Phantom Music

I haven’t written a blog here in a while for several personal reasons but it is time to shake off the shackles and write again so here goes…

Musical Ear Syndrome!  Or as I like to call it, phantom music.  Musical Ear Syndrome is a form of non-psychiatric auditory hallucination, also called Musical Hallucination or Musical Tinnitus.  Most people have heard of tinnitus, or ringing in the ears.  It is a perception of sound when none exists.  Musical tinnitus (or Musical Ear Syndrome) is when that sound is perceived as music.  Usually, victims hear musical noises ranging from vocals to instrumental music, and some even hear announcers or commercials.

Most people don’t talk about it because they are afraid of being accused of being mentally unstable or psychotic.  This might be a good time to talk about psychiatric auditory hallucinations.  Psychiatric auditory hallucinations are generally defined as voices talking to the victim (on a personal level), usually associated with schizophrenia or mania.  There can also be medical reasons for some auditory hallucinations, such as brain lesions or medication side effects.  Musical Ear Syndrome (or MES) does not fall into these categories.

As I mentioned above, most people don’t talk about it because they don’t want to be considered crazy.  But MES is becoming increasing recognized as separate from other auditory hallucinations making it easier for people to discuss it.  Experts believe that MES is related to hearing problems, and usually (but not always), is experienced by those with hearing loss.

I started googling this subject because I have experienced this phenomena myself.  Let me start by stating that I have a HUGE problem with insomnia.  Every few weeks, I have extreme difficulty getting more than a couple of hours of sleep several nights in a row.  I become an extremely light sleeper, and can be awakened by the slightest sound.  I have been awakened by the sound of the refrigerator coming on in the middle of the night, in the kitchen when I am in the bedroom, on a different floor!  In order to combat this, I turn on a fan in the room to help mask normal nighttime sounds.

Then, occasionally, I would be awakened by music.  I would assume it was my clock radio coming on - I would reach for the alarm clock and notice that it was hours before I needed to get up!  So where was the music coming from?  I would try and hunt the phantom music down but it was faint and difficult to trace.  The music was not coming from my clock radio, it wasn’t the neighbor, nor was it anything I could find to turn off!  The phantom music would last for a period of time lasting from about thirty minutes to a couple of hours.  I would get so frustrated!

I finally complained to my sweetie, and she googled it and told me about MES.  After researching it myself, I realized that my phantom music was triggered was my fan!  The item I used to mask noise was causing the phantom music that woke me up and kept me up!  It was such a relief to know that there was this thing called Musical Ear Syndrome, and I wasn’t the only person to experience it.

Now, when MES wakes me up in the middle of the night, I turn off the fan and am able to get back to sleep.  However, turning off the fan allows other noises to disturb me but for some reason, the sound of the refrigerator or furnace does not bother me nearly as much as the phantom music.

Papercuts Papercuts Papercuts

I know that I have made a couple of entries regarding papercuts.  The reason is that I know the artist, Elaine LaMarche, and we commissioned a piece of art.  Now, I am so excited!  I just have to give a shout out to Elaine LaMarche of E-Art Judaicuts - Noah's Arc won first place in an art show!  Woo hoo!  This beautiful piece of art deserves all of the accolades it has received.  Check out her stuff on her website and follow her on Facebook.

Noah's Arc



Frances Hodgson Burnett

This all started because I was looking for something new to read on my Kindle that was cheap! I have been rereading some of my favorite books so I decided to see if there was a free/cheap version of The Secret Garden or The Little Princess, both written by Frances Hodgson Burnett.  To my delight, I found the entire collected works of Frances Hodgson Burnett for under $3.00!

After downloading the book, I was surprised at how many books there were in this collection, so I decided to find out what I could about the author.  I was shocked at how little information is out there, and so much of it is contradictory!  For heavens sake, she didn't live that long ago.  She was born in 1849 and died in 1924 and her children's books are considered classics!  Well, that just made me more curious.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

Frances Hodgson Burnett was born in England and emigrated to the United States at the end of the Civil Way at age 15.  Some websites call her English and other call her American.  All agree that she started writing as a child and continued throughout her entire life.  I could not find any agreement on when her father died.  I read he died in 1852, 1853, 1854, 1865.  After his death, the family lived in abject poverty, genteel poverty, or gradually declining affluence.  However, everyone agrees that she supported her family with her writing.  I saw that she was successful enough to support her family starting at age 18, 19, or 20, and that she was not successful until much later in life.

