Remarks:

This is by far my favourite Tom Lehrer song. It came out in 1959 but never seemed to have charted. Gilbert and Sullivan fans will know the tune – it comes from the “Major-General’s Song” (1879) from their musical “The Pirates of Penzance”. Lehrer lists all the chemical elements known at the time, all the way up to nobelium (#102). Since then 16 additional elements have been discovered, up to oganesson (#118). Lehrer does not list the elements in order but arranges them to fit the meter of the song.

He passed away last year at age 97!

Requiescat in pace. 

See also:

• songs
• other singers who passed away in 2025:
  • D’Angelo
  • Angie Stone
  • Roberta Flack
  • Sly Stone
  • Jimmy Cliff
  • Sonny Curtis

Lyrics: 

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, protactinium and indium and gallium
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium
There’s yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium
There’s strontium and silicon and silver and samarium
And bismuth, bromine, lithium, beryllium, and barium
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
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 Harvard
And there may be many others but they haven’t been discovered

From now till Easter (January 20th to April 5th 2026) I will be on a Portuguese media diet. It will include all of Lent (February 18th to April 2nd) but start almost a month early.

The diet: All private media consumption outside of this blog – books, news, music, Internet, etc – will be in Portuguese or one of its forms, including creoles, dialects (like Galician), and ancient forms (Latin). Unlike in the past, even research for posts will be limited to Portuguese. If that makes my blog less US-centric or Anglocentric, all the better.

The masthead: The picture above of Lusophonia (Portuguese-speaking countries) will be the masthead while the diet lasts.

– Abagond, 2026. 

See also:

• media diet
  • 2024: Portuguese media diet review
  • 2018: Programming note #34
  • 2007: My thing for Brazil – this became a Portuguese media diet of sorts
• Jhumpa Lahiri: In Other Words
• The Vast Talking Machine
• Portuguese
  • Galician
  • Latin
    • Vulgar Latin
• books I read in 2026
• advice:
  • A Guide to Anglos
  • How to be more Brazilian
• resources:
  • music: Portuguese, Latin
  • Wikipedia: Portuguese, Latin

“The Trumpet of Conscience”

1. Impasse in Race Relations
2. Conscience and the Vietnam War
3. Youth and Social Action
4. Nonviolence and Social Change
5. A Christmas Sermon on Peace

All of these are from 1967. It is a quick read, only 80 pages.

In brief: He says that the Civil Rights Movement had moved from non-violence to riot and repression, and thus a dead end! On the Vietnam War he covers much of the same ground as his Riverside Speech of April 1967, which I have already done a post on. Excellent! He also talks about the youth, both Black and White, which gave him hope for the future since many of them were trying to change society for the better – not just their protests against racial injustice, poverty and war, but even the counterculture of the hippies. There is also a wonderful defence of non-violence – that violence can only bring further violence, that the ends do not justify the means. In fact, the means mould the end.  To create a just society you must begin to live it. Cutting corners undermines the very thing you are trying to do.

It may sound kind of pie-in-the-sky, but it was not like the worldly, materialistic, might-makes-right values were working out so well.

Some of my favourite quotes (with keywords bolded):

“The war in Vietnam is but a symptom of a far deeper malady within the American spirit.”

“The hippies are not only colorful, but complex; and in many respects their extreme conduct illuminates the negative effect of society’s evils on sensitive young people.”

“It is ironic that today so many educators and sociologists are seeking methods to instill middle-class values in Negro youth as the ideal in social development. It was precisely when young Negroes threw off their middle-class values that they made an historic social contribution. They abandoned those values when they put careers and wealth in a secondary role. … they challenged and inspired white youth to emulate them.”

“If just two countries, Britain and the United States, could be persuaded to end all economic interaction with the South African regime, they could bring that government to its knees in a relatively short time.”

“… to planetize our movement for social justice.”

“But we will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the ideal in the making, and the end in process, and ultimately you can’t reach good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and the end represents the tree.”

“I’ve seen too much hate to want to hate, myself, and I’ve seen hate on the faces of too many sheriffs, too many white citizens’ councilors, and too many Klansmen of the South to want to hate, myself; and every time I see it, I say to myself, hate is too great a burden to bear.”

