At 06:43 PM 12/27/04 -0000, ronaldvanriet wrote:
>Is this the only occurence of a slide rule in a song?
I decided to do a google on +lyrics +"slide rule" to see what came up.
I found (in addition to "Wonderful World (Don't Know Much)" which you
mentioned):
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young - Drivin' Thunder
"I ain't never going back to driving school.
And I ain't too good with numbers
And I've just run out of fuel
Here comes another corner baby
Let me demonstrate my slide rule."
Tin Huey - Closet Bears
"It's fuzzy in the closet, all the bears are depressed
Their eyes are red, their paws are soiled, their slide-rule's a mess"
Sinkcharmer - Breaking the Slide Rule (album title)
Bruce Cockburn - Starwheel
"crystal drift on the whistling wind --
constant change is the space we're in.
you may use a slide rule or a golden crown
but nothing's worth it that you can pin down --
see how the starwheel turns."
Gordon Lightfoot - In My Fashion
"Now take a look at me, do I look like the kind of guy,
the kind of fool who went to school and had to stand on a stool
because he couldn't come to terms with a slide rule?"
Shawn Phillips - Technotronic Lad
"Well he got out his toy computer
Little slide rule in green
Started calculation with a bit of fabrication
On a world with his promised dream"
Katrina and the Waves - Love Calculator
"Put away your pencil,
put away your slide-rule"
Mike Agranoff - the Ballad of Jake and 10-Ton Molly
"Jake had worked at Avco since 1954.
No paneled office had he there, no name upon the door.
But with slide-rule, square, and drafting board, intuition, faith, and zeal,
He could take a wild half-baked idea and turn it into steel."
The Doormat Singers - The Institute Screw
"My CRC book is not here, my slide rule is at home"
Jerry Douglas - Slide Rule (album title)
Metropolitan - Slide Rule
(I listened to a cut from the track and couldn't really understand any of
the lyrics. But I did understand why the band was being billed as "Indie
noise pop rock" after listening ... )
Jim Steinman - Making Love Weighing Nothing at All
"And I know the laws of Newton.
A solution must exist.
I know all the rules, and I'm real good at math'matics,
but I shouldn't need a slide rule for this!"
Darediablo - Slide Rule
(Only saw mention of the song in a review - haven't found a track or lyric
sheet.)
And some "Slide Rule Filk" songs for you:
Icemark - My best friend's a TRS-80!
(A parody version of the B-52's "Love Shack," the line "tin roof rusted!"
in the original is changed to "slide rule broken!")
Stephen Savitzky - Old Time Computing
"Oh the slide-rule's age is hoary
It has passed its hour of glory
But lives on in song and story
And it's good enough for me."
http://thestarport.org/people/steve/Doc/Songs/oldtime.html
The Brothers Four - The Thinkin' Man
"When John Henry was a little baby,
He was sittin' on his mammy's knee,
When he picked up a slide rule and a book on mathematics,
Sayin' "Thinkin's gonna be the job for me,"
Sayin' "Thinkin's gonna be the job for me."
I found an amusing parody of a Who song (not sure who wrote it):
"Slip stick, slip stick, do multiplication
Using only rows C and D.
Slip stick, slip stick, squared calculation:
It's so easy, use A and B.
So easy -- use A and B.
It's a hard, hard knurl!"
Okay ... I've looked through 150 of the links that came up from the google
search (there were a total of 3,570 hits for +lyrics +"slide rule").
Apparently, the slide rule is much loved as a lyrical symbol. :-)
-=-
While I was hunting for slide rule lyrics, I also found this really nifty
page telling how to use a slide rule as a bicycle gear chart!
http://www.cs.uwaterloo.ca/~arpepper/Cycling/slide_rule.html
And this quote from a biography of Frank Zappa:
"Zappa once said he felt ''stuck between the slide rule and the gutbucket''
and much of his career could be seen as an attempt to reconcile those two
extremes."
http://www.hotshotdigital.com/WellAlwaysRemember.3/FrankZappaBio.html
I also found:
"The pulsing, gyrating "Tigers in the Temple" recalls "Y" era Pop Group
with a slide rule funky rhythm section and repetitive staccato guitar riff"
http://www.indianapolismusic.net/pics4/aircheck_IV.php
which leads me to wonder if "slide rule" is some obscure musical term?
"This warm-up gig/drinking-money fund-raiser at the Bottom of the Hill may
be your last chance to experience Victims Family's hectic time changes,
sardonic lyrics, and volcanic blasts of slide-rule hardcore at a local venue."
http://www.sfweekly.com/Issues/2003-08-06/music/hear.html
Again with the slide-rule music?
"Noise from the post-punk kingdom: Illinois (by way of Wisconsin)
slide-rule-rockers Braid share a stage with more hair-product-friendly punk
bands"
http://www.eye.net/eye/issue/issue_10.15.98/music/digestive15.html
Okay, enough of this taunting! I must look it up. What is "slide-rule-rock"?
"The more we get out on the road, the more I find people who are
really getting into this whole 'math rock' genre of indie bands, like
us and the dazzling killmen and rodan. At least thats what its being
called - at least one person in virtually every city comes up to one
of us praising math rock (or slide rule rock as Tommy Tar likes to
poke at). although the best moniker i've heard recently was from one
of mcclelland's relative's who called us cranial precision rock, or
CPR :) I liked that one."
http://scribble.com/uwi/sounds/choke/craw18.html
"King Crimson If you can tap your foot in time to the square root of 11,
then head to 12th & Porter to catch these avatars of slide-rule rock,
featuring Robert Fripp and Adrian Belew."
http://archives.nashvillescene.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?story=Back_Issues:200
1:June_14-20_2001:Arts:Our_Critics_Picks
Okay ... if you're as puzzled by this as I am, here's a page that attempts
to explain what Math Rock is:
http://www.rundevilrun.com/mathrock.html
A quote from Bono of the band U2:
"If we're in the studio trying to build the rocket," says Bono, "Edge is
under the hood with his slide rule, I'm trying to become fuel, Larry is
pointing out the reasons it'll never fly, and Adam's asking, 'Do we really
want to go there?' They're always reasonable and usually correct and I
hate them for it."
http://www.macphisto.net/article672.html
And a very funny re-writing of "A Christmas Carol" by Stanford University
physics students:
[Enter the Ghost of Christmas Past stage left, with slide rule.]
Scrooge: [Looks up] Nice slide rule.
Ghost of Christmas Past: Thanks!
Scrooge: Now go away.
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/physics/Lighter_Side/Skit/Skit95/XmasSkit.html
While I was at it, I tried a googlism (http://www.googlism.com) for slide
rule and it told me "Sorry, google doesn't know enough about slide rule yet."
Well ... why the heck not?
Sparrow