Again, websites disagree about how many books Frances Hodgson Burnett wrote.  They range from just a few to thirty, forty, fifty and sixty.  Now, she is strictly known as an author of children's books.  But during her lifetime, she was apparently best known for her children's book or her historical novels or her books for adults or for her plays.  Speaking of her plays, I read that she was a playwright as well as that she didn't write plays, just that her novels that were dramatized for the stage.

Some websites say the critics loved Frances Hodgson Burnett and others say that the critics really disliked her, critiquing her more for her private life than for her writing.  She was considered scandalous.  She married and divorced twice, she earned her own money and controlled it herself, she liked fashion and travel, and was entirely too independent.

Most everything I read agrees that her first marriage was unhappy.  Frances Hodgson met her first husband, Swan Burnett, shortly after arriving in Tennessee as a teenager.  Swan Burnett became a doctor, and I read on one website that she put him through medical school with her earnings as a writer.  Or she just financed his advanced training.  Or her husband was Dr. L. M. Burnett out of Washington, DC.

The most interesting contradictions I found is regarding Frances Hodgson Burnett's second husband.  Some websites state he was an English doctor, a secretary, her business manager, or an actor.  One website stated that he blackmailed her into marriage in order to control her fortune.

With all the contradictions I found, I felt that I had to find out more about Frances Hodgson Burnett.  I downloaded her biography to my Kindle and I should be able to find out the true story of this fascinating woman.

Random Girls

I was taking a break and turned on the TV; Funny Girl was on.  It is a Barbra Streisand movie about and an early Broadway star, Fanny Brice.  And so begins my Google searching!  The movie took some liberties with the real life of Fanny Brice but Barbra Streisand depicted her fairly accurately.  I was surprised how differently Fanny Brice could appear in photographs.  I can definitely see the comedic actress but she wasn’t that ugly.

Fanny Brice

Next, I looked up the Ziegfeld Follies.  They were put on by Florenz Ziegfeld and were around for around 25 years starting around 1910.  I guess they were sort of a cross between more modern Broadway musicals and vaudeville.  The chorus girls, or Ziegfeld Girls, were famous for being beautiful, but I was surprised at how risqué most of their pictures were.  I guess they were the pinups of their time.  Reading a bit more, I found out that many stars got their start as a Ziegfeld Girl (but I recognized more that were turned down by Flo Ziegfeld).

Ziegfeld Girl

Lillian Lorraine was considered the most famous of the Ziegfeld Girls.  Apparently, she had an affair with Flo Ziegfeld and he loved her even after their affair ended.  I looked up her image and was surprised… I think she wasn’t that good looking.

Lillian Lorraine

Researching even more, I found out that the Ziegfeld Girls were preceded by the Floradora Girls.  Floradora was the first of a series of musicals during the late 1800’s and early 1900’s that became really popular.  These chorus girls were not nearly as  risqué as the Ziegfeld Girls.  Amazing what a difference about fifteen years can make!

Floradora Girls

And before the Floradora Girls were the Gibson Girls.  I was expecting the Gibson Girls to be similar to the Floradora and Ziegfeld Girls.  But, instead of being chorus girls on stage, they were a illustrations by an artist, Charles Dana Gibson.  Not real.  In fact, very not real.  I know, that is not grammatically correct but I couldn't believe how unrealistic he depicted women.  He combined two different standards of beauty into an impossible ideal; he wanted a “fragile lady” with the “voluptuous woman”.  In order to reproduce the look of a Gibson Girl, women needed to lean forward and have a tightly cinched waist.  In fact, in order to maintain such a ridiculous posture, a special corset was developed to allow women to depict this artist's ideal.

Edwardian S-Curve Corset

Feeling Nostalgic

My search was a little different this time than what I usually do for these blogs.  Instead of trying to find out new information, something I hadn't heard of before, I used Google to verify the facts and make sure that I had things in the correct chronological order.  And I did have to research the correct name of some of my favorite games.  It doesn't help to say "You know, that game where the guy swung through the trees on a vine and jumped crocodiles."

