The Holiday Season 2013

My annual holiday message:

Tomorrow, of course, is Christmas. If you're celebrating Christmas, may you have a merry one, full of happiness.

It's also Isaac Newton's birthday, something I always like to commemorate given my background in Physics.

And back in the month of November, I celebrated the festival of Chanukah. Let's take each of these in turn.

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So that's it. To all my Christian friends, as I said before, may you have a merry and joyous Christmas. To all my Jewish friends, I hope you had a happy Chanukah. To all my friends who celebrate some other holiday of the season, may it be for good. And for those of my friends who celebrate no holiday at all, may you enjoy a good start to the Gregorian New Year of 2014.

Telengard's Jewel-Encrusted Thrones

Apropos of nothing...

When my brothers Joshua, Jonathan, and I were younger and we had a Commodore 64 computer, we used to play a dungeon-adventure game called Telengard. In the game, you moved an adventurer through a dungeon looking to kill monsters and acquire treasure.

One of the things you might find on your travels was a jewel-encrusted throne, and the text that popped up with the graphics on the screen read something as follows:

"You see a jewel-encrusted throne. Do you want to (s)it down, (r)ead some runes or (p)ry some jewels, or (i)gnore it?"

The thing is, when you encountered one of these thrones, the most recognizable musical theme from In The Hall of the Mountain King from Peer Gynt would play. It so happened that the question on the screen scanned to the music, so the three of us would sing the song to the music each and every time before deciding what to do. And it got to the point where we would sing it away from the game so often that I even can do it today.

It turned out that gnomi played Telengard on an Apple IIe as she was growing up, and she used to sing the words to the music as well.

It never occurred to me to wonder, but now I do: did the person or people who programmed the game know that that music scanned? Is that why they chose it? To this day, do they know how much they ear-wormed those of us who played Telengard?

Or was it just an odd coincidence?