Tom Lehrer delighted in following a Web site that predicted the exact day of his death and kept changing it according to an algorithm. He checked it regularly.
Last week, Lehrer died, at 97, in the tiny graduate-student house in Harvard Square he bought in the 1960s and never saw any need to change even as he gained enduring international fame for his matchlessly mordant songs. It had ridiculously narrow and dangerously steep stairs, with a too-low ground-floor clearance for anyone his height. Miraculously, he never fell down those steps, or the ones to the basement, where he kept hundreds of books and CDs, all dedicated to musical theater and the songs of the 20th century.
