Devastating news for the Fountain Boyz; the man permanently warped our humor at an early age, and made us the cruel, horrible characters we are today (Updated)

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Tom Lehrer, Musical Satirist With a Dark Streak, Dies at 97

July 27, 2025, 12:53 p.m. ET

Tom Lehrer, the Harvard-trained mathematician whose wickedly iconoclastic songs made him a favorite satirist in the 1950s and ’60s on college campuses and in all the Greenwich Villages of the country, died on Saturday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 97. 

His death was confirmed by David Herder, a friend.

Mr. Lehrer’s lyrics were nimble, sometimes salacious and almost always sardonic, sung to music that tended to be maddeningly cheerful. Accompanying himself on piano, he performed in nightclubs, in concert and on records that his admirers purchased, originally by mail order only, in the hundreds of thousands.

But his entertainment career ultimately took a back seat to academia. In his heart he never quit his day job; he just took a few sabbaticals.

He stopped performing in 1960 after only a few years, resumed briefly in 1965 and then stopped for good in 1967. His music was ultimately just a momentary detour in an academic career that included teaching posts at Harvard, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of California, and even a stint with the Atomic Energy Commission.

Mr. Lehrer’s songwriting output was modest, but it was darkly memorable. In the tasteless world he evoked, a seemingly harmless geezer turned out to be “The Old Dope Peddler” and spring was the time for “Poisoning Pigeons in the Park.”

In “The Masochism Tango,” which the sheet music instructed should be played “painstakingly,” he warbled, “You can raise welts/Like nobody else.” In “Be Prepared,” his “Boy Scout marching song,” he admonished, “Don’t solicit for your sister, that’s not nice/Unless you get a good percentage of her price.”

And another favorite:

The Democrats find a new way to appeal to young male voters; or appall them, whatever

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‘Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Seen’: Democrats Asking Crowd To Throw ‘Balls Of Yarn’

Youth-driven advocacy organization Voters of Tomorrow held their 2025 summit on Friday, with lawmakers like Democrat Speaker Emerita Nancy Pelosi and Democrat California Rep. Ro Khanna speaking as guests. While discussing the Democrats’ push to motivate voters ahead of the midterms, Ingraham played a clip showing two women standing at a podium while someone said that if supporters liked “bonding” and “throwing yarn,” they should head for the breakout session.

In the clip played by Fox News, an announcer was heard instructing those who liked to “throw balls of yarn” to head to the “back” of the room, adding, “if you don’t want to throw balls of yarn and bond, that’s OK.” 

(Video at the link, but here’s another one that sums it up just as well)

Or if self-deportation is too difficult, Homeland Security will cheerfully offer assistance

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Mind you, not everyone is on board with this option. Here’s a chubby-wubby former coffee dispenser complaining that we’re “ripping away law-abiding dutiful undocumented people from their country!” Their country? I don’t think so, dear; not yet, and let’s hope never.

Let's subsidize their self-deportation to Gaza

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The husband beating his wife should be like a guy beating his sweetheart"

Muslim Doctor Defends Wife-Beating, Advises Husbands to Avoid Serious Injury, Calls It 'Therapeutic'

In a disturbing interview, a doctor at Gaza’s Islamic University openly instructs Palestinian husbands that they are obligated to beat their wives—but only in a way that avoids breaking bones or damaging vital organs. His justification? That “wife-beating should be therapeutic, not vindictive.” 

"The purpose of wife beating is to warn the wife that the life of the family is in danger and that the marital relations are in danger," the doctor said. "She needs to be cautious and not let the family be destroyed." 

He clarified that the beating should be symbolic yet real, with specific conditions and guidelines to follow. According to him, the aim of a husband beating his wife is not to seek revenge or cause harm, but rather to correct her behavior and safeguard the family. He emphasized that husbands should avoid striking women in sensitive areas like the face or vital organs. The beating, he insisted, should not be severe or motivated by malice.

"The husband beating his wife should be like a guy beating his sweetheart," he said, referring to the saying "The beloved's first is as sweet as raisins." 

"It's like when a father beats his son or when a mother beats her daughter for doing something wrong," he continued, arguing that the beating should be "therapeutic" to correct one's wife. 

International Women's Day protest for Gaza held in Washington

And of course …

The good news is that we've already made a start; the bad news, for her, is that we've started with Iran

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Ilhan Omar supports H.R.2419, the Nuclear Abolition and Economic Conversion Act of 2019.

H.R.2419 calls for the elimination of all nuclear weapons – as does the ICAN Pledge!

Gotta love this part: we’ll reducate nuclear scientists and pout them to work in other fields, like building bridges and “vibrant, fair, and equitable communities”. Uh huh

Nuclear weapons are taking billions of dollars and some of our best scientists and engineers away from much more important and urgent priorities, like addressing the climate crisis, preventing future pandemics, fixing our crumbling infrastructure, and building vibrant, fair and equitable communities. Ilhan Omar can help get rid of these weapons and shift our national priorities to where they are needed.

Trouble Ahead — in fact, it’s already here

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(Outdated advice)

InstaPundit: GOALPOSTS, MOVED (I’d say removed, but let the professor have his way –Ed]

College Board shortens SAT as student performance declines. “The College Board defended the shortened passages, now approximately the length of a social media post, citing that the ability to read longer passages is ‘not an essential prerequisite for college.'”

In 2024, the College Board introduced sweeping changes to the Scholastic Assessment Test (SAT), made largely without the awareness of lawmakers.

According to a June 18 op-ed by Michael Torres, the policy director for the Classical Learning Test (CLT), one major change was the format switch from paper to computerized testing. This allows the exam to be adaptable, which means that “students are served easier or harder questions in later portions of each section based on their early performance.”

[Cool: it dumbs it down as the dunce flounders along - no one fails at opur house! —Ed]

  • Torres also notes that the Reading and Writing section of the test shrank from between 500-750 words to anywhere between 25-150 words.

  • The College Board defended the shortened passages, now approximately the length of a social media post, citing that the ability to read longer passages is “not an essential prerequisite for college.”

  • As a result, reading material such as passages from U.S. founding documents have been eliminated in order to accommodate “students who might have struggled to connect with the subject matter.”

  • Additionally, the optional essay was eliminated entirely. 

  • The math portion of the exam has faced modifications, as well. In addition to students being offered [fewer] questions and the same amount of time to answer them, they may now use a calculator for the entire portion. 

  • One AI model found that the SAT has been getting easier by four points each year since 2008, and the ACT is projected to follow the SAT in its decline of “academic excellence.”

This extends to the changes made in the new SAT math section, as well. College Board now serves test-takers fewer questions but did not reduce the amount of time for the section correspondingly. Students taking the post-2024 SAT now have 1.6 minutes per question, compared to 1.3 minutes on the 2015-2024 SAT. (The ACT and CLT provide 1.1 minutes per question.) Additionally, a calculator can now be used for the entirety of the SAT math section.

It’s hard to predict the extent to which these changes may decrease the rigor of the SAT math section. However, they comport with a more than 15-year trend. Researchers at the University of Cincinnati trained an AI program to do SAT math questions going back to 2008, and it found that the test has been getting easier by about four points per year.

  • Finally, the optional essay was eliminated completely.

For the most part, the content-level changes made to the SAT have garnered little pushback. Concerns that have been raised have focused primarily on the test being computer-based rather than paper-based. A likely reason for this seeming indifference is that, well, what can anyone do about it?

“The College Board gets to do what they want, and we have to trust fall into it.”“The College Board gets to do what they want, and we have to trust fall into it,” Jennifer Jessie, a Virginia-based college counselor, told ChalkBeat last year.

As test-optional college-admission policies have proliferated, the College Board and ACT seem to have reacted with a bit of panic. Rather than offer a consistent standard of academic excellence, these companies are competing to offer the least unpleasant product to 17-year-olds.

“If we’re launching a test that is largely optional, how do we make it the most attractive option possible?” Priscilla Rodriguez, College Board senior vice president of college readiness assessments, told Chalk Beat in an article about the changes:

“If students are deciding to take a test, how do we make the SAT the one they want to take?”

I’ve mentioned before that, twenty years ago, I dropped a note to my former (and now, sadly, late) GHS English teacher Dwight Wall, expressing my dismay that my own daughter was now in his class and had never read Thomas Wolfe (or for that matter, Tom Wolf, but that’s a different loss). I told him that reading “Look Homeward, Angel” during my Junior year with him had inspired me to read all of Wolfe’s writings and had greatly influenced and improved my writing, as well as providing hous, even days of enjoyment; what had happened?

Mr. Wall wrote back, explaining and lamenting that the current crop of students balked at reading even a twenty-page essay, so he’d given up assigning the, let alone entire novels. That was 1985; this report on the SAT’s (and the ACT’s) dilution make it clear that deterioration and rot has only accelerated.

Snuck in at the bell yesterday afternoon

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8 Woodside Drive, Deer Park offers an interesting perspective on the COVID and post-Covid market. When it was offered at $5.395 million from July-through-September 2020 it went nowhere, and was pulled. Returned to the market in April 2021 at that same price, it sold in 19 days for $5.856 million.

Four years years later, it took a bit longer to settle out the bidders: 22 days, but the wait was worth it, because that same, untouched-since-purchased house was listed at $7.995 million, and sold to NYC (10003) buyers yesterday for $8.750.

(Very) dated 1927 house, typical of the original Deer Park homes (which was one of the reasons for the neighborhood’s appeal to many of us), it sits on 1.9 acres in the R-1 zone, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see it replaced by one of the now-standard Biggerbetterbrighterwider models.