5 funny songs by Tom Lehrer
June 7, 2008 by Michael Nugent
The Vatican Rag by Tom Lehrer.
Tom Lehrer, who is eighty this year, is an American mathematician who wrote and performed musical satire in the 1950s and 1960s. Best known for his darkly comic Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, his political and social satire also included the Vatican Rag, National Brotherhood Week, Who’s Next and We Will All Go Together When We Go.
Lehrer is in my directory of famous atheists. In 1996, he said that, while he was not a spiritual person – “I find enough mystery in mathematics to satisfy my spiritual needs. I think, for example, that pi is mysterious enough (don’t get me started!) without having to worry about God” – he believed that to be an atheist was almost as arrogant as to be a fundamentalist. However, by 2000, he had told Cosmik Debris magazine “I used to think atheists were arrogant, but now I am one and I like it.”
Tom Lehrer on YouTube
Here are four more Tom Lehrer classics from YouTube:
Poisoning Pigeons in the Park by Tom Lehrer
National Brotherhood Week by Tom Lehrer
Who’s Next by Tom Lehrer
We Will All Go Together by Tom Lehrer
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Hi Michael,
None of your videos are working for me from Australia.
“We’re sorry, this video is no longer available” is the message. this often happens when videos are taken down, but this is a fresh post. Maybe youtube have restricted hot linking.
anyway, looking forward to your new direction – once the glitches are worked out.
Zak
Thanks for that, Zak. I’m trying to figure out what the issue is. The videos have not been taken down from YouTube, and they do not have embedding disabled. When they are embedded on my website, I can play them on my computer, and also on another computer that uses a different ISP.
Here’s a blog post by Spamhuntress about this problem, which suggests (a) that it might be a bug caused by the merger of YouTube and Google, (b) that it might happen after a page has been open for a period of time, and (c) that it might be resolvable by reloading the page and/or turning off Google Web Accelerator.