For years I’ve told the story of this wonderful jiggety chemical, and how Asimov realized it was singable to the ‘Irish Washerwoman’ (and the receptionist who gleefully realized that ‘he knew it in the original Gaelic!’).
Well, someone took up the challenge, it appears. I just heard it on Rhapsody radio…sung by a group called North Sea Gas, and recorded on the album Lochanside.
I must hear it!
Did you ever hear these words to The Washerwoman:
Oh, McCarthy is dead and McGuiness don’t know it,
McGuiness is dead and McCarthy don’t know it.
They’re both of them dead and they’re lying together,
and neither one knows that the other is dead
There was a chem teacher in my high school who always performed that number, with the accompanying dance, for every new class. I unfortunately had a different teacher.
Man, that scared my cat.
Cool. That’s in the same league as singing the periodic table to Modern Major General.
I don’t suppose anybody has the WHOLE song?
Here’s the lyrics-- you already know the tune:
Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde
(Isaac Asimov?)
Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde
Sodium citrate, ammonium cyanide
Phosphates and nitrates and chlorides galore
Just have one o’ these and you’ll never need more.
Got messed up last night on some furfuryl alcohol
Followed it down with a gallon of propanol
Drank from mid-morning until late afternoon
And then spat on the floor and blew up the saloon.
Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde,
Powdered aluminum, nitrogen iodide
Slop it around and add in some benzene
Then top off the punch with Fluorescein
Whiskey, tequila and rum are too tame, no
The stuff that I drink must explode into flame.
When I sneeze I dissolve all the paint in the room,
And then rattle the walls with an earth-shaking BOOM
Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde
Go soak your head in a jar of formaldehyde
Scrub very hard, and then rinse out your mane
In dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane…
BR
The Element Song
There’s antimony, arsenic, aluminum, selenium,
And hydrogen and oxygen and nitrogen and rhenium,
And nickel, neodymium, neptunium, germanium,
And iron, americium, ruthenium, uranium,
Europium, zirconium, lutetium, vanadium,
And lanthanum and osmium and astatine and radium,
And gold and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.
There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And strontium and silicon and silver and samarium,
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium.
There’s holmium and helium and hafnium and erbium,
And phosphorus and francium and fluorine and terbium,
And manganese and mercury, molybdenum, magnesium,
Dysprosium and scandium and cerium and cesium.
And lead, praseodymium, and platinum, plutonium,
Palladium, promethium, potassium, polonium,
And tantalum, technetium, titanium, tellurium,
And cadmium and calcium and chromium and curium.
There’s sulfur, californium, and fermium, berkelium,
And also mendelevium, einsteinium, nobelium,
And argon, krypton, neon, radon, xenon, zinc, and rhodium,
And chlorine, carbon, cobalt, copper, tungsten, tin, and sodium.
These are the only ones of which the news has come to Ha’vard,
And there may be many others, but they haven’t been discavard.
The elements song quoted above is by Tom Leherer…did I spell that right?
Oh, and Sam, you can hear the whole thing if you subscribe to Rhapsody radio on the net and go looking for the tune.
Sincerely,
Tyg
thanks Tyghress - I thought that’s who did it, but all the links I found didn’t reference him.
Yep…that’s Tom Leherer, though I am not sure of the spelling either. I don’t remember the title. I was in the Boy Scouts when he was at his peak, so I tend to remember his song “Be Prepared”
I think it’s Lehrer.
Remember the Vatican Rag (no offense intended, I swear);
First you get down on your knees,
Fiddle with your rosaries
Bow your head with great respect and
Genunflect, genuflect, genuflect!
Get into that long processional
Step into that small confessional
There a man whose got religion’ll
Tell you if your sin’s original,
If it is you better stay for
Some of the wine and some of the wafer.
Two, four, six, eight,
Time to transubstantiate.
First you get down on your knees…etc.
“The Vatican Rag.” I had forgotten about that one. A friend of mine played that at home and his mom immediately hussled him off to confession…
My favorite is still “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park” (and maybe we’ll do in a squirrel or two…" ROFLMFAO!)
But my best memory was my father laughing hysterically at New Math, and me (um in 68 I was 11 years old) not thinking it was at all funny. Dad couldn’t explain the joke.
Oh, and I’m a little miffed at North Sea for not spelling the title correctly (back to Paradimethylaminobenzaldehyde)
Poisoning the Pigeons in the Park and The Masochism Tango are two of my favorites by Leherer.
I have a couple of CDs but on a live CD he insults Irish music and folk music in general so I’ve been a bit put off.