Following Milton Babbitt's untimely death at the age of 94 (death at any age is untimely, since it unties the time dimension) in January 2011, I was interested in finding out more about his relationship, personal and music-theoretical, with the US information science community during and after the Eisenhower years. The musical avant-garde represented in parody by Babbitt and Cage as two poles of an antithesis sprang into life in the Cold War era at the same time as Scientology, MAD and Playboy magazine. Today the US doyen of priapism is ready to admit that even the best formula for a creative life has its natural limits. I wanted to ask Joseph Straus and Jerry Kohl what they thought of Babbitt's influence in the wider context of cognitive linguistics. In addition to positioning Babbitt as a significant influence on the Russian composer's serial music in the instructive Stravinsky's Late Music (Cambridge University Press, 2001), Joseph Straus is co-editor (with Stephen Dembski) of Babbitt's Words about Music. Jerome Kohl is a fellow Stockhausen enthusiast and distinguished former editor of Perspectives of New Music, a periodical set up in the 1960s to assert US authority in new musical theory and practice by an editorial board including Babbitt and graced by a logo in honour of serial music devised by Stravinsky himself.