Weekly Update 08/08/26 – 08/14/26 (Artillery in Music, Playlists, and Office Progress)

This week's Weekly Update starts with some news about my thyroid cancer and diabetes, along with the progress I'm making on remodeling my office. I also take a look at some of the playlists I've been building and how hearing the 1812 Overture led me down an unexpected path exploring Artillery in Music, from ancient attempts to represent the sounds and feelings of battle to cannons and even a nuclear explosion being incorporated into music.

Hello. I thought I'd start today by updating you on things that are happening with my medical conditions. This week I got the results back from my recent tests, and from my point of view, the results were not great. The TSH reading I got was much higher than we've seen it get in over 10 years. It was almost 5, when for 10 years now or more I've been keeping it at less than 0.5. There was also a small uptick in my thyroglobulin antibody reading, from 2.0 last year to 2.5, so I was interested in hearing what my endocrinologist would have to say when I saw him yesterday.

TSH, or thyroid-stimulating hormone, is the hormone produced by the pituitary gland that tells thyroid cells to start working. Since I should not have any thyroid cells left after my operations, and since this hormone could encourage thyroid cancer cells to become active and start multiplying, in my case, since I have had two recurrences of thyroid cancer, my doctors have wanted that number kept very low. So the fact that it had risen seemed unsettling to me.

As for thyroglobulin, it is a protein that is produced by thyroid cells. Since, as I have said, I have had three operations and three rounds of radioactive iodine to remove the thyroid cells from my body, thyroglobulin is something my doctors monitor for evidence of remaining thyroid tissue or thyroid cancer.

The newer and more sensitive test shows my thyroglobulin at less than 0.02, which is the lowest result the test can report. That means it could actually be zero, but the test cannot distinguish zero from another value below 0.02. The other test measures thyroglobulin antibodies, and that reading is currently 2.5, up from 2.0 last year.

I spoke with my endocrinologist, the doctor who deals with my thyroid cancer, and he feels that the readings are not alarming and that we should stay the course. He feels that the increase in my TSH is most likely the result of me regaining some of the weight that I lost last year when I underwent my episode with diabetic ketoacidosis, and possibly the result of my now being on Mounjaro to help with my diabetes and with weight loss.

To update you on my diabetes, I'm getting my numbers much better controlled now that I'm taking Mounjaro. I've moved up from the starting dose of 2.5 all the way up to my current dose of 10.0, and my numbers are still a little high. We'll see how the 10.0 works. I've also not seen the weight loss that Mounjaro is supposed to help with.

I have noticed that I have been waking each morning with a slight headache and some pain in my right leg, and so I have not been walking this week, but I hope to get back to that soon.

As to the remodel of my office, things are going well. I think instead of replacing the doors, I'm going to go ahead and strip them of the paint and then finish them when we're done. I currently have one closet door that I have applied one gallon of stripper to, and it barely covered, or didn't quite cover, the entire front side, leaving a small portion in one corner that I will have to do later. At $68 a gallon, this is a somewhat expensive process, but I think it will still end up costing less in the long run than buying completely new doors and having to finish them.

Last weekend I got about half my office painted, the part of the office that I have access to while the furniture is still in it, and I think it's starting to look good. I'm using a Sunrise Rose color on the accent wall that will be directly behind me and a sky blue on the other walls. I have mounted a large mirror on one of the walls to help the room feel like it's larger, and I've designed the layout for my Phoenix memorabilia that will go on the wall behind me, as seen when I'm on a Zoom call.

I think I'm making real progress. My current goal is to have the room ready to install the new flooring over Labor Day weekend, and I think I'm going to try to do that myself rather than paying someone to do it for me. I've been looking into it, and I think it's something I can handle.

Things at work are going well. Next week I face the first major goal in my project, to have the software I'm developing or modifying really ready to work within our system rather than the system it was originally designed for. Then I have until mid-October to get the rest of the eBiz functionality integrated into FACTS.

One of the little side projects I have going is developing a set of playlists that I can use for different reasons. I have held for a long time that the only mood-altering substance that I use is music. So I'm working on different playlists for different moods or states of being.

I currently have several. One of them is my Pick Me Up list, which I've made up of songs that I find lift my spirits when I listen to them. This list contains 339 songs so far and takes 20 hours and 51 minutes to play from beginning to end. I usually play it randomized.

I also have a playlist called Energy. These are songs that, when I listen to them, help give me more energy. Most of them are also on the Pick Me Up list, but these are more driving songs that help push me. Songs like the theme from Rocky, "The Heat Is On", "One Night in Bangkok", "The Throne Room" music from Star Wars, "The Imperial March" from The Empire Strikes Back, and "Mean Green Mother from Outer Space." It only has 30 songs and takes only two hours to play.

There is a playlist I call Sad Love Songs that I use when I'm very blue. I have also asked that it be played at my funeral. It starts with my two favorite songs, "Another Suitcase in Another Hall" from Evita and "Close Every Door" from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. Then it continues with "Bright Eyes", "I'm Going to Go Back There Someday" by the Muppets, "Memory" from Cats, "Learn to Be Lonely", and finally "Goodbye to Love" by the Carpenters. All songs that talk about how I feel about life.

I also have several playlists set up that do not have words that I need to pay attention to, songs that can really work as background. Not elevator music, but things I enjoy that can make a backdrop for me. I'm working on several lists. One of them I call "Without Words Jazz," which is really more jazz tunes and modern tunes. I compare that to another list that I'm working on called "Without Words Orchestral," which contains different classical and orchestral pieces. This list has 175 songs on it and takes 15 hours to play.

I was playing that list this week on random, and one of the pieces that played was the 1812 Overture, and that got me thinking. Thinking about the 1812 Overture and a piece that is often paired with it, Beethoven's Wellington's Victory. I think when deciding what to play, conductors select these two because they both have cannons.

The whole idea of artillery in music occurred to me, and I started to wonder how two things so disconnected as the life-affirming power of music and the life-destroying power of war became joined together. So I went to Astra (ChatGPT) and asked for a history of artillery in music.

Artillery in Music

Gunpowder was first recorded in China in 1044, but the idea of representing battle through music and performance has been around much longer. It goes back at least to the ancient Greeks in the 4th or 5th century BC, with things such as the Greek Pyrrhic Dance, or Pyrrhichios, a dance that Plato describes as imitating the movements of combat, including avoiding blows and missiles and attacking an opponent.

By the early 1300s, cannons had appeared in Europe.

Sometime in the late 1300s, an artist known as Grimace introduced a composition called Alarme, alarme that the Harvard Dictionary of Music identifies as an early, or "incipient," example of the battaglia, the musical form in which composers imitate fanfares, cries, drum rolls, and the general commotion of battle.

By the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance, European composers were experimenting with representing the sounds of warfare. In 1528, Clément Janequin's La Guerre became one of the first major surviving works to turn the sounds and progression of an actual battle into an elaborate musical composition. It was about the French victory at the Battle of Marignano, and Janequin tried to use human voices to imitate the sounds of battle, including cannon.

In the 1500s, as cannons became more standardized and mobile, they also became associated with royal power, military victory, ceremony, spectacle, and national prestige. Military music and artillery existed alongside one another before composers began deliberately incorporating the sound or symbolism of cannon into concert music.

By the early 18th century, artillery was becoming a permanent, professional military institution rather than specialized equipment assembled only when needed.

In 1749, George Frideric Handel composed Music for the Royal Fireworks for the massive London celebration marking the end of the War of the Austrian Succession. While the music was composed specifically for a celebration that included fireworks, the fireworks themselves were not part of the musical score the way cannon effects later would be in pieces like the 1812 Overture.

In the late 1700s, European composers were also incorporating what was called "Turkish" military music, particularly percussion associated with Ottoman Janissary bands. Bass drums, cymbals, triangles, and related percussion entered European orchestral writing and conveyed military associations.

Joseph Haydn's Symphony No. 100, Military, premiered in London in 1794. Its second movement uses trumpet, bass drum, triangle, and cymbals to create a distinctly military atmosphere.

So now warfare was no longer merely associated with the occasion surrounding the music. The orchestra itself was depicting warfare.

In 1813, Beethoven created Wellington's Victory, or the Battle of Vittoria, Op. 91, commemorating Wellington's defeat of French forces at the Battle of Vitoria in Spain.

Beethoven used the existing British song "Rule, Britannia!" to represent the British forces and the French tune "Malbrouck s'en va-t-en guerre", better known to many of us today as the tune of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," to represent the French forces. So no, as I have often wondered, Beethoven did not write "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow." I must admit I'm a little disappointed. For years, because of hearing this piece, I thought Beethoven did write it.

Then, of course, came Tchaikovsky and the 1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky did not originally intend for someone to roll a cannon into a concert hall. His correspondence indicates that the "cannon" effect could be produced by a large theatrical drum used to imitate cannon fire. But, as we all know, that sound eventually led to real artillery being used in performances.

And while not necessarily requiring artillery, there have been many attempts to capture the sounds, atmosphere, or experience of warfare in 20th-century music, including Sergei Prokofiev's Cantata for the 20th Anniversary of the October Revolution (1936 to 1937), Dmitri Shostakovich's Symphony No. 7, Leningrad, Benjamin Britten's War Requiem (1962), and Malcolm Arnold's A Grand, Grand Overture, Op. 57 (1956).

And that brings us from cannon to nuclear weapons. As far as I know, the only example of the sound of a nuclear weapon actually being incorporated into modern music can be found at the end of a song by the Tuff Darts entitled "(Your Love Is Like) Nuclear Waste." The song ends with the sound of a nuclear explosion, and on the original vinyl release the explosion continues in the record's locked groove until you lift the needle.

Over the years I have undergone more than my share of tests and treatments involving radioactive substances, and "(Your Love Is Like) Nuclear Waste" has become a friend that I listen to while I am undergoing them. I have even recommended it on various online discussion boards for other thyroid cancer patients to use during their treatments.

Well, I hope you all have a great week.

— Odell Sneeden Hathaway III

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Weekly Update 08/01/26 – 08/07/26 (25 Years, Wildfire Smoke, and a Better Mouse)