Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Barbershop Chorus
My interest in Barbershop was whetted back in the 70s by a brother-in-law who sang baritone with a couple of championship quartets.
I’ve harbored a not-so-secret desire to sing Barbershop myself for many years so I was in proverbial heaven tonight when I attended my first practice with our local Barbershop chorus. There were only 9 guys present but all vocal positions were represented…3 basses, 3 leads, 1 (quite good) tenor and 2 baritones (myself included).
Practice ran for almost 2-1/2 hours. We performed a wide range of vocal exercises and received extensive instruction about proper breathing using the diaphragm before rehearsing several songs as a group. My favorite part of the evening was the last 15-20 minutes when we randomly split up into quartets and had fun with a variety of tags. Honestly, I was not familiar with any of the songs but picked up on them relatively quickly.
Is it next Tuesday yet?
{extended}Sunday, May 25, 2008
Church at the park
As has been the custom on Memorial Day eve for the last several years, our church ditched the normal 6:00 pm service and went to a local park for games and food.
Saturday, May 24, 2008
Break in the shade
Nothing like a break in the shade after a hard session of bike riding.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Chapman daughter struck, killed by car in driveway
My Lord…I gasped when I read this.
One of contemporary Christian music star Steven Curtis Chapman’s six children was killed this afternoon when she was struck by a car said to be driven by her teenage brother in the driveway of the family’s Williamson County home.
The child, Maria, age 5, was taken by LifeFlight to Vanderbilt Hospital, which confirmed the death, according to Laura McPherson, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Highway Patrol.
She was hit by an SUV driven by her teenage brother, she said. Police did not give the driver’s name.
The teen was driving a Toyota Land Cruiser down the driveway of the rural home at about 5:30 p.m. and several children were playing in the area, McPherson said. He did not see the 5-year-old in the driveway before the vehicle struck her, she said.
“It appears to be a terrible accident,’’ McPherson said.
No charges are expected, she said. The accident was witnessed by two other children; the entire family was home at the time, McPherson said.
Veteran singer/songwriter Chapman and his wife Mary Beth have long been supporters of international adoption, having brought three girls from China into their family. Maria is one of their adopted daughters.
The couple is so active they formed an organization, Shaohannah’s Hope, to aid families wanting to adopt.
The tragedy was announced during services at Harpeth Hills Church of Christ, which the family attends. The young girl had just graduated from the church preschool.
Most of the family was at Vanderbilt children’s hospital after the accident and could not be contacted.
The long gravel driveway leading to the home west of Franklin was blocked off by Williamson County sheriff’s deputies.
“The critical response team of the THP is reconstructing the accident,” McPherson said. “The district attorney’s office was consulted.”
Chapman was in the news in April when he was inducted into the Music City Walk of Fame.
[source article from the Tennessean]
{extended}Saturday, May 17, 2008
Who dressed these children?
Friday, May 16, 2008
After quake, many inquiries from Chinese about adoptions
Already, the survivors of China’s earthquake are putting together their own makeshift families. In the Jiuzhou Stadium in Chengdu, where thousands are being housed, volunteer Melody Zhang says she met a “nice-looking” one made up of a mother, a father, a grandfather and two children—from four different families.
“They just naturally took care of each other,” says Ms. Zhang, the associate director of adoption agency Children’s Hope International, who has been delivering supplies in Sichuan province.
As the focus of the earthquake relief effort in Sichuan turns to aiding survivors, China is witnessing an outpouring of requests by other Chinese to adopt children orphaned by the disaster. The provincial Sichuan Internal Affairs Bureau has set up an adoption hotline and says it has received hundreds of enquires from elsewhere in the country. So many people were trying to call it on Friday that the hotline almost always gave a busy signal.
[Read the full article at The Wall Street Journal.]
{extended}Thursday, May 15, 2008
What is one thing you’ve never done that you would like to do?
Got a question for ya’...
What is one thing you’ve never done that you would like to do?
I’ll start.
My father was a B-29 bomber pilot in WW II. The little island of Tinian was captured by the United States in July 1944 and converted into an airbase from which many bombing runs originated including the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Dad flew from Tinian and I would love to visit that island.
{extended}Wednesday, May 14, 2008
‘Electric Company’ returning to the air
Sesame Workshop is developing a new, updated version of the 1970s kid’s show The Electric Company for PBS. Shooting on the new program, which will run weekly, probably starting next January, started this week in Manhattan.
The original show, which featured Morgan Freeman and Rita Moreno, ran original episodes from 1971-77, and aired reruns through 1985. The new series will consist of 26 half-hour episodes and plans to move into books, games, and digital media.
Read an article from E! Online.
{extended}Tuesday, May 13, 2008
A hair experiment
Pearle Vision’s Mother’s Day commercial
There was a huge stink on Friday over NBC’s current ‘America’s Favorite Mom’ contest.
On the contest website, moms were categorized as military moms, working moms, single moms or COE “Chairman of Everything” moms. Oh yeah, there was one more category. Grandmothers, stepmoms and moms to adopted children were under the category of “non-mom” moms. No lie.
Those idiots at NBC and Teleflora may not get it but Pearle Vision does. This company ran a 30-second commercial on Mother’s Day with a mother and her two daughters - one biological and one adopted from China. The mother says, “I have seen tears in the eyes of an abandoned child in China. And even though I knew I was taking her to a better place, all she knew is that she was being taken away. I have seen my daughters, born on opposite sides of the earth, become true sisters. But most of all, I have seen that being a mother is not in the blood - it’s in the heart.”
Preach it.
Watch the commercial here and tell Pearle Vision “thank you”.
{extended}Monday, May 12, 2008
I think they’re up to something
Twenty is enough
Back in 2003 when my Gospel quartet was traveling around the eastern half of the U.S., we had opportunity to sing along the beautiful Eastern Shore of Virginia one particular weekend.
For our Sunday morning service, we presented a concert at Belle Haven United Methodist Church. This was a memorable little church because there was a husband and wife present who had adopted 12 children from Russia. At the time, the children ranged in age from 3 years up to 16 and they were all there except for one. As you can imagine, the family literally took up an entire pew.
I ran across an online article this morning from November 22, 2007 about a family who had adopted 20 children. As I began reading the article, I quickly discovered that the family in this story was the same family we sang for 5 years ago. Only now they’ve added 8 more children including 2 from from Uzbekistan and 2 from Vietnam!
Read the entire article from the Richmond Times-Dispatch.
{extended}Sunday, May 11, 2008
New rules and economy strain adoption agencies
Faced with a tightening of federal regulations governing foreign adoptions, and suffering from a downturn in business, international adoption agencies in the United States are finding themselves in financial straits and closing their doors in unprecedented numbers, experts say.
At least 15 percent of agencies that specialize in international adoptions have recently shut down, are expected to do so this year or will probably merge with other agencies to survive, according to the National Council for Adoption, an advocacy and education group in Virginia.
In some cases, the closings have come without warning, leaving people without the thousands of dollars in fees they paid to an agency or the child they had thought would finally be theirs.
They have also led to lawsuits and criminal investigations, as some struggling agencies have apparently turned to more desperate business practices to stay afloat.
[Read the entire article from the New York Times]
{extended}Saturday, May 10, 2008
Iron Man
I went to see a matinee showing of the movie Iron Man this afternoon.
This was one of those flicks that Carmi had no interest in seeing. My brother-in-law tagged along even though he had seen it just a few days ago.
I thought it rocked and it will definitely be in my Christmas stocking.
There were several previews of interest. Let’s see…the new Indiana Jones movie, the new Chronicles of Narnia and The Incredible Hulk. Man, it’s going to be a busy summer.
{extended}Thursday, May 08, 2008
Northwest to add non-stop China route from Seattle
Northwest Airlines announced today it will begin non-stop service between Seattle and Beijing.
With the new route, which will begin March 1, 2009, Northwest will be the only U.S. carrier to fly non-stop from Seattle to China.
Routes between the USA and China are highly coveted by U.S. carriers and are restricted by bilateral flight agreements between the two nations. Airlines are not able to add flights between the countries without winning federal approval, which typically comes only after an intense bidding process among interested airlines.
NWA was able to land the rights to fly between Seattle and Beijing by repositioning another route to China that the carrier already had the rights for. Northwest will fly the route using 243-seat Airbus A330-200 jets.
The move is a major boon for Seattle, which had long been trying to secure non-stop service to China. Another carrier, China’s Hainan Airlines, is also scheduled to begin non-stop service to Beijing on June 9 with four weekly flights, according to the Seattle/Tacoma International Airport’s website.
The new flights will likely elevate Seattle’s status as an international gateway, and could also signal a new effort by Northwest to cement its presence in the city. The carrier recently announced a new trans-Atlantic non-stop route to London Heathrow, service that is slated to begin June 1. Northwest also flies two other overseas routes from Seattle, to Amsterdam and Tokyo Narita.
Domestically, Northwest flies from Seattle to its hubs at Minneapolis/St. Paul, Detroit and Memphis and to the Hawaiian destinations of Honolulu and Kona.
Northwest does not operate a full-fledged hub in Seattle, but it does have a codesharing partnership with Alaska Airlines — which has both its headquarters and largest hub in Seattle. That pact currently allows the carriers to market and sell seats on many of each other’s flights.
In a press release, Northwest says the partnership will allow it to offer connections to and from Beijing to destinations “throughout the United States.”