Tom Lehrer Has Died

[jsburbidge]

 Given that he gave up satire because, he said, life has caught up with satire when Kissinger won the Nobel Peace Prize, I had been wondering what he thought of the events of the current USA. We may never know now.

(I grew up with both LPs and the earlier EP which my father has picked up at Yale, so I've been listening to his work for over 60 years.)

Comments

[ionelv]

I did not know anything about the man until today. I listened to one of his '50s parodies about the predictable end of MAD and I think I will listen to more of them. He is my kind of artist. https://youtu.be/frAEmhqdLFs?feature=shared

[jsburbidge]

He is, among other things, the origin of the hackish developer's ironic reference to getting to something in "my copious free time".

See http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/C/copious-free-time.html .

[ionelv]

Did not know about the link and I found a 2015 Paris Review article a better explainer of the origin of the phrase. https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/06/09/copious-free-time/