The very first video game I ever played was Pong.  I was in high school and I loved it!  The only place I knew that had it was a pizza parlor that had several pinball machines and the one Pong machine.  I couldn't get to the pizza parlor because I didn’t have a driver’s license and there were no such things as home gaming consoles.  Pretty soon, other video arcade games showed up but they were pretty bad in my opinion.  It wasn't until I was in college that the good ones came out such as Space Invaders and Asteroids.  The golden age of Pacman and Donkey Kong came out after I graduated.

The first real home video game console to be released was the Atari 2600.  But we never got one before I went to college since money was tight back in those days.  So it took several years before I could afford to buy an Atari 2600 of my own.

I had to get Pong, of course, and Breakout which was a more advanced version of Pong but tipped on its side.  My other favorite games were Space Invaders and Asteroids, Adventure and Haunted House.  I had Pitfall, Berzerk, Missile Command and Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Other games included Dig Dug, Pacman, and Frogger.  There was even an educational one - Brain Games.  I even bought ET the Extra-Terrestrial.  Yes, that one - the video game that was so bad they buried unsold cartridges in the desert someplace in New Mexico; the game that was so bad it almost destroyed video games before they even got started.  In addition to the games I had all the possible controllers – the joystick, the paddle and a keyboard controller.  I continued to play for quite a few years, but after one move I never bothered unpacking my Atari 2600. 

But I still have all of that stuff around someplace.  I never get rid of things.

Night Owl

I have chronic insomnia.  I have had chronic insomnia for as long as I can remember, and it has always been difficult.  I seldom get a regular night's sleep.

I remember being glad to learn how to tell time in first grade.  We had this mantle clock that chimed the hours - at noon it chimed twelve times, at 1:00 it chimed once, at 2:00 it chimed twice, and so on.  When I was awake during the night, I knew what time it was by the chiming of the clock.  But I dreaded the time between 12:30am and 1:30am.  That was because the clock only chimed once for the half hours.  So if it chimed once, I wasn't sure what time it was.  It could be half past the hour or 1:00am.  And if it chimed once two times in a row, I still wasn't sure what time it was.  It could be 1:00am or 1:30am.  But if it chimed once three times in a row, I finally knew what time it was!  It was 1:30 in the morning!  And that was in the first grade!  Now, how many of you know 6 year olds that are awake for hours in the middle of the night?

Having insomnia has wrecked havoc with both school and work, but I have learned to get by with little sleep.  However, as I have gotten older, I sometimes I wonder if it is really insomnia or if I am just a Night Owl.  No matter how tired I am, if I remain awake until 10:00pm then I am remain awake for hours.  It is as if a switch is flipped at 10:00pm and, suddenly, I come alive.  If there is no social requirements for me to get up at a certain time, I naturally fall asleep around 2:00 or 3:00 o'clock in the morning and awaken sometime around 9:00 or 10:00 o'clock in the morning.

So, I decided that tonight's Google search should be the Night Owl.

First of all, Wikipedia is not very informative.  It just defines night owls as people  who stay up until late at night and morning larks as people who get up early.  Next, there were some businesses that had late night hours: bars and lounges and, for some reason, hookah places.  I was surprised by the next listing - sales of night vision goggles.  The first page on Google ended with several blogs ranging in topics from baseball cards to hair products.  Now, I don't know how any oft that is related to being a night owl, but the next few pages were even more baffling.  There were blogs about home decor, a Christian pastor, fishing lures and pediatric urgent care.  Not what I expected when I googled "night owl".

Video Game Muse???

Have you ever been inspired by someone?  Tried to emulate them and fail, miserably?  That happened recently.  I follow a blog in which the author recently spoke of her muses in the kitchen.  Based purely on memory, I thought a muse was an artist’s inspiration based on something Greek. Oh, and there were nine of them.

I looked it up and it turns out that there were nine Greek goddesses that inspired artists, writers and scientists.  So that inspired me to try and google gaming muses.  I thought I would eventually google something about video game inspirations but it was a total disaster!  First of all, google kept trying to correct it to “gaming mouse” instead of “gaming muse”.  When I finally got google to understand I wanted to search for “gaming muse”, I still didn’t get what I expected.  I got either foreign websites, stuff on tumblr, or something about Muse Software.  I kept going deeper into google to see if anything about video game inspiration showed up and when nothing of interest showed up, I switched to “video game muse”.  That didn’t turn up anything either.  <sigh> I am so disappointed.

So, do I write about my own muses in video gaming?  What inspired me to start gaming in the first place?  I don't know.  I am so disappointed but I might revisit this topic at a later time...