Science rock

Mathematician, professor and satirist Tom Lehrer died last week. He was 97.

Lehrer’s heyday in the pop world peaked in the 50s and 60s. I only knew about him in an ancillary fashion, because my parents weren’t on the intellectual left of the spectrum, and I was more of a Stan Freburg girl. But I came to enjoy Lehrer when his songs popped up as retro in my adulthood.

One of the most amusing, to my mind, is “The Elements”, a song listing all the Periodic Table elements (up to time of writing) to the melody of the Gilbert & Sullivan patter song, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General”, from Pirates of Penzance.

Fun Fact: The song was a clue in an episode of NCIS, many years ago.

I’m not giving you Lehrer singing it, because I rather fancy this animated version; it neatly illustrates Lehrer’s cleverness.

I know people who sang this over and over again to learn the Periodic Table. (I made a big model of it on butcher paper and taped it to the wall on the way to the bathroom.)

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Lit Crit

Earlier this month, a friend gave me a pile of cozy mysteries featuring a quirky police constable in the north of Scotland named Hamish Macbeth. I’ve been in a kind of escapist mood, so I stacked them in order of publication and ripped through them.

(Fun fact: I’m actually descended from Duncan I, the historical basis for the king murdered by Macbeth in that Scottish Play.)

At any rate, they were amusing and didn’t require a great deal of attention on my part, so mission accomplished. But as I progressed through the series, I found them increasingly irritating, especially Hamish’s various romantic relationships. That guy just cannot stick a landing, and the one he can’t get over, Priscilla—well, I just wanted to bitchslap her.

At one point I even texted my friend, “Please tell me that Priscilla gets murdered.” (Sadly…)

But in the pile of paperbacks, there was also this one, wrapped with a warning:

I’ve put that, still wrapped, in the box with the others for donation.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Opportunity knocks

So, this popped up in my texts last week:

I have no earthly notion who “Eddie” might be, but he’s not even trying. I mean—he’s not even going to the same effort as the hundreds of South Asian recruiters whose emails start with “I hope you’re doing well” before they pitch you a contract job for which you have no qualifications located five states away.

An undefined “opportunity”—job? MLM? investment?—is not enough to get me to do anything but report spam and block.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Stretching the dollar

If you want to know whether the economy for the simple folk is improving under the current kleptocracy, here you go:

Yes, items at the Dollar Tree now cost $1.50. (They’ve been $1.25 for a while, but this is still a 17% increase in the past month.) I’m guessing that a good chunk of their inventory is manufactured in China, so it’s bound to get worse.

I can understand why Dollar Tree isn’t renaming itself to Dollar-fifty Tree, because they have no way of knowing how many more price raises they’re going to have to incorporate. And Ten Dollar Tree doesn’t really have that same ring to it.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu

 

Gratitude Monday: comfort

How disgustingly humid is it in the District They Call Columbia, you ask?

This is what I saw from every window yesterday morning.

So what am I grateful for?

Yes—operating air conditioning.

 

©2025 Bas Bleu