First we got the bomb, and that was good…

While catching up on the blog entries from when I was gone, I ran across Julia‘s second-hand link to a flash version of Tom Lehrer’s The Elements song and I thought I’d pass it along as well.

I discovered Tom Lehrer when I was nine years old and in the fourth grade, which sound incredibly strange to me now but didn’t seem so strange at the time. My best friend at the time, Tom Kraines, got the LP of That Was the Year That Was from God knows where and he made a tape of it for me. I would have to say that 90% of the humor of the album went completely over my head (I had no idea was genuflecting was, to say the least, or nearly any of the political references) but we thought the songs were hilarious nonetheless. From there, of course, we went on to An Evening Wasted With Tom Lehrer and the rest was history. (The Oedipus Rex song still cracks me the hell up.)

The funny part of it all is that many things that I learned about from Tom Lehrer’s songs made no sense to me until some random point later in my life. The Elements and the last bit of Clementine were just funny bits to me until I discovered Gilbert and Sullivan in high school. And I was totally shocked when I got to Yale and first heard my new alma mater (Bright College Years) and The Whiffenpoof Song, realizing finally what the old Harvard man was lampooning in Bright College Days. (Now I know where the “tables down at Mory’s” are…)

Anyway, it’s one of those cherish bits of flotsam and jetsam from childhood, so…

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