Song of Seikilos

I’ve fallen in love with this song. It’s the oldest complete musical composition known. (There are older fragments but this is the oldest complete song.) It’s an epitaph on a gravestone, about 2000 years old.

Prefacing the tune are the words: “I am a tombstone, an icon. Seikilos placed me here as an everlasting sign of deathless remembrance.”

The translation Wikipedia gives, which is pretty good as far as my Greek can tell after all these years since school, is:

Hoson zes, phainou
Meden holos su lupou;
Pros oligon esti to zen
To telos ho chronos apaitei
While you live, shine
Don’t suffer anything at all;
Life exists only a short while
And time demands its toll.

I first found out about it though on the Amaranth publishing site, which has a really haunting midi of the song.

Via the Wikipedia article I found a good mp3 of the song (including singing), and a youtube video of a fellow performing it on a harp. I tried to learn how to play it on my ukulele (and sing along). After a lot of attempts I never got one without significant mistakes, so I posted one with significant mistakes as a response on youtube. Here ’tis.

Bush has bad day at Sydney Opera House – Yahoo! News

Bush has bad day at Sydney Opera House – Yahoo! News:

This is a real nostalgia piece. Remember when the worst thing you could say about Bush was that he was a bumbling idiot who couldn’t pronounce hard words? Before the torture, the unnecessary wars, the destruction of civil liberties, the executive-branch power grabs, the secret wiretapping of citizens, the extratordinary renditions, Guantanamo, nuclear threats against Iran?

Man, those were the days.

“Austrian” troops instead of “Australian” troops — what a hoot!

NOUN: Temporary absence or cessation of breathing.

I found out this past week I’ve got sleep apnea. Apparently about 39 times an hour I stop breathing for at least 10 seconds, and wake up because of it, and don’t remember it.

But in between, I get 1.53846 minutes of extremely restful sleep.

The good news is that a very low pressure cpap completely prevents the apnea, so I’ve got to get one of those, and I’ll be fine.

I wouldn’t really have expected this, because far from sleeping too much (as apnea sufferers tend to), I tend towards insomnia. But the doctor said it can go either way, hypersomnia or insomnia.

I’ve heard some folks say treatment for apnea can make a big difference in your life. I don’t want to get my hopes up or anything, but that’d be neat.

The sleep study which discovered this was recommended by a trip to an ENT specialist, which was part of the ongoing attempt to discover why I’ve had a cough since about February.

It was kind of funny, I saw the notes that the sleep lab sent back. They said, apparently with a straight face, that it was vitally important that I lose massive amounts of weight, or no treatment would be effective — and just after that, that a very mild cpap treatment completely eliminated the problem. So maybe no treatment would be effective except the one they had tried that very night and confirmed was completely effective? I don’t know. Maybe that weight loss stuff was boilerplate.

Since I’m aware that significant weight loss virtually never lasts for more than 5 years, and usually more weight comes back after that than you lost in the first place, weight loss doesn’t seem like a useful long term solution to me. I mentioned this to the doc and he accepted that reasoning, then mentioned bariatric surgery, and since I’m not into Russian roulette, I said I wasn’t interested in that either. To the doctor’s credit, he accepted that as well and we went on with the cpap plan.

I mentioned that I was disappointed that I would have to use a cpap, and he smiled and offered me a tracheotomy as an alternative. I decided the cpap would be fine.

He did give me a good scare-the-patient story, about how he actually did have to schedule a tracheotomy for a patient with extremely severe apnea for whom the cpap wasn’t effective, and the guy died of sleep apnea in the two weeks before the surgery happened.

So I’m taking it seriously. Cpap it is. Bring it on!