Tikkun Leyl Shavuot & The Elements

Shavuot Yizkor for Dad:  Abq Jew's father, Richard Yellin, zichrono l'bracha, loved the satirical songs of Tom Lehrer. So much so that we once bought - no, we invested in - one Tom Lehrer album, An Evening Wasted with Tom Lehrer, an album described by the New York Herald Tribune as "more desperate than amusing".

We played that album a lot, successfully annoying our family and friends. As a result, Abq Jew knows all the lyrics to all the songs on that album.  Except this one, The Elements, because the lyrics are a bit tricky.  (Also - Abq Jew knows none of the lyrics to any other songs that may have been on any other Tom Lehrer albums.  Just this one.)

As members of Abq Jew's Fan Club know, there's a Community Shavuot Service & Tikkun coming up:

Congregation B'nai Israel @ Tue 07 June 2011 @ 7:00 pm 

What It Is:  Nahalat Shalom and Congregation Albert join
Congregation B'nai Israel for a Shavuot Service, with guest speaker
Rabbi T. David Ritch de Herrera of Sephardic New Mexico.
Also featuring Rabbi Deborah Brin and Cantorial Soloist Beth Cohen
of Nahalat Shalom; Rabbi Howard Kosovske and Cantor Barbara Finn
of Congregation Albert; and Rabbi Min Kantrowitz of JFSNM. 
There will be an all-night Tikium Leyl Shavuot beginning at 11:00 pm.

and it's always possible that the participants therein will run out of material at some point, probably around 4:00 in the morning.  Too early for Hashkama Minyan, but way too late to just call it a night.

May Abq Jew humbly suggest ... you're way ahead of me.  Abq Jew has looked all over the Internet, and has found ... er, discovered ... the two best videos of The Elements - here and here.

Pick one, pick the other, pick both - but pick yourself up and bring the lyrics to a Tikkun!

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 and protactinium and indium and gallium,
And iodine and thorium and thulium and thallium.

There's yttrium, ytterbium, actinium, rubidium,
And boron, gadolinium, niobium, iridium,
And 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.

Yes, Abq Jew will be thinking of his mother, Roselyn Yellin, of blessed memory, at Shavuot Yizkor, too.  But this blog post is really for Dad.