Thursday, March 02, 2006

If you can't Curium, Barium.




A humorous tune by the immortal Tom Lehrer:

The Elements

Now, if I may digress momentarily from the mainstream of this evening's symposium, I'd like to sing a song which is completely pointless, but is something which I picked up during my career as a scientist. This may prove useful to some of you some day, perhaps, in a somewhat bizarre set of circumstances. It's simply the names of the chemical elements set to a possibly recognizable tune.

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, (gasp)
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.

Isn't that interesting?
I knew you would.
I hope you're all taking notes, because there's going to be a short quiz next period...

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, (gasp)
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 Hahvard,
And there may be many others but they haven't been discahvered.

And now, may I have the next slide please? ...carried away there.

11 comments:

eyedoc333 said...

I'm off to make a Calcium deposit at Chemical Bank.

Carl said...

He should have made the tune a heavy metal one...

eyedoc333 said...

That went over like a LEAD balloon.

Carl said...

Don't spew your antimony at me!

KEvron said...

heh. learnt this one in hs physics:

Ba AuH2O.

KEvron

eyedoc333 said...

Cesium!

5th Estate said...

you missed "Balonium", the atomic weight of which is "Delicious!"
(courtesy of the long suffering Ms Crabapple--The Simpson's)

Fantod said...

I love Tom Lehrer!

That went over like a LEAD balloon.

I once got detension because when the teacher asked the class what Pb stood for I said a little too loudly, but I thought under my breath, "Peanut Butter!"

Fantod said...

oops! b/c: "detention"

Carl said...

I came to praise Cesium not to Barium...

eyedoc333 said...

You've thrown everything at me but the kitchen Zinc.