Just casually suggesting privatising the arrest, processing and deportation of human beings like that’s a normal, not-evil thing to say.
It’s funny he should say that, because my vision of a better world is one where everyone involved in ICE has died a slow and painful death from cancer and now their worthless carcasses are rotting in the ground in unmourned graves :D
While it was a longshot, I do appreciate that Gimli did try chopping the Ring up with an axe first. It was worth a shot, and they’d have all felt like bloody idiots if they took the Ring all the way to Mordor only to find out it could have been chopped up by an axe all along.
I cannot overstate how much I love Tom Lehrer’s story. It sounds so fake but is entirely real.
He’s a goddamn genius- he started studying mathematics at Harvard when he was 15 and graduated magna cum laude. He worked at Los Alamos for a few years before being drafted and working for the NSA, where he claims to have invented jello shots to get around alcohol bans.
He then went back to Harvard for a couple years before starting to teach political science at MIT.
Through all of that, he was writing and performing both some of the funniest shit you’ll ever hear (Poisoning Pigeons in the Park, Masochism Tango) and absolutely scathing political satire (Who’s Next, Wernher von Braun, Send the Marines). Until the mid/late 60s counterculture gained momentum. He didn’t like their aesthetic, so he stopped making music.
Shortly after, he moved to California and started teaching math and musical theater history at the UC Santa Cruz for the next 30 years.
I don’t know if non-Californians understand just how goddamn funny that is. It’s where stoners and math (and now computer science) kids who couldn’t get into Berkeley go. Leaving Harvard/MIT for UCSC is peak academic phoning it in. And by all accounts he had a blast.
Plus the whole putting all of his music in the public domain thing. That fucked.
Also he is still alive! 95 years old as of November 2023.
The other day @piecesoftape sent me a text that said, “you probably got a notification for this, but Tom Lehrer outlived Kissinger.”
There’s a quote attributed to Lehrer, probably in answer to why he stopped performing, that “political satire became obsolete when Henry Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”
I am delighted to report Tom Lehrer is still with us as of January 13, 2025.
He also discovered an English rhyme for “orange,” which famously doesn’t rhyme with anything.
It’s an internal rhyme (parts of two words), but it still rhymes, and the poem goes thusly:
it’s important to mock and belittle military and law enforcement to signal to others that these are not respectable professions, both to dissuade entry and to devalorize the institutions in the public eye
like it doesn’t matter if a person is so fat they’re immobile & have infections in their skin folds & need assistance with everything from hygiene to cooking to cleaning etc. they should still get good medical care.
the fattest person you possibly imagine still deserves medical care. it also doesn’t matter why they’re fat, even if that person got fat because all they did was eat and eat without ever exercising, they still deserve medical care.
Had a dream last night that i was a knight and this bigger scarier knight had me on the ground and right before he swung his sword at my neck he said smth like “i mourn the loss of life for the tree who will become your coffin” which shouldnt have turned me on like it did but alas
