Dave Siglin was gracious enough to design a neo-Baroque (?) invitation for my voice recital:

The invite is available for download in PNG format (180kb), JPEG format (112kb), and vector-based PDF format (2.34mb) which looks great at just about any resolution. Come to the War Memorial Chapel Saturday at 7 and hear works by J.S. Bach, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and G.F. Handel. See you there!

As a friend of mine noted Friday afternoon (for an entirely different reason), “It’s the first day of summer.”

Yes, friends, it’s time for me to get myself deeply involved in another controversy raging around the ship we call Fundamentalism. Perhaps you’re local to the Greenville, SC area. Perhaps you’ve heard that Greenville “native” Chris Sligh is one of the finalists on American Idol, the overblown talent show where aspiring pop singers put their spin (or not) on old (or not) rock songs (or not) in the hopes of landing a large recording contract and becoming famous (or not). If you live in Greenville and didn’t know this, we may safely assume you live under a rock in the Pumpkintown area. (Pumpkintown, BTW, is a nice place. Just don’t blink driving through it or you might miss it entirely.)
Click for more…

I don’t know if I’ve announced this, but the online map of which my title speaks has gone through a semi-major rewrite and is now ready for public consumption. The Map (following in such traditions as The Calendar [also being announced for the first time] and the more-well-known The List) is a neat combination of technologies and open-source hacking that allows me to enter (through a fairly kludgy process) all the Quartet’s engagements past and present on an interactive Google map. You can change which year you’re looking at; years are color-coded; pending visits are marked with little tags; and completed visits are marked with large markers. Each marker when clicked will bring up a bubble displaying the church name, address, and website (where applicable).

Along the same lines, The Calendar is another Google venture, this time simply my shared Quartet calendar listing the dates and times of services. Quite incomplete at the moment, since it only goes through May (which, incidentally, is how far my Groupwise calendar is filled), but as time goes on I’ll get more and more into that. I might even add an auto-post for each weekend that we’re out. Who knows? The future is bright at mounty’s corner. A little too, bright, actually. Someone want to kill a few of those lights?

This morning at work I was talking with my “cubicle” mates about the opera. (BTW, the Rigoletto was fantastic. Todd Thomas and Megan Monaghan represented Philly well, and they both have cannons for voices. Wow. I had great seats, too - aisle 4 left, H7 is where I ended up, which is basically front and center. Yeah, it was great.) I pointed out that in operatic literature, for the most part, the voice parts seemed to be character references. When’s the last time you saw an evil tenor? A pure-at-heart bass/baritone? A chaste alto or mezzo? A living soprano? All the operas at BJU so far:
Click for more…

Life in the tech support field can be…interesting…at times. Not at all unrewarding; in fact it opens up the chance to meet and interact with people that I would otherwise never get to see in such a way. Take last night and this afternoon, for instance. BJU’s putting on a production of Verdi’s Rigoletto next week, and as usual we’re bringing in outside singers for the lead roles. I don’t know what the official policy word on this is - I suspect it has something to do with not killing our already-hard-working voice faculty and having the unique way to share the gospel of Christ to visitors who otherwise would have no reason to step onto campus.
Click for more…

I’m thinking of writing a how-to manual. I will call it “How to OD on Life.” It will be grand.
Click for more…