OT- Tom Lehrer

[Axxon]

I posted on another post how much I admire the works of Tom Lehrer and the memories sent me on a google tour of nostalgia. I'm not near my stereo so an audio nostalgia tour is right out.

I found a site that has lyrics of his works. He is one amazing social satirist among other things so I offer the site for your perusal.

It even includes midis but these suck if you've never heard the songs. Anyway, the first part of the first midi IS national brotherhood week but as a true fan I recognize every bar of that medley.

Tom Lehrer Lyrics

Enjoy.

Here's his christmas song:

3. A Christmas Carol

One very familiar type of song is the Christmas carol, although it is perhaps a bit out of season at this time. However, I am informed by my disk jockey friends, of whom I have none, that in order to get a song popular by Christmas time you have to start plugging it well in advance, so here it goes. It's always seemed to me, after all, that Christmas, with its spirit of giving, offers us all a wonderful opportunity each year to reflect on what we all most sincerely and deeply believe in - I refer, of course, to money. And yet, none of the Christmas carols that you hear on the radio, or in the street, even attempts to capture the true spirit of Christmas as we celebrate it in the United States, that is to say the commercial spirit. So I should like to offer the following Christmas carol for next year as being perhaps a bit more appropriate.

Christmas time is here, by golly,
Disapproval would be folly.
Deck the halls with hunks of holly,
Fill the cup and don't say when.

Kill the turkeys, ducks and chickens,
Mix the punch, drag out the Dickens.
Even though the prospect sickens,
Brother, here we go again.

On Christmas Day you can't get sore,
Your fellow man you must adore.
There's time to rob him all the more
The other three hundred and sixty-four.

Relations, sparing no expense, 'll
Send some useless old utensil,
Or a matching pen and pencil.
("Just the thing I need, how nice!")

It doesn't matter how sincere it is,
Nor how heart felt the spirit,
Sentiment will not endear it,
What's important is the price.

Hark, the Herald Tribune sings,
Advertising wondrous things.
God rest ye merry merchants,
May ye make the Yuletide pay.
Angels we have heard on high,
Tell us to go out and buy!

So, let the raucous sleighbells jingle,
Hail our dear old friend Kris Kringle,
Driving his reindeer across the sky.
Don't stand underneath when they fly by.


Actually, I did rather well myself this past Christmas. The nicest present I received was a gift certificate good at any hospital for a lobotomy... rather thoughtful.

[Axxon]

Dola, since this is a football board I must quote the best fight song ever, Fight Fiercely Harvard.

Here goes:

5. Fight Fiercely, Harvard

Now we come to that peculiar bit of Americana known as the football fight song. I was reminded not too long ago, upon returning from my lesson with the Scrabble pro at the Harvard club in Boston, of the days of my undergraduacy long ago when there used to be these very long Saturday afternoons in the fall with nothing to do - the library was closed - just waiting around for the cocktail parties to begin. And on occasions like that, some of us used to wander over to the...I believe it was called the stadium, to see if anything might be going on over there. And one did come to realize that the football fight songs that one hears in comparable stadia have a tendency to be somewhat uncouth, and even violent, and that it would be refreshing, to say the least, to find one that was a bit more genteel. And here it is, dedicated to my own alma mater, and called Fight Fiercely, Harvard.

Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight!
Demonstrate to them our skill.
Albeit they possess the might,
Nonetheless we have the will.

How we will celebrate our victory,
We shall invite the whole team up for tea. (How jolly!)
Hurl that spheroid down the field,
And fight, fight, fight!

Fight fiercely, Harvard, fight, fight, fight!
Impress them with our prowess, do!
Oh, fellas, do not let the crimson down,
Be of stout heart and true.

Come on, chaps, fight for Harvard's glorious name!
Won't it be peachy if we win the game? (Oh, goody!)
Let's try not to injure them,
But fight, fight, fight!
Let's not be rough, though!
Fight, fight, fight!
And do fight fiercely!
Fight, fight, fight!

[Axxon]

What the hell, I'm feeling good. How about some pron???

5. Smut

I do have a cause, though, it is obscenity. I'm for it! (laughter) Thank you. Unfortunately, the civil liberties types who are fighting this issue have to fight it, owing to the nature of the laws, as a matter of freedom of speech and stifling of free expression and so on. But we know what's really involved: dirty books are fun! That's all there is to it. But you can't get up in a court and say that, I suppose. It's simply a matter of freedom of pleasure, a right which is not guaranteed by the Constitution, unfortunately. Anyway, since people seem to be marching for their causes these days, I have here a march for mine. It's called:

Smut!
Give me smut and nothing but!
A dirty novel I can't shut
If it's uncut
and unsubt-le.

I've never quibbled
If it was ribald.
I would devour
Where others merely nibbled.
As the judge remarked the day that he acquitted my Aunt Hortense,
"To be smut
It must be ut-
Terly without redeeming social importance."

Por-
Nographic pictures I adore.
Indecent magazines galore,
I like them more
If they're hard core.

Bring on the obscene movies, murals, postcards, neckties, samplers, stained
glass windows, tattoos, anything!
More, more, I'm still not satisfied!

Stories of tortures
Used by debauchers
Lurid, licentious and vile,
Make me smile.
Novels that pander
To my taste for candor
Give me a pleasure sublime.
Let's face it I love slime!

