuals.

Lady Gaga is…
An indefatigable genius.

A guestofaguest.com is…
A pretty accurate social barometer for relevancy within a very select microcosm.

This is a great quote…,
“Humanity has advanced, when it has advanced, not because it has been sober, responsible, and cautious, but because it has been playful, rebellious, and immature.” –Tom Robbins, Still Life With Woodpecker