How weird is this?

Discussion

3 replies

Posted by Eva McDermott on March 7, 2012 at 10:00 PM

My oldest son Brian looks like "Harry Potter", but what is really crazy is that they have the same hero..... Tom Lehrer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=endscreen&NR=1&v=rSAaiYKF0cs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DYW50F42ss8&feature=related

Just found this tonight. My husband and I are both PhD chemists, he from MIT and me from Seton Hall. We both had a great laugh watching this. The last thing Brian wants to hear, again is that he looks like HP. Worse than that, the have the same hero!

Brian is a PhD student at RPI in their Nuclear Engineering Program. BTW - When he was 5 years old, his favorite video was "The Powers of Ten" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0fKBhvDjuy0.

Posted by Roger Kirchen on March 7, 2012 at 11:33 PM

Thanks for posting. This is cool. I had seen the second video, but never had seen Harry Potter in this role. There are several clips of Tom Lehrer's song out there. Some of these have a text overlay with element names and some of the names have spelling mistakes: noibium, somarium, etc. Plus the ever popular flourine. I ask my students to e-mail me the list of mistakes for bonus marks. I found out that after this assignment they know the correct spelling of the elements. And the tune!

Posted by Lynn Jones on March 8, 2012 at 3:04 PM

I guess I'm a little weird but my favorite comedy personalities include Tom Lehrer (two doctorates, math & history/political science), and the Cajun comedian Justin Wilson (safety engineer with Exon until he retired to become first a full time comedian and then with a cooking show on PBS).

Lynn

Posted by Walt Sterneman on March 9, 2012 at 7:57 AM

I have loved Tom Lehrer since I first heard "The Vatican Rag" in the '60's. My son, who is just graduating in under grad Psy this year, became a big fan and could sing the entire elements song as a sophomore in HS. He will get a big kick out of the HP connection. Thanks for posting!