Okay, you made it through my baroque home page, and you're wondering what sort of person might have dreamt it up. I'm a fairly low-key individual, so I'll keep it short and simple.

Picture: Portrait of the Artist as Rendered by Tim Stuby, Esq. I'm Vance Briceland; I'm thirty-something. I photograph badly. Yes, I know, I know, everyone says that, but you haven't seen many photos of me. Typically I'm baring my teeth at the camera and wearing a glazed, doomed expression associated with fightened deer frozen on the road by someone's headlights.

Unfortunate yet true: I was once stopped in a Pizza Hut by a woman who thought I was John Tesh and wanted me to autograph her napkin and to kiss Connie Selleca for her. I obliged, of course. (What could I do? She'd bought all my albums and was one of my biggest fans.)

Alas, despite goatees, piercings, and an immediate resolution to shed that squeaky-clean image in favor of something more dangerous, I fear I'm still to the bone one of those boy-next-door clean cut types. I'm beginning to think I could get a facial tattoo and file my teeth to points, and I'd still get asked to play piano at the nursing homes on Sundays.

I'm a Southerner plucked from his native soil, currently living in a comfortable house in Detroit with Mr. Craig Symons and three cats--they may be demons, for all I know.Emma and Sarah Jane (as if she would allow us to call her by her second name) are the original two; lately Chloe has taken up residence with us. She's a purebred ragdoll, and knows it. During the days I labor at Wayne State University as Information Officer in the Sponsored Programs Office. In my spare time I write, listen to music (groups that distress my friends, typically), sing in a choral ensembles, play in a bell choir, empty the cat pans, and read bushels of science fiction and bad nineteenth-century fiction. Shows you what a handful of liberal arts degrees will do for you, