Like a lot of kids my age, I would occasionally turn on Transformers for the cartoon du jour. I mean, c’mon - what can top the combination of cool cars, trucks, and planes AND evil robots bent on world domination fighting noble robots dedicated to saving humankind from their clutches? It’s a perfect combo! I even had a few of the toys, and yes, I will admit to making that cool swooshing noise as I unfolded a Lamborghini Diablo into a good guy robot. So imagine my surprise when one of my favorite composers, Steve Jablonsky, teamed up with producer Michael Bay to score a live-action remake of the timeless animated classic. The result: Transformers, which landed the spot of the action movie of the summer. Not bad for a kid’s cartoon show.
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The Quartet was on the road again this weekend (is on the road, rather - I’m typing this from a motel in Taylorville, IL) and we got to do something that I don’t think I’ll ever do again: sing the National Anthem at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. Okay, so it was just us, the rest of the tour group, and a few guys who had paid big bucks for Allison Transmissions to take them for a spin around the 2.5 mile track in a pickup, but it was still pretty cool. When the tour guide found out our identity, he had us step up in the winners’ podium (where the National Anthem is typically sung at the Indy 500) and sing for the crowd. Expect a video on YouTube sometime after we get back.

After that coolness (not to mention all the other stuff there - the IMS is really a nifty place to tour) we went to sing at a church in Dennison, IL. After the service, we stepped outside and waited for the last folks from church to leave. That left us, Bussy, and a whole slew of stars above. It was so clear and so dark that we could barely pick out constellations for all the stars that were up there. I recognized the Big Dipper and Scorpio (I think), but the really neat thing was that from horizon to horizon there was a cloudy band of stars - that, folks, is the edge of our particular arm of the galaxy. Yes - the Milky Way Galaxy was spread out above us tonight. I’d heard about that but have never seen anything quite like it before, and let me say it was absolutely stunning. To see that many stars sprinkled above the earth like that…truly God is an amazing God!

So that’s all from IL. Go Eagles, go Penn State, and go Pig Sty Esquires, my fantasy team on ESPN, who are 1-0 after solidly trouncing Davey last week. Woo hoo!

German’s a fun language. It’s got all sorts of harsh sounds that are (for the most part) actually very easy to spit out. That’s the key - you just gotta fire the words out like you’ve got a hairball or something. So I’m at work this afternoon, listening to J.S. Bach’s cantata BWV 80, Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. The English words are, let’s face it, a little clunky. It is, after all, an English translation that is trying to catch both the meaning and the metrics of the original German. (Remind you of any other translation discussions?) The fifth movement, which is the second full chorus movement, has a particularly sturdy text:

Und wenn die Welt voll Teufel waer
Und wollten uns verschlingen,
So fuerchten wir uns nicht so sehr,
Es soll uns doch gelingen.
Der Fuerst dieser Welt,
Wie saur er sich stellt;
Tut er uns doch nicht,
Das macht, er ist gericht’t,
Ein Woertlein kann ihn faellen.

In English: the whole thing.

As a singer, I have to say that singing along at my desk was one of the little joys today. The second line is particularly fun to spit out. Remember that the “w” is pronounced as a “v” and that the “v” is pronounced as an “f.” Also remember that most two-vowel combinations just tend to glide off the tongue - “fuerchten” (third line) is pronounced “FEAR-hten” with the “fear” pronounced with a bit of a snarl and the “h” as in “human.”

Enjoy your pronunciation and remember to wipe off your monitor and keyboard when you’re through, especially if you’re not at your computer. Eww…

First day back to work after a 10-day “vacation.” Came in late because (after coming into Greenville late) I got four hours of sleep. No sooner (literally less than five seconds) had I sat down in my chair for the first time in who knows how long and the phone rings - it’s one of our security consultants in Atlanta wanting to go over his software that I was supposed to have been testing for the last three weeks. Let’s back up, shall we?
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Before we pull out of Moncton this morning I thought I’d take time out to write about yesterday.

I slept.
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After pulling out of Saint John yesterday afternoon for more sightseeing (let me say that the Bay of Fundy is one of the most picturesque places I’ve ever seen) we headed up to Fredericton (2 hours north [nord]) for a church service, then east (est) an hour and a half to Moncton, where we’ve got two days here. The service last night was great - lots of folks came out and (I think) were blessed by the music. Apparently folks up here just don’t get traveling groups from anywhere that we’re familiar with in the States. Whether it’s because they can’t “afford” these groups (though we don’t actually charge anything to come up) or because they’re too remote for most groups to make it worth their while, I’m not sure. But I do know that everywhere we’ve gone we’ve been gratefully received, and that’s really cool. Thanks, Canada!
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I just realized today how…well, pedantic the French language appears to be. Take English: you’ve got a noun (lane) and an adjective (right). Put them together and you have “the right lane.” The article is usually unnecessary, so we have an economy of words - two ideas, two words, off you go.

Then there’s these signs around New Brunswick: “Fin de la voite de droit.” As far as my limited understanding goes, that is the title of this post in French. “Right lane ends” as opposed to “the end of the lane of the right.” Why??
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It has been one day and a half here in the Maratimes. Not only did the Calvary Quartet sing to two packed out churches, but the Phillies set a new MLB record by losing their 10,000th game. In 126 years of franchise play, no team before this afternoon had lost that many games. Now the Phillies are in the record books…not for winning (or anything else positive, for that matter) but for losing. Appropriately enough, the Phils are the losingest team in major league sports. How’s that for fame?

So yeah, Maratimes, singing, boating, etc. etc. etc. It was a long day. Fun, but still long. The alarm is not going to be set for tomorrow morning. Sightseeing for a few hours, sure, but not before lunch. So now I can’t really keep my eyes open, and I keep typing very strange things while I’m writing this post. Not just typos, but completely different words. Very annoying. I’m going to stop now…before I type something embarrassing…

So this is it - day one (two?) of the Calvary Quartet World Tour…otherwise known as the “Canada trip.” It started Friday at 4 (eastern) with the promise of 24 hours straight driving. It was smooth skies all the way to the St. Stephen, NB, border crossing…where we met…HER.
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Today’s Independence Day! Unless you’re not from the USA, in which case you’re probably a smidge annoyed by the fact that we get to take the day off, shove pig parts cooked a dozen different ways down our throats all day, then watch enough explosions to turn the Swiss Alps into The Flattest Place on Earth go off overhead, then go home and blow our neighbor’s lawns up, all because we’re American and we can! This, by the way, is a somewhat disturbing trend in this country, doing things because we can. But I’ll leave the nepotism out of it if you promise not to start a political flame war in the comments. Please do not feed the trolls.
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I’m sure most people in Greenville will hate me for this (BTW, I just misspelled that town name - in an unusual irony, it came out as “GreenVILE”) but I just saw a great sunset…from the water’s edge at Clearwater Beach on the beautiful Gulf of Mexico. Fine white sand, a nice pleasant breeze, not too salty but definitely more robust than an inland breeze…it’s great. We’re singing at Hillsdale Baptist Church in Tampa Sunday morning and afternoon, but who could miss hitting the beach for the day before singing on Sunday?
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This weekend has capped what may possibly be my busiest week since August of last year. Note: I don’t mind being busy. In fact I rather like it. It’s just when I get busy and exhausted that I get a little loopy.
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On today’s date, two hundred sixty five years ago in Dublin, Ireland, George Frederic Handel’s Messiah enjoyed its world premier. Nowadays, the piece enjoys annual performances all across the world. But it was not always so. The first American performance of the work was in a New York City tavern, as a benefit concert. And while most folks today who enjoy the finer arts will at least acknowledge, if not enjoy, such performances, that, too, was not always so. In fact, in 1862, shortly after the start of the American Civil War, the New York Tribune had this to say about such repeat performances of Messiah: Click for more…

My recital’s done and over with. That’s a huge load off my shoulders! It went well - the mistakes that were made were largely unnoticeable if you’re not intimately familiar with the nuances of my facial expressions (which are quite nuanced, to the point that I can be quite excited without looking like it). I did have one of those “catharsis” moments right before my last piece on the program - some of you might have noticed the lopsided, almost goofy grin as I came back out. My last piece (from which the title was drawn) involved a chorus of 10 highly talented singers. The six girls in the group were to come onstage from the wing where I was hanging out, rehydrating, madly studying notes and words, etc. I stepped off after the Vaughan Williams selection, and they were all back there, a excited buzz in the air. Someone in the group wanted to know when they should leave the stage; I told them to wait until after I came back out for the customary “curtain call,” since “I [couldn’t] get back on while [they’re] getting off” (actual quote). Immediately, one of the girls piped up, “So…what are you saying? That we’re all fat?”
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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!

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.)
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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:
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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.
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We’ll call this a press release:
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