Style Conversational Week 1239: Nerds & Music
The more esoteric material from the science parody contest — and
where to find more of it
Maxwell’s equation. The Empress received no “Silver Hammer” parodies.
(tes.com)
By Pat Myers
Pat Myers
Editor and judge of The Style Invitational since December 2003
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August 3, 2017
I hope you didn’t miss me too much when I was off Not Doing This for two
weeks. I hope you missed me just the right amount (desperately).
While on vacation in Europe late last month, I did look at a number of
the sci-tech song parodies submitted for Week 1235
of The Style Invitational, but I didn’t
really curl up with them until late last week. As always, I was swimming
in great material, using a wide range of topics and musical genres. (The
results.)
Every time I run the results of a parody contest — usually once or twice
a year — I feel bad that I couldn’t include so much of the creative,
well-crafted, clever, funny work; a human can read only so many sets of
lyrics in a row, especially if the reader is singing along, literally or
mentally. I first knocked myself for having such a broad scope; we had
enough good songs on global warming alone to fill a page of parodies.
But it’s so nice to present a lively mix of subject matter to readers.
Ah, readers. While The Washington Post’s readership is highly educated —
according tothis 2008 release
I
found, 77 percent have college degrees and 42 percent graduate degrees —
that doesn’t mean they’re all comfortable with technical terms and
issues, especially in the sciences. On the other hand, those same
specifics and inside terms can be exactly what makes a parody — or other
inside joke — so much fun to a niche audience, like your own colleagues
or students.
I discovered that writing songs for your university students and
associates is a long-standing and beloved tradition, to judge from the
many examples I received from academics. And I enjoyed many of them,
even if they didn’t rhyme well enough to work well on the page (height /
thrice; “oy vey”/range) or assumed arcane terminology (“When f prime
swaps sign, findin’ extrema local;” “Beta lactam ring’s reactive site/
Starts bonding with D-D-transpeptidase”). You can make such language
work in a general song, but the lyrics have to bring the reader into it,
not assume it’s already understood.
While this week’s Invite ink went largely to our regular Losers,
especially those who’ve done so well in previous contests, I do want to
shout out the work of the clever profs who sent me their greatest hits,
and encourage the more sciencey among you to check it out. (I’m pretty
sure that virtually all these songs were written for occasions other
than this contest, which was fine with me as long as our own readers
were unlikely to have seen them.)
First, I’d like to salute *Kevin Ahern, *who had some Invite ink before
getting his honorable mention with “Viagra”/“Maria” today. Kevin is a
biochemistry professor at Oregon State, and gained renown (and enormous
thanks) some years ago for posting his textbook online for free. Kevin
has a Web page linking
to the “Metabolic Melodies” he’s written for his students, including at
least some of the 25 he submitted for Week 1235. Kevin also writes and
posts a new limerick each day, which he posts on Facebook (and so he
might not want to shut off those Style Invitational contest
notifications just yet ...).
The award for Slickest Video — not to mention Neatest Video Inspiration
— goes to statistics professor *Michael Posner* of Villanova University
for “Stats Are Cool, You See,”
a parody of“Cooler Than
Me” by ... pop star
Michael Posner. The video was made by students in a film production class.
*Greg Crowther,* a professor at the University of Washington medical
school, has been writing “STEM songs”
to interest
students since 1999. The parody I got the biggest kick out of was of the
Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back”; it begins, “Find the concentrations of
ions out and in;/ Figure out the quotient, and take the log (base 10)./
Multiply by a “constant” like 58 mV; / Divide by ion valence, z, to find
potential E.” But he’s got a million of them, complete with karaoke
music. Anatomy students, you have gold here, with “Cardiac Output &
Pulmonary Ventilation” and “Obstructive and Restrictive Lung Disease.”
Sing it!
Penn State’s *Dennis Pearl, *director of the Consortium for the
Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education,
sent me a great recording of “Old Time Random
Poll,”
a parody of “Old Time Rock and Roll.”
University of Oregon geologist *Greg Retallack* referred me to his sung
parody of “As Time Goes By”
that relates to his work
on how the state’s soil affects the taste of local wines. (He didn’t
send me the words, though — and so the terroirist didn’t win.)
The Loser Community itself is emphatically not without a nerd
contingent; our MIT grads alone could fill up a Loser Brunch venue
(while analyzing all the food with a spectrometer) . But most of them
figured correctly that Ms. Word Person would go less “niche,” as
psychotherapist and 28-time Loser *Josh Feldblyum *put it.
Josh gave it a shot anyway with a parody of “For the Benefit of Mr.
Kite” that points to some evidently nasty disagreements in the
psychiatry community with the cognitive-theory approach of Aaron Beck:
For the benefit of Dr. Beck
We shall talk about some dreck
inside your mind.
Ralph Ellis will be there as well,
Sigmund Freud can go to hell
I think you’ll find
All this talk of insight and defenses
Fails to address the real problem.
And you’ll see, Dr. B will challenge the field! [Several verses follow.]
But to the Invite Community, the most renowned Loser Nerd of all is the
beloved Hall of Famer and chemical engineer *Jeff Contompasis,* who
revels in his geekiness. Jeff got ink this week with his Made for the
Masses physics celebration of “My Favorite Springs.” He didn’t, however,
with this parody of the treacly “Ebony and Ivory” that began: Entropy
and enthalpy are two portions of Gibbs Free Energy/ For the maximum
non-expansion work reversibly ...”
All kidding aside, I /love /the idea of using songs in teaching, and I
heartily applaud the work of all these guys. I’m almost inspired to take
a beginning course in chemistry or physics, the two courses I struggled
most with in high school in the 19zubzubs, just to try out these songs.
(Almost.)
As for the less technical songs (or for requests of more of the above),
I plan to share a number of this week’s worthy non-inking entries over
the next week or two in theStyle Invitational Devotees
Facebook group. Because the posts keep moving
down the page, search for “science parody” in the search bar on the left
rail, and I’ll make sure to include that phrase every time I post a new
one. If you haven’t joined the group yet, we’re eager to welcome you
with the traditional Anagramming of the Name.
*OH, YEAH, A NEW CONTEST: MOVIE MASHUPS *
Week 1239 is an encore of contests we did in
2005 and 2011, and I think it’s pretty straightforward, as long as you
note my leniency where I wrote *“Note:”* Unlike the “Before and After”
game often featured as a “Jeopardy!” category, and in some of our other
portmanteau contests, the exact letters of the title don’t need to
overlap. The standard is: Will the reader recognize two movie titles? If
so, combine them as you like; if not, it won’t be funny. (Hint:
Recognizing a movie title generally includes having heard of it.)
So that you don’t repeat what’s already gotten ink, here are there
results of those two contests (scroll down past each week’s new contest
to see the winners):
Results of Week 610
Results of Week 939
(Word
to the freeloader: The links for the results above go to Lose Elden
Carnahan’s Master Contest List
of
all Style Invitational columns. They appear on his own Web page, on the
Losers’ website at NRARS.org, and thereby do not come up against The
Post’s paywall for nonsubscribers. If you want to look at an Invite
contest — any or all of the previous 1,238 — you can see it there in
formats ranging from scanned text to PDFs. Elden sometimes falls a few
weeks behind — the man has had a lot to deal with lately — but has
always caught up eventually.)
/The headline “Nerds and Music” was a frequently submitted headline idea
for the Week 1235 results. We might have used it before, but I don’t
care. /