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Tom Lehrer

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44 pointsjacquesm32 comments

While at UCSC in the early 90s, one morning I fell asleep in the front row of desks in an empty classroom (after a long night of studying).

I was awoken some time later in a quite full of students class room by Tom Lehrer. He stated with a smile that while my snoring had a nice rhythm, it was drowning out his lecture.

I took Tom's Nature of Mathematics course. Lots of fun.

'I know some people feel that marriage as an institution is dying out, but I disagree and the point was driven home to me rather forcefully not long ago by a letter I received which said: "Darling, I love you and I cannot live without you. Marry me, or I will kill myself." Well, I was a little disturbed at that until I took another look at the envelope and saw that it was addressed to occupant.'

I highly recommend this long article about him: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7580638. The story of the master tapes in his basement is striking, but the whole portrait is striking.

Ah, thanks for that! Great article.

I have fond childhood memories of poisoning pigeons in the park

The song I hope?

Some of you may be amused to know that Lehrer's "Fight Fiercely Harvard" [1], written as a parody of his (and my) alma mater's traditional football fight songs, has been enthusiastically and affectionately adopted by Harvard students themselves, and is frequently played at games by the Harvard Band.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=27PSHASlGUU

> Tom Lehrer is a comedian who has found a large group of fans all over the world, but embarrassingly few good webpages. This page is supposed to be pretty good. I even manage to update it from time to time. Thanks to everybody who's been sending me e-mail. I really appreciate it!

nice! i hadn't realised it, but he's absolutely right; given how popular he is among geeks, lehrer has startlingly little about him on the web.

He pretty much dropped out of the public eye so long ago--and did it absolutely. In the late 70s, we tried a variety of good personal connections to persuade him to perform at MIT and the answer was a resounding no. Add to that a relatively small body of songs and there's just not a whole lot more to say past a certain point.

Edit: That said, there have been a couple of in-depth articles relatively recently. I suspect the issue is that they needed a lot of research that went beyond easy-to-find sources.

I got the crap kicked out of me in music class when I was 12 for playing "National Brotherhood Week" as an example of a song I liked...

I'd have happily stood with you, that's my favorite by far. Be grateful that it doesn't last all yeaaaarrrr...

Fantastic song, super sharp and as applicable as the day it was written.

Whatever happened to National Brotherhood Week as an institution?

It seems like the sort of thing which the US could do with more of, given how much race relations have deteriorated since the 60s.

That's a problem that is not just limited to the US.

Race relations have deteriorated since the 1960s? I agree that they aren't superb now. But watch a little footage of what happened to protests back then, or the reaction to Freedom Summer.

Members of the corps

All hate the thought of war

They'd rather kill them off by peaceful means

Stop calling it aggression

We hate that expression

We only want the world to know

That we support the status quo

They love us everywhere we go

So when in doubt, send the Marines

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHhZF66C1Dc

An ever timely classic

The day after the US invaded Panama, some NPR affiliate led off a piece with a snippet of the piano work from that. I wonder how much of the audience got that.

When I was 15 or so, a teacher asked us to bring in a song making a political statement. In class we traded and discussed them.

The kid I traded with had brought in NWA's "Fuck Tha Police." I'd brought in Tom Lehrer's "Pollution," which I thought was funny and knew by heart already; my parents had a moderately diverse collection of vinyl records that I'd listened to for years, playing them low and just sitting against the speaker.

http://www.casualhacker.net /tom.lehrer/the_year.html#pollution

It was an eye-opening moment -- I was a fairly solitary kid who hadn't realized how out of step I was from most of my peers.

When I was at school we were on occasion obliged to perform musical numbers for parents and visiting dignitaries. And thus I discovered Tom Lehrer: for one year, one of my friends was drafted in to such a performance, that time of `Masochism Tango'.

Heaven only knows what the parents thought about that! - since my friend couldn't sing for shit.

I was remembering Tom Lehrer fondly the other day after seeing BAM's new production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which has a hilarious fight song from "Old Ivy", sending me back to TL's "Fight Fiercely Harvard", the only Harvard 'fight song' I ever learned.

http://www.casualhacker.net/tom.lehrer/revisited.html#harvar...

Tom featured heavily in Dr. Demento's radio show, which is how I learned of him. My dear aunt just emailed me about the glowing blue orc sword in a British museum and we both agreed the only good orc is a dead orc.

We finished the email thread with a lyric repurposed from Tom's classic Poisoning Pigeons in the Park:

    We'll murder them all amid laughter and merriment,
    Except for the few we take home to experiment.

He and his music are timeless.

My favorite songs of his, in no particular order :

Who's Next?, National Brotherhood Week, The Elements, The Vatican Rag, Pollution, Send the Marines, Wernher von Braun, Be Prepared

One song appears to be missing: "Selling Out", which is on the first CD of the 3-CD set "The Remains of Tom Lehrer".

"It is a sobering thought, for example, that when Mozart was my age, he had been dead for two years."

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer

Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter actor) did Lehrer's periodic table song not too long ago. Earnest and cute!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs

My son was looking for something he could play to accompany a report in 8th grade chemistry class, and after he failed to download more than the intro to some song or another, I suggested that song. He reported that it was a hit.

8th grade? That's an impressive bit of memorization. Kudos.

Tom Lehrer sang a new song a few years ago: Sociology

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB97Qe2D4V0

Apparently that was filmed in the '90s, at MIT.

Odd fact about Tom Lehrer, he was a mathematical prodigy who got into Harvard at 15.

All of his stuff is on Spotify, in case you're not into MIDIs.

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