What is it about melody that helps us memorize words and lyrics?

This can be explained by "earworms," which are melodies that get stuck in your head. Advertisers use this with catchy melodic jingles. If you find yourself walking around singing the Baby Back Ribs commercial, you are the victim of an earworm.

Now, a series from Berlitz called Earworms Learning has put this annoying phenomenon to good use, by creating audio CDs designed to drill a foreign language into your head. They do this by using the same catchy melodies utilized by advertising agencies.

Are you a skeptic? Quick: How do you say, "Do you want to sleep with me tonight?" in French?

In case you're too young to know the answer: "Voulez vous coucher avec moi, ce soir?"

For you geeky types who need to know the science behind everything, according to the Earworms Learning website, extensive research has been conducted by the Bulgarian physician Georgi Lozanov, who discovered that "music puts listeners into a state of relaxed alertness, the alpha state, the ideal state of consciousness for learning."

The Earworms Learning Program comes in two volumes. In volume one, you'll learn basic travel dialogue, that will help you order at a restaurant, shop, ask for directions and other useful conversational tidbits. Volume two teaches you to hold a conversation and actually talk about yourself. Courses are available in French, Spanish, Italian, Greek, and more.
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Boats take you into the enormous crater, because it’s full of the sea now. The main towns on the island, Fira and Oia, are perched at the top of the rim. The whitewashed buildings lining the top of the brown cliffs remind me of snow-capped mountains, but it’s much too hot for that today!

The result of this arrangement is that it’s a loooong way down (almost 600 steps) from the town to the waterfront, or a long way up the other way! The traditional way to do this is by donkey. Being a person who loves to walk, I decided to take the steps on my own two feet down to meet a boat one morning. Sure enough, I met many donkeys on the path, carting tourists up the steps. In fact, you can pretty much find your way to the stairs by following your nose.

Our Greece guide, Susan, warned me about this.

In the morning, it’s OK, but as the day goes by, you’ve got to watch out for more and more steaming, fragrant piles. By late in the day, the local guides call it the giant donkey poo luge.”

The morning walk wasn’t bad, but when I returned that afternoon, I took the new-fangled cable car to the top instead.

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I’m in Greece now, checking out some options for a new Greek Islands tour. Santorini is definitely worth a stop, but if you decide to take the stairs to the old port, morning is recommended!

Related posts:

1. Photo: Mazelike streets of Mykonos
2. Shirley Valentine -- Greece movie recommendation
3. I never intended to become

Click for larger image

On the Greek island of Mykonos, the main town is full of tiny winding streets like this. Well, kind of like this, except that they're often full of shops and people!

As you wander through the streets, it feels a lot like you're walking through a labyrinth. It's most fun if you're wandering without a fixed destination, just taking in the sights (and perhaps a few of those shops)!

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I'm in Greece now, visiting a few islands in conjunction with plans for a new women's trip to Greece. It's so gorgeous in the islands -- it gives me fantasies of moving here, just like Shirley Valentine.

Related posts:

1. Photo: Greek Islands, relaxing on the yacht
2. Photo: Sailing away in the BVI
3. Photo: The miraculous Santuario de Chimayo

(click for large image)

The yacht's tied up at the pier, and it's time to relax. I don't remember for sure, but I bet they were talking about dinner plans or sightseeing options (perhaps over a cocktail?), while I was taking pictures.

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We charter a 90-ft private yacht to take us around the Greek islands on our women's trip to Greece. It's a tough life (scratch that, I cannot tell a lie) a heavenly way to travel! With the soaring Euro, we may not be able to keep this up in the future, but for 2008 it's the only way to go!
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Related posts:

1. Greek Myths - soap opera of the gods
2. Photo: Mazelike streets of Mykonos
3. Photo: Sailing away in the BVI

How to cover such a huge topic in less than an hour? They touched briefly on at least a dozen topics that left me wanting to know more. A few of the points:

• Some of the mythical figures, and stories of murder, incest, and eating your young ("completely bonkers" according to one of the participants)
• The different ages of Greece, and the relationship of history and myth
• The evolution and purpose of myth ("distilling 2000 years of scholarship into about a minute", as another participant said)
• The great Greek tragedies competing with each other
• And one thought totally new to me -- Pandora as Eve?

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In Our Time: The Greek Myths

If you're not familiar with this show, it's a wide-ranging show about "the history of ideas", with recent episodes covering such diverse topics as Newton's Laws, Kierkegaard, the Statue of Liberty, and (of course) the Greek Myths. I get it as a podcast. Check it out at In Our Time.

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If you're going on our Greece trip for women, you'll find this especially interesting! You'll be seeing some of these places in person. You might even stand in the very room at Mycenae where Clytemnestra killed her husband Agamemnon... (no-one knows for sure!)
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Related posts:

1. Photo: Greek Islands, relaxing on the yacht
2. Shirley Valentine -- Greece movie recommendation
3. The Pitt connection

It’s a 1989 movie about a British woman who's resigned to (and sick of) her routine, loveless existence. Quite by chance she gets an opportunity to spend a fortnight in Greece. While there, she discovers both a new love for life, and the self she thought she'd lost forever.