– Abagond, 2026. 

See also:

• Martin Luther King, Jr
  • Riverside speech against the Vietnam War
• 1968 media diet – I read this as part of my 1968 media diet
• Vietnam War

526

Remarks:

In honour of Sade’s 67th birthday on January 16th! I have posted ten Sade songs before and naturally assumed this was one of them. Not so!

The song came out in October 1985, reaching #3 on the US R&B chart. The video shows her singing in New York and riding a horse in the south of Spain. The story continues in “Is it a Crime?” that came out a few months later.

The term “quiet storm” as a kind of music does not come from this song but from Smokey Robinson ten years before.

See also:

• songs: the 1980s
• Sade
  • 1984: Your Love is King
  • 1984: Smooth Operator
  • 1984: Why Can’t We Live Together
  • 1986: Is it a Crime
  • 1988: Paradise
  • 1992: Feel No Pain
  • 1992: No Ordinary Love
  • 1993: Kiss of Life
  • 2010: Babyfather
  • 2010: Soldier of Love

Lyrics:

[Verse 1]
If I tell you
If I tell you now
Will you keep on
Will you keep on loving me?
If I tell you
If I tell you how I feel
Will you keep bringing out the best in me?

[Chorus]
You give me, you give me the sweetest taboo
You give me, you’re giving me the sweetest taboo
Too good for me

[Verse 2]
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt like this before
There’s a quiet storm that is you
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt this hot before
Giving me somеthing that’s taboo
(Sometimes I think you’re just too good for mе)

[Chorus]
You give me the sweetest taboo
That’s why I’m in love with you (With you)
You give me the sweetest taboo
Too good for me
(Sometimes I think you’re just too good for me)

[Bridge]
I’d do anything for you
I’d stand out in the rain
Anything you want me to do
Don’t let it slip away

[Verse 3]
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt like this before
There’s a quiet storm
I think it’s you
There’s a quiet storm
And it never felt this hot before
You’re giving me something that’s taboo

[Chorus]
You give me the sweetest taboo
That’s why I’m in love with you (With you)
You give me, keep giving me the sweetest taboo
Too good for me

[Outro]
You’ve got the biggest heart
Sometimes I think you’re just too good for me
Every day is Christmas, and every night is New Year’s Eve
Will you keep on loving me, huh, huh?
Will you keep on
Will you keep on bringing out the best in me?

Source: Genius Lyrics. 

Erich von Däniken (1935-2026) was a shady Swiss German hotel manager who is best known for writing “Chariots of the Gods?” (1968). In the book he tried to prove archaeologically that the Earth was visited by beings from another planet in ancient times – the ancient astronauts. He was popular in the 1970s and again in the 1990s. His books sold 63 million copies in 32 languages. That puts him on a level with Laura Ingalls Wilder and her Little House on the Prairie books (60 million).

Carl Sagan, an astronomer and trained scientist who was an expert on extraterrestrial life, said in 1976:

That writing as careless as Däniken’s, whose principal thesis is that our ancestors were dummies, should be so popular is a sober commentary on the credulousness and despair of our times. I also hope for the continuing popularity of books like Chariots of the Gods? in high school and college logic courses, as object lessons in sloppy thinking. I know of no recent books so riddled with logical and factual errors as the works of Däniken.

Sloppy: Däniken could not even get his facts right! For example the Piri Reis map of 1513 that he says shows Antarctica only goes to 5 degrees south of the equator! It does not even show all of Brazil!

Pseudoscience: His books show all the signs of pseudoscience. For example:

1. Makes sensationalist claims – most science is dry as dust.
2. Disagrees with nearly all the experts in the field.
3. Not trained in the relevant fields – astronomy and archaeology in this case, not hotel management.
4. Proceeds from conclusions to facts, not the other way round.
5. Makes no predictions that can be proved wrong.
6. Does not look for the simplest explanations (Occam’s Razor).

Egypt, circa -1345. Probably Akhenaton as a boy. Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

Ancient astronauts explain nothing because they can explain anything!

