We Didn't Start The Fire

Blackboards, Peter May,(1) eigenvalues Nori's way,
Webster hanging round,(2) he'll tell us some day.

Kottwitch, Balduchi,(3) Zu-Zu Land I don't see,
Train wreck, mid-term.(4) Geodesics make no turn.

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it.

Blackboard style, Fefferman.(5) Long computation, no way man(6).
Who's there, Ridgeway Scott?(7) Don't fall asleep Bloch!(8)

Alperin, characters, Russian bear sweat patches,(9)
Corlette, T-Rex(10), intra-departmental sex.(11)

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start a fire
In the first year office
'Cause they would have caught us.

Desk stacking, snowball whacking, locks changed, ass smacking,(12)
Call in the lawyers, fifty bucks. Benson Farb high on drugs.(13)

Lower standards,(14) VIGRE pay,(15) tea bum chased by Peter May,(16)
Baby boom,(17) tea room, still no theorem proved to date!

We didn't start the fire
It was always burning
Since the world's been turning.
We didn't start the fire
No we didn't light it
But we tried to fight it.

(Explanations to the lyrics)

Verse One - The third and second quarters

(1) May has the habit of using all the blackboards at once for his grotesque diagrams. He has also perfected the art of blackboard gymnastics.

(2) Webster didn't tell us if we were having a final exam or not until right before the scheduled date.

(3) Kottwitz mispronounced Balduzzi's name as Balduchi, so Balduzzi then deliberately mispronounced Kottwitz's name as Kottwitch.

(4) Constantin's course went over our head, especially the trip to Zu-Zu Land. Our midterm was a disaster, and one of us referred to his class as a 'train wreck.'

Verse Two - The potential advisor lectures and the first quarter

(5) Fefferman had a great blackboard style that was essentially writing over the top of what still there.

(6) Kenig showed us an explicit formula he had proved that took at least half a transparency to write down.

(7) None of us went to Ridgeway Scott's lecture. (Appropriately he didn't turn up to our beer skits. Also, most of the faculty invitations went out stating beer skits was going to be held in Ry 258 - his office.)

(8) Bloch falls asleep in many lectures, which has man us laugh. He even fell asleep in Jin's topic presentation.

(9) Nadirashvili would sweat a lot when teaching us.

(10) Corlette has very short arms. Once you notice, you can't get it out of your head.

(11) Kevin and Brook, Vince and Kathy, Kevin and Barbara, Casey and Jeremy, Courtney and Nick, Dave and Alexandra, Brian and Priya, and Jeff and Ann. There are certainly others we have forgotten

Third Verse - General departmental stuff

(12) We had a little too much fun with the first years. It's started out nicely, but landed us in trouble in the end.

(13) Farb, whilst trying to find out who stacked the desks in the first year office by harassing his students at length, claimed he'd hired a lawyer to retrieve a $50 debt. It's rumoured that Farb has taken illegal drugs.

(14) After dropping the second topic, this year the second language exam was dropped.

(15) VIGRE will continue to fund us, even if not so generously.

(16) May regularly chases the tea bum from the tea room, despite being one of the few people there who doesn't owe tea dues.

(17) There are lots of us having baby's at the moment.