Remember that fantastic iPad app, The Elements, blogged here around the time of the iPad's US launch? And that cute little easter egg within the app: an animated rendition of Tom Lehrer's "The Elements Song?" Here's a new version to accompany the new Japanese edition of the Elements App, sung by two cute girls who dig science. I love it.
Theodore Gray, the guy behind all of it, explains:
I have a cousin, Thomas Howard Lichtenstein, who has lived in Osaka for the past 20 years making a living as a lounge singer at night and composer during the day. This turned out to be a remarkably useful fact when I decided that, based on the huge success of The Elements for iPad in Japan, I really wanted to record a translation into Japanese of Tom Lehrer's elements song. (The entire rest of the ebook had been translated into Japanese: The only things left in English were the song and the spoken element names.)
I asked my cousin if he could make it sound like a nauseatingly cute Japanese pop song. My exact words were "make me think of cats with big eyes". Which I think he has clearly achieved.
I had planned to locate and hire some kind of B-list J-Pop idol to sing it, but he suggested his daughters give it a try, and they did a fantastic job. So the singers are in fact my twin 13-year-old, half-Japanese first cousins once removed. So there you have it, my contribution to increasing the world's supply of WTF, one song at a time.
More at periodictable.com.