Old books can be indecent books,
Though recent books are bolder.
For filth, I'm glad to say,
Is in the mind of the beholder.
When correctly viewed,
Everything is lewd.
I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz - there's a dirty old man!

I thrill
To any book like Fanny Hill,
And I suppose I always will
If it is swill
And really fil-thy.

Who needs a hobby like tennis or philately?
I've got a hobby: rereading Lady Chatterley.
But now they're trying to take it all away from us unless
We take a stand, and hand in hand we fight for freedom of the press.
In other words: Smut! I love it.
Ah, the adventures of a slut.
Oh, I'm a market they can't glut.
I don't know what
Compares with smut.
Hip, hip, hooray!
Let's hear it for the Supreme Court!
Don't let them take it away!

[Axxon]

Lastly, and I will stop here. This song does not translate well on paper but it is his most impressive. One can't hear it and not go oh wow. It's not about genius or clever but it's simply oh wow, someone did this.

He did. Imagine hearing this rapid fire staccato as it was presented.

4. The Elements

Now, if I may digress momentarily from the mainstream of this evening's symposium, I'd like to sing a song which is completely pointless, but is something which I picked up during my career as a scientist. This may prove useful to some of you some day, perhaps, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances. It's simply the names of the chemical elements set to a possibly recognizable tune*.

There's antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium, (gasp)
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.


Isn't that interesting?
I knew you would.
I hope you're all taking notes, because there's going to be a short quiz next period...

There's holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium, (gasp)
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.

There's sulfur, californium and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin and sodium.

These are the only ones of which the news has come to Hahvard,
And there may be many others but they haven't been discahvered.


And now, may I have the next slide please? ...carried away there.

[Axxon]

OK, I lied. For the scholars among us let me introduce Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky to you.

Hey, it's only one thread.

6. Lobachevsky

For many years now, Mr. Danny Kaye, who has been my particular idol since childbirth, has been doing a routine about the great Russian director Stanislavsky and the secret of success in the acting profession. And I thought it would be interesting to st... to adapt this idea to the field of mathematics. I always like to make explicit the fact that before I went off not too long ago to fight in the trenches, I was a mathematician by profession. I don't like people to get the idea that I have to do this for a living. I mean, it isn't as though I had to do this, you know, I could be making, oh, 3000 dollars a year just teaching.

Be that as it may, some of you may have had occasion to run into mathematicians and to wonder therefore how they got that way, and here, in partial explanation perhaps, is the story of the great Russian mathematician Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky.*

Who made me the genius I am today,
The mathematician that others all quote?
Who's the professor that made me that way,
The greatest that ever got chalk on his coat?

One man deserves the credit,
One man deserves the blame,
and Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name. Oy!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobache...

I am never forget the day I first meet the great Lobachevsky.
In one word he told me secret of success in mathematics: Plagiarize!

Plagiarize,
Let no one else's work evade your eyes,
Remember why the good Lord made your eyes,
So don't shade your eyes,
But plagiarize, plagiarize, plagiarize...
Only be sure always to call it please, "research".

And ever since I meet this man my life is not the same,
And Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name. Oy!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobache...

I am never forget the day I am given first original paper to write. It
was on Analytic and Algebraic Topology of Locally Euclidean Metrization
of Infinitely Differentiable Riemannian Manifold.
Bozhe moi!
This I know from nothing.**
But I think of great Lobachevsky and I get idea - haha!

I have a friend in Minsk,
Who has a friend in Pinsk,
Whose friend in Omsk
Has friend in Tomsk
With friend in Akmolinsk.
His friend in Alexandrovsk
Has friend in Petropavlovsk,
Whose friend somehow
Is solving now
The problem in Dnepropetrovsk.

And when his work is done -
Haha! - begins the fun.
From Dnepropetrovsk
To Petropavlovsk,
By way of Iliysk,
And Novorossiysk,
To Alexandrovsk to Akmolinsk
To Tomsk to Omsk
To Pinsk to Minsk
To me the news will run,
Yes, to me the news will run!

And then I write
By morning, night,
And afternoon,
And pretty soon
My name in Dnepropetrovsk is cursed,
When he finds out I published first!

And who made me a big success
And brought me wealth and fame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name. Oy!
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobache...


I am never forget the day my first book is published.
Every chapter I stole from somewhere else.
Index I copy from old Vladivostok telephone directory.
This book, this book was sensational!***
Pravda - ah, Pravda - Pravda said:
"Jeel beel kara ogoday blyum blocha jeli," ("It stinks").
But Izvestia! Izvestia said:
"Jai, do gudoo sun sai pere shcum," ("It stinks").
Metro-Goldwyn-Moskva bought the movie rights for six million rubles,
Changing title to 'The Eternal Triangle',
With Brigitte Bardot playing part of hypotenuse.****


And who deserves the credit?
And who deserves the blame?
Nicolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky is his name.
Oy!

[Axxon]

"you know, I could be making, oh, three thousand dollars just teaching" is one of my favorite lines ever.

[clintl]

I agree with you about Tom Lehrer - definitely one of the greats.

[Axxon]

Thank god I'm not alone on this. Bless you Clintl!

[digamma]

I worked at his class's 50th reunion at Harvard as a shuttle van driver. In talking to many of the reunion goers, the highlight (by far) of that reunion was a concert he gave featuring many of his "hits."

[JPhillips]

I hear he was once big in the animal husbandry business, until he got caught at it.

I'm also a big fan of his uncle, Dr. Charles Gall, inventor of the gall bladder.