Friday, December 13, 2013

There's Antimony, Arsenic, Aluminum, Selenium...

In Alyssa’s science lesson today, they learned all about the Periodic Table. Full marks to the teacher, because he played them American mathematician-singer-songwriter-satirist Tom Lehrer’s fabulous 'The Elements Song'... which is basically him singing all the names of the elements to the strains of Gilbert & Sullivan, recorded sometime in the 1950s. 
I have it – and many other great songs like 'Poisoning Pigeons in the Park', 'Oedipus Rex' and 'The Masochism Tango' – on an illegally copied cassette, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer. To be honest, I thought he was dead. But no, he’s 85 and still very much alive.
Alyssa then informed me that Daniel Radcliffe is a huge fan (“the cleverest and funniest man of the 20th century”) and together we watched a YouTube snippet of him doing The Elements Song on Graham Norton.  

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