The Alien Fallacy: Just because we cannot explain something does not mean we have to jump straight to “Aliens did it!” You see the same style of thinking about UFOs. Däniken loved UFOs. He simply applied the same fallacy to ancient mysteries. Like the iron Pillar of Delhi, which has not rusted for 1500 years – but which turned out to have a very human explanation after all. No aliens need apply.

Or take the Great Pyramid of Giza. We might not know how it was built, but it did not spring out of nowhere like an alien technology would. Instead it was preceded by older, simpler, smaller, even failed pyramids, like the Bent Pyramid (pictured below).

The Bent Pyramid, built c. -2600.

Racist: Däniken, as far as I know, never broke down into a racist rant to remove all doubt, like Scott Adams did. But his theory is in fact built on a profoundly racist assumption:

Ancient dark-skinned people were incapable of anything that exceeds present-day Western technology. Therefore beings from another planet must have helped them. 

Only White people are capable of technological wonders. He never says this straight out, but it is assumed.

Notice that all the ancient mysteries always seem to be in non-Western countries: India, Peru, Mexico, Egypt, etc. Why is it never Greece or Rome? It always seems to be non-White people whose abilities are doubted. It is dehumanizing.

– Abagond, 2026. 

See also:

• pseudoscience
• Ancient Egypt and ancient astronauts
• Egypt in 2600 BC
• The white racist guide to writing history
• Scott Adams
• The whiteness of Laura Ingalls Wilder

542

Scott Adams (1957-2026) was a White American cartoonist, famous for the “Dilbert” comic strip, which appeared in newspapers across the US from 1989 to 2023. It made fun of office life – pointy-haired bosses and such. By 2013 it was in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries in 25 languages!

“Dilbert” was funny if you ever worked in an office, especially of a big company, as Adams himself did in California in the 1980s at a bank and a telephone company (Pacific Bell). He makes fun of the brainless bosses and the mindless meetings. He escaped that world by working on his comic strip early every morning till it was a success.

Racist rant: It all ended in 2023 in an unfunny way in a racist rant, saying Black people were a hate group, advising racial segregation for Whites:

“So if you know, nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll. That’s a hate group. That’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them.

“And I would say, you know, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people. Just get the fuck away. Wherever you have to go, just get away.

“So that’s what I did. I went to a neighbourhood where, you know, I have a very low Black population ’cause unfortunately there, you know, there’s high correlation between the density – and this is according to Don Lemon, by the way. So here I’m just quoting Don Lemon, when he notes that when he lived in a mostly Black neighbourhood, there were a bunch of problems that he didn’t see in White neighbourhoods.

“So, I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a White citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense. It’s no longer a rational impulse.

“And so, I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off, like I’ve been doing it all my life. The only outcome is I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re White. It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying. Totally not trying.”

Newspapers dropped him. “Dilbert” soldiered on on the Web.

“Dilbert” had no Black characters till 2022! And then only to make fun of wokeness, in particular the hiring of Black people. Some 76 newspapers did not find that funny and dropped him even before he reached the racist ranting stage a year later.

Very fine people: Adams is also infamous, at least on this blog, for defending Donald Trump when he called neo-Nazis “very fine people”.

Adams is still beloved by the right-wing, by people like Megyn Kelly and Jordan Peterson.

The afterlife: Despite the best efforts of his Christian friends, Adams did not believe Jesus was God till the very end, but only in a Pascal Wager sort of way: dying of prostate cancer, he had little to lose.

– Abagond, 2026.

Sources: his racist rant (YouTube).

See also:

• “very fine people” – defends Trump defending neo-Nazis
• Don Lemon
• black ghetto
  • redlining – the main reason some Black neighbourhoods are so screwed up.
  • Black pathology – the reason White racists believe.
  • The white ethnographic gaze: the 1960s
• woke
  • John McWhorter: Woke Racism
• Jordan Peterson
• Megyn Kelly
  • Megyn Kelly and blackface
  • Megyn Kelly: Santa is white
• lovable fools – top image is of Wally from the “Dilbert” comic strip.

572

An artist paints a picture of Renee Nicole Good at the site of the shooting, now an ad-hoc memorial. (Via FOX 9 KMSP)