Once, when I had my weekly meeting with Ken Ross, my PhD advisor, I said something about 'sliding down the razor blade of life.' He immediately cracked up, but he said he didn't know people my age knew who Tom Lehrer was, the originator of that morbid line and writer of several dozen satirical pop songs popular in the 50s and 60s. I had to admit that it was my parents' albums I listened to. (This led to a charming conversation about sick 1950s humor, the era that gave rise to humor genres such as dead baby jokes. The next day, Ken surprised me by lending me four volumes of Charles Addams cartoon books. I was only vaguely familiar with that cartoonist, but his wonderfully morbid cartoons were very therapeutic at a rather stressful point in my life.) Anyway, what prompts this bit of nostalgia is a lovely Ben Smith and Anita Badejo article I ran across today in Buzzfeed, "Looking for Tom Lehrer." I didn't know much about Lehrer, and it turns out no one else knows much about him either, but the article does fill in a fair bit of the rather interesting back story about the Harvard math instructor who wrote "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park" as well as "The Vatican Rag" and the "Elements Song." If all of this is news to you, by all means look him up on YouTube. (You'll find, as the notes on one of his three albums affirms, that he plays piano acceptably.)