It's definitely a chick flick, though I bet most of us over the age of 30 have had many of the same thoughts & feelings. One of my favorite parts is where she muses

I've allowed myself to lead this little life, while inside me there was so much more. And it's all gone unused. ... Why do we get all this life, if we don't ever use it? Why do we get all these feelings, and dreams, and hope, if we don't ever use them? That's where Shirley Valentine went. She got lost in all this unused life."

Recommended for (mostly women, but hey, a lot of us feel the same):

Anybody who's wondering what happened to the life they dreamed of
Anybody who's wondered what happened to the person they used to be
Anybody thinking of visiting the Greek Islands

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We're doing our next women's trip to the Greek Islands in June. While your trip is unlikely to be the same as Shirley's, I know from experience that it can be a rejuvenating, life-affirming adventure. Even if you're not going to Greece, the movie is still recommended.
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Related posts:

1. Greece: Lost city of the Mycenaeans discovered
2. Photo: Mazelike streets of Mykonos
3. I never intended to become

This is really a remarkable find. It is rare indeed to locate an entire town built during the Late Bronze Age that shows this level of preservation. … Because of soil erosion and tectonic subsidence, much of the soil had already been stripped from the site,so the architectural remains of about 20 acres of closely built structures were plainly visible.”

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Clues indicate that the city (known as Korphos Kalamianos) was built between 1200 and 1400 BC. It was likely a military outpost or fortress, possibly to protect the harbor. Directly across the gulf, the ancient city of Kolonna on the island of Aigina was a rival of Mycenae.

EurekAlert: Professor exploring a 'lost' city of the Mycenaeans

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We visit Mycenae on our Greece tour for women, and it's a very cool place. This is where King Agamemnon reigned, the leader of the Greek forces in the Trojan war. It's remarkable to stand here and realize how advanced they were 3500 years ago.
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Related posts:

1. Shirley Valentine -- Greece movie recommendation
2. Rome: Eternal city 100 years ago = deja vu!
3. The Pitt connection

The reason I promoted this to the head of my Netflix list was because our Greece trips this year include a visit to Mycenae, the powerful city that was home of King Agamemnon, who was leader of the Greek armies in the Trojan War.

The movie took a number of artistic liberties in rearranging the story, but then nobody knows how accurate the version in Homer's The Iliad was, either. There have been many centuries for people to take artistic liberties between the original events and now!

Most experts today believe the story of the Trojan War is based at least generally on fact, but perhaps it's a condensation of multiple campaigns that occurred over many decades, all rolled into one neat story line.

We may never know if the Trojan horse ruse ever really took place. But we do know that the city of Mycenae was center of a powerful kingdom over 3000 years ago. The stones are standing to prove it. The same amateur archaeologist, Heinrich Schliemann, discovered both Mycenae and Troy, back in the 1800’s when most people had written them off as myth. Now that’s the stuff that archaeologists’ dreams are made of!

One quote from the movie that caught my attention…

War is young men dying and old men talking.”
~ Odysseus (played by Sean Bean in the movie)

Some things never change!

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We visit Mycenae on our women’s trip to Greece. There’s something magical about standing in the ruins of a city over 3000 years old. Though quiet today, you can imagine kings and great warriors coming and going, and the bustling sense of importance.
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Related posts:

1. Greece: Lost city of the Mycenaeans discovered
2. Greek Myths - soap opera of the gods
3. Photo: Mazelike streets of Mykonos

Like many who travel to Europe and pay for European goods and services, I've spent plenty of time the past couple of years bemoaning how the US Dollar has sunk in comparison. Everything in Europe gets more and more expensive. Then on the home front, the cost of gas has risen substantially, so airplane tickets are up, and even driving trips in the US get more expensive! Oh, woe is us...

But compare it to a REALLY bad time, and all of a sudden, it seems like we're downright fortunate and prosperous.

During the German occupation of Greece (1941 to 1944), the monthly inflation rate peaked at 8.55 billion percent. Prices doubled every 28 hours. By 1944, they were printing 100 trillion drachma notes.

Daily Frappe: Greece hyperinflation - how far we've come...

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While our Greek Islands yacht trips would certainly be a lot cheaper with their currency in that state, I wouldn't wish that on anyone! We visit this fascinating country twice a year, and I'm happy that they're doing well. (Though I may continue to moan privately about the exchange rate!)
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Related posts:

1. Photo: Greek Islands, relaxing on the yacht
2. Greek Myths - soap opera of the gods
3. Shirley Valentine -- Greece movie recommendation

The British Museum in London is home to the Elgin Marbles, many of the finest sculptures from the Parthenon in Athens. It's an impressive display, but what we see today is a lot different than they looked back in their day.

Today, you see white marble carvings, but originally they were brightly painted, so that people could make out the scenes when they were high up on the Parthenon.

A new film on permanent display in the museum shows how these would have been. Using computers, they virtually reconstructed the sculpture, reuniting the body of the scene with the missing heads (now in Copenhagen). Then they applied the color.

The results are amazing! The battle scenes come to life with vivid emotion and fear. You get an entirely different impression than looking at the physical carvings.

See BBC NEWS | Fear and fury among the Marbles

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Our Greece trips for women begin in Athens, and you can see the Parthenon from the hotel’s rooftop pool. I’m always on the lookout for interesting, relevant items, and will post whatever I find in our Greece category.
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Related posts:

1. Greeks go for all the marbles
2. Greek Myths - soap opera of the gods
3. Photo: Greek Islands, relaxing on the yacht