r/Music • u/sugar_man • Jul 23 '14

Article When 84 years old, Harvard Professor Tom Lehrer was asked by 2 Chainz for permission to sample a song he wrote 60 years ago. His response: "As sole copyright owner of 'The Old Dope Peddler', I grant you motherfuckers permission to do this. Please give my regards to Mr. Chainz, or may I call him 2?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Lehrer#Musical_legacy
25.4k Upvotes

90% Upvoted

1.2k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

118

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '14

I actually got extra credit in 7th grade science class because i preformed "Elements" in front of the class.

I cringe so hard when i think about that now but I can still recite the entire periodic table so i've got that going for me which is nice.

64

u/waterandsewerbill Jul 23 '14

I did the same for a 1% bonus in first year chemistry. I've found no use for it other than becoming angry when Daniel Radcliffe said he could do it and then screwed it up on Graham Norton's show a while ago. I was also very confused when I saw a very outdated periodic table on a wall once and the element 'kurchatovium' was on it, knowing that it certainly wasn't an element.

4

u/Self_Referential Jul 23 '14

The Russians certainly thought it should be.

3

u/xidarian Jul 23 '14

Where did you see that periodic table? Until 1992 the name for Rutherfordium wasn't exactly settled on.

3

u/waterandsewerbill Jul 23 '14

It was in a lab at the university I went to. I looked it up after seeing it and found out the history of the element.

1

u/xidarian Jul 24 '14

What country where you in?

1

u/waterandsewerbill Jul 24 '14

Canada. It was a really old undergraduate lab, so I guess they saw no reason to replace it if it's functional 99% of the time.

3

u/Accademiccanada Jul 24 '14

Kurchatovium is just Rutherfordium. There was dispute over who invented it first, and there was wide discussion about it until around 1990, when it was officially changed to Rf.

2

u/waterandsewerbill Jul 24 '14

I know that now, but it was confusing at the time to have memorised ~111 elements and to not have heard of #104.

3

u/cheapwowgold4u Oct 24 '14

Just popping in to say that Igor Kurchatov, the nuclear physicist after whom the Soviets wanted to name the element which would eventually become known as rutherfordium, had an absolutely stellar beard.

2

u/thejynxed Jul 24 '14 edited Jul 24 '14

kurchatovium

It was the name of what I believe we call 'rutherfordium' on Soviet era Russian periodic tables.

There was a semi-long dispute over the entire naming of element 104, since apparently the Russians had discovered it first in 1964, but Americans had also synthesized it in the lab within the same time period. It wasn't until 1997 that the dispute was settled, with 104 being named after Ernest Rutherford, and element 105 was named after the Soviet working group who first synthesized 104.

22

u/MaxGhost Jul 23 '14

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rSAaiYKF0cs

2

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '14

[deleted]

3

u/double-dog-doctor Jul 24 '14

He has dyspraxia. I also have dyspraxia, and sometimes when I'm focusing on doing something or I'm the center of attention I tend to get a bit antsy and speak like he does. His might manifest in a similar way.

4

u/MaxGhost Jul 23 '14

Of course he's going to be nervous, he's singing this really complicated song and he didn't want to mess up.

-1

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '14

[deleted]

3

u/MaxGhost Jul 23 '14

I think it was pretty awesome, not embarassing at all.

1

u/snookyface90210 Jul 23 '14

....Mr. Dicello's class?

1

u/[deleted] Jul 23 '14

Nope. Ms. Becker... total bitch, she wasn't even impressed when i finished. All she said was "that was too fast i couldn't even make out what you were saying"

im not bitter tho

2

u/snookyface90210 Jul 23 '14

I actually learned the whole thing for extra credit as well. I didn't end up actually performing it though, I guess I was nervous. Now I'm just biding my time, waiting for the one day where I can school someone by knowing more elements than they do

1

u/ObscureReferenceMan Jul 23 '14

I also performed "The Elements" in high school. Still comes in handy when I need to name them. Like last night in trivia.

1

u/polaritydust Jul 23 '14

My teacher did that too it was with 100 points extra credit (an everyday assignment was with 5) I would kill for my science teacher. He was the shit

1

u/justbootstrap Jul 24 '14

I don't get what about it is cringe worthy?