pac man fever

there once was a band named arcadia. they released one album: So Red the Rose. wikipedia tells us that "some versions of the album and related singles contained a numeric code in their artwork, though versions in some countries simply used randomized numbers which did not decipher to anything intelligible. The code was a simple substitution cipher, numbering the letters of the alphabet. A=1, B=2, C=3, etc."

Wikipedia has more to say. arcadia the band perhaps took the name from a latin phrase.

"Et in Arcadia ego" is a Latin phrase that most famously appears as the title of two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594–1665). They are pastoral paintings depicting idealized shepherds from classical antiquity, clustering around an austere tomb. The more famous second version of the subject, measuring 122 by 85 cm, is in the Louvre, Paris, and also goes under the name "Les bergers d'Arcadie" ("The Arcadian Shepherds"). It has been highly influential in the history of art and more recently has been associated with the pseudohistory of the Priory of Sion popularised in the books Holy Blood, Holy Grail and The Da Vinci Code.

The phrase is a memento mori, which is usually interpreted to mean "I am also in Arcadia" or "I am even in Arcadia", as if spoken by personified Death. However, Poussin's biographer, Andre Felibien, interpreted it to mean that "the person buried in this tomb has lived in Arcadia"; in other words, that they too once enjoyed the pleasures of life on earth. The former interpretation is generally considered to be more likely. Either way, the sentiment was meant to set up an ironic contrast by casting the shadow of death over the usual idle merriment that the nymphs and swains of ancient Arcadia were thought to embody.

Due to its remote, mountainous character, Arcadia has always been a classical refuge. So during the Dorian invasion, when Mycenaean Greek was replaced with Doric Greek along the coast of the Peloponnes, it survived in Arcadia, developing into the Arcadocypriot dialect of Classical Antiquity. Arcadocypriot never became a literary dialect, but it is known from inscriptions. Tsan is a letter of the Greek alphabet occurring only in Arcadia, shaped like cyrillic И; it represents an affricate that developed from labiovelars in context where they became t in other dialects. Tsakonian Greek , still spoken on the coast of the modern prefecture of Arcadia, in the Classical period considered the southern Argolid coast immediately adjoining Arcadia, is a descendant of Doric Greek, and as such is an extraordinary and much noted example of a surviving regional dialect of Classical Greek. The capital of Tsakonia is the Arcadian coastal town of Leonidi.

One of the birth-places reported for Zeus is Mount Lycaeum in Arcadia. Lycaon, a cannibalistic Pelasgian king, was transformed into a werewolf by Zeus. Lycaon's daughter was Callisto. It was also said to have been the birthplace of Zeus' son, Hermes.

Arcadia remained a rustic, secluded area, and its inhabitants became proverbial as primitive herdsmen leading simple pastoral unsophisticated yet happy lives, to the point that Arcadia may refer to some imaginary idyllic paradise, immortalized by Virgil's Eclogues, and later by Jacopo Sannazaro in his pastoral masterpiece, Arcadia (1504); see also Arcadia (paradise).

learn more about the proverbial at arcadia(utopia).

secret codes and utopias aside, arcadia is real. but was there ever really a song that went:

I've got a pocket full of quarters
going to the arcade
going to play Pac-Man!

because i used to sing it, and there was a dance that went along.