With the line "It's 55 minutes past 11..." the song directly reference the Minutes to Midnight Doomsday Clock which was established and maintained by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists at the University of Chicago, which denotes by just how few minutes it is to midnight to what the impending threat of just how close the world is estimated to be to a global disaster, and it also includes a rejection of dead-end jobs ("who gives you work and why should you do it?").
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He helped found Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, and his wife Martyl Langsdorf designed the 1947 cover of the publication which debuted the Doomsday Clock.
She has served on the Advisory Board of the American Bar Association Committee on Law Enforcement and National Security and the editorial boards of Current History and Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Martyl Suzanne Schweig Langsdorf (March 16, 1917 – March 26, 2013) was an American artist who created the Doomsday Clock image for the June 1947 cover of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.