![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Periodicity
Jun. 24th, 2005 02:46 amA while back All Things Considered had me really laughing.
See, they ran a story about The Periodic Table of Haiku. And that was cool. It's a cute concept -- each element of the periodic table gets its own descriptive haiku (some strictly so, some more loosely).
But what some sneaky producer did next was the really funny part. Because, as a piece of incidental music to separate the Haiku piece from the next one (or "bumper", in radio jargon), they used Gilbert & Sullivan's "Model of a Modern Major General".
As Denis Leary says, "Some of you are laughing, and some need an explanation..."
In a very generational kind of thing, there's a musical parodist by the name of Tom Lehrer. He was a math professor (now retired), but he also did topical stuff. This was in the 1960s -- he hasn't made any new recordings in decades.
One of things he did was, he sang through the list of elements to the tune of, you guessed it, "Modern Major General". (Though not in order.)
Fortunately, due to The Magic of the Web (TM), I can point you to this: An animation of Lehrer's ditty (done using Macromedia Flash -- go here if you don't already have the plug-in).
You can thank me later.
See, they ran a story about The Periodic Table of Haiku. And that was cool. It's a cute concept -- each element of the periodic table gets its own descriptive haiku (some strictly so, some more loosely).
But what some sneaky producer did next was the really funny part. Because, as a piece of incidental music to separate the Haiku piece from the next one (or "bumper", in radio jargon), they used Gilbert & Sullivan's "Model of a Modern Major General".
As Denis Leary says, "Some of you are laughing, and some need an explanation..."
In a very generational kind of thing, there's a musical parodist by the name of Tom Lehrer. He was a math professor (now retired), but he also did topical stuff. This was in the 1960s -- he hasn't made any new recordings in decades.
One of things he did was, he sang through the list of elements to the tune of, you guessed it, "Modern Major General". (Though not in order.)
Fortunately, due to The Magic of the Web (TM), I can point you to this: An animation of Lehrer's ditty (done using Macromedia Flash -- go here if you don't already have the plug-in).
You can thank me later.
