> Reflecting on his bicoastal life in a 1981 interview for Newsday, he said he planned to keep his Massachusetts home “until my brain turns completely to Jell-O, at which time I will of course move to California full time.”
To think he is only a couple years younger than Mel Brooks.
> Lehrer once stated that he invented the Jello shot during this time, as a means of circumventing the base's ban on alcoholic beverages.[18]
18. Boulware, Jack (April 19, 2000). "That Was the Wit That Was". SF Weekly. Archived from the original on November 28, 2018. Retrieved November 27, 2018.
https://web.archive.org/web/20181128164739/https://archives....
Full text at https://web.archive.org/web/20211025111743/https://archives.... for the time being. Save your copy while the Archive still exists!
Truly a gift of a person, we were fortunate to have him for nearly a century.
I almost ended up TA'ing his class the next year but I had to focus on my undergraduate thesis instead. I would have loved to get to know him better, as his sense of humor was incredible.
I also had Ralph Abraham- a chaos theory guy and psychonaut who taught hist class (Nature of Math) in a natural amphitheater- at points, I could almost picture him wearing a toga, lecturing us on greek math.
Stallman says in https://stallman.org/articles/on-hacking.html:
> Playfully doing something difficult, whether useful or not, that is hacking. (...) It is hard to write a simple definition of something as varied as hacking, but I think what these activities have in common is playfulness, cleverness, and exploration. Thus, hacking means exploring the limits of what is possible, in a spirit of playful cleverness. Activities that display playful cleverness have "hack value".
However:
> The concept of hacking excludes wit and art as such. The people who began to speak of their activities as "hacking" were familiar with wit and art, and with the names of the various fields of those; they were also doing something else, something different, for which they came up with the name "hacking". Thus, composing a funny joke or a beautiful piece of music may well involve playful cleverness, but a joke as such and a piece of music as such are not hacks, however funny or beautiful they may be. However, if the piece is a palindrome, we can say it is a hack as well as music; if the piece is vacuous, we can say it is a hack on music.
(So I think The Elements qualifies, if barely.)
And with respect to
> Hackers typically had little respect for the silly rules that administrators like to impose, so they looked for ways around.
perhaps we should mention mention the origin story of the Jell-O shot from https://web.archive.org/web/20211025111743/https://archives....:
> A rumor has circulated for years that in the 1950s, Lehrer invented the Jell-O shot, a cup of flavored gelatin infused with booze, which has now become a frat-house favorite. He throws his head back and laughs.
> "That's amazing how that got around! What happened was, I was in the Army for two years, and we were having a Christmas party on the naval base where I was working in Washington, D.C. The rules said no alcoholic beverages were allowed. And we wanted to have a little party, so this friend and I spent an evening experimenting with Jell-O. It wasn't a beverage," he says with a shrug.
> "And we finally decided that orange Jell-O and vodka was the best. We tried gin and vodka and various flavors and stuff -- of course you can't sample too much. So we went over to her apartment and we made all these little cups and we thought I would bring them in, hoping that the Marine guard would say, 'OK, what's in there?' And we'd say, 'Jell-O.' and then he'd say, 'Oh, OK.' But no, he didn't even ask. So it worked. I recommend it. Orange Jell-O."
So, yeah. Definitely a hacker.
Seeing the New York Times publish wrong out-of-date information has been funny since Judith Miller.
I, Tom Lehrer, individually and as trustee of the Tom Lehrer Trust 2007, hereby grant the following permissions: All copyrights to lyrics or music written or composed by me have been permanently and irrevocably relinquished, and therefore such songs are now in the public domain. All of my songs that have never been copyrighted, having been available for free for so long, are now also in the public domain. In other words, I have abandoned, surrendered and disclaimed all right, title and interest in and to my work and have injected any and all copyrights into the public domain. The permission granted includes all lyrics which I have written to music by others, although the music to such parodies, if copyrighted by their composers, are of course not included without permission of their copyright owners. The translated songs on this website may be found on YouTube in their original languages. Performing and recording rights to all of my songs are included in this permission. Translation rights are also included. In particular, permission is hereby granted to anyone to set any of these lyrics to their own music, or to set any of this music to their own lyrics, and to publish or perform their parodies or distortions of these songs without payment or fear of legal action. Some recording, movie, and television rights to songs written by me are merely licensed non-exclusively by me to recording, movie, or TV companies. All such rights are now released herewith and therefore do not require any permission from me or from Maelstrom Music, which is merely me in another hat, nor from the recording, movie, or TV companies involved. In short, I no longer retain any rights to any of my songs. So help yourselves, and don’t send me any money. NOTICE: THIS WEBSITE WILL BE SHUT DOWN AT SOME DATE IN THE NOT TOO DISTANT FUTURE, SO IF YOU WANT TO DOWNLOAD ANYTHING, DON’T WAIT TOO LONG. Tom Lehrer November 26, 2022
You can help out by hosting a copy somewhere!
It’s sad that these things will eventually be lost to centralization and digital aging. Make physical copies as well. How long does the USB standard last?
Think about the music that has been lost to time/death/natural disaster/RIAA
If not, do we know which subset of his work is free?
"Diseases of the rich" has always seemed like a useful metaphor for one way to decide on what product you are going to build. Does it heal a "disease" of the "rich"?
I'd only heard of him from a song of his, "Poisoning pigeons in the park", that has been available on DECtalk since way back.
Searching for this, I just found another of his, "I got it from Agnes", that has also been adapted for DECtalk. Similar dark humor!
https://chordify.net/chords/i-got-it-from-agnes-by-tom-lehre...
Godspeed, Tom. This has been a rough week - three of the heroes of my formative years have checked out of existence - Lehrer, Ozzy and author Ingvar Ambjørnsen. Sigh. Who's next?
"Tom Lehrer releases song lyrics to public domain" (2020), 130 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24833683
"Tom Lehrer at 90: a life of scientific satire" (2018), 80 comments, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16774608
Originally I was going to use one of his albums but I found that his humor still hits hard after all these years, to the extent that I thought the songs would detract from my project. In the end I just used my three favorite song: The Elements, We Will All Go Together When We Go, and the absolutely brutal takedown of Werher Von Braun.
GEO: As a mathematician did you ever make any brilliant discoveries?
TOM LEHRER: Oh,nonono. I have no desire to extend the frontier of human knowledge; retract them, if anything. I like to teach it and I like to think about it, but that's about it.
detaro•2h ago