Category Archives: Completely Different

Find the Invisible Cow.

I got sent there via Wonkblog which said “Oh my god this is so great”.

I could only stand to play once.

Might have seemed more attractive if I were grading, I suppose.

Some kind soul has put on YouTube an entire 1967 performance by Tom Lehrer — in Copenhagen of all places. (Is rhythmic clapping still a custom there today?)

Enjoy it now before someone takes it down.

Incidentally, it seems Tom Lehrer is still around:

Most people assume that Tom Lehrer is dead, just as he has always wished us to think. Lehrer is by no means dead, but he turns 85 this month. After he retired at the peak of his fame in 1960, he gleefully collected all newspaper references to “the late Tom Lehrer,” and a CD box set of his collected works that came out in 2000 was called “The Remains of Tom Lehrer.”

…

LEHRER HAS REMAINED, if not a recluse, an intensely private man. Nobody knows much about him except his songs, exactly as he likes it. He grew up in Manhattan, the privileged Jewish son of a necktie manufacturer, attended a prep school and then Harvard, where he spent seven years pursuing a doctorate he never got (“I wanted to be a graduate student forever”). After he stopped performing, he produced a handful of songs for “The Electric Company” (“Silent E” is still fondly remembered by yuppies) and this or that riff, like his Jewish Yuletide carol, “Hanukkah in Santa Monica.”

Those songs never get old for me. But I had to explain to one my kids once, many years ago, who Brezhnev was.

This is funny. What if Wolverine were a film by (the classic) Woody Allen: