[Nan3cy]

Happy Birthday!  I've been meaning to ask.  What's with the 3?

Glad you asked. That's a reference to a 50s/60s comedian/songwriter named Tom Lehrer, who purportedly had a friend named Hen3ry (the 3 was silent). Hen3ry was the guy who said, as he was being taken to the Massachusetts State Home for the Bewildered, "Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it." My dad was a major TL fan and played his records for everyone he knew - and as a result I still know most of the songs many years later. He's very biting, very political, and very funny. You can still find a number of his songs performed (and one entire concert, from Copenhagen of all places) on Youtube. I recommend them highly.

There is actually a TL-Stanford connection of sorts. Don Kennedy, Stanford's president from 1980 to 1992, was at Harvard when Lehrer was in grad school there. Don once told me about purchasing TL's first album from his very own hands in Cambridge. When the LSJUMB made itself banda non grata in Oregon over the spotted owl thing, and some reporter asked Kennedy for his take on the band, he paraphrased a review of TL's music and said, "Their muse is not bound by such inhibitions as taste."

[Nan3cy]

Happy Birthday!  I've been meaning to ask.  What's with the 3?

Glad you asked. That's a reference to a 50s/60s comedian/songwriter named Tom Lehrer, who purportedly had a friend named Hen3ry (the 3 was silent). Hen3ry was the guy who said, as he was being taken to the Massachusetts State Home for the Bewildered, "Life is like a sewer. What you get out of it depends on what you put into it." My dad was a major TL fan and played his records for everyone he knew - and as a result I still know most of the songs many years later. He's very biting, very political, and very funny. You can still find a number of his songs performed (and one entire concert, from Copenhagen of all places) on Youtube. I recommend them highly.

There is actually a TL-Stanford connection of sorts. Don Kennedy, Stanford's president from 1980 to 1992, was at Harvard when Lehrer was in grad school there. Don once told me about purchasing TL's first album from his very own hands in Cambridge. When the LSJUMB made itself banda non grata in Oregon over the spotted owl thing, and some reporter asked Kennedy for his take on the band, he paraphrased a review of TL's music and said, "Their muse is not bound by such inhibitions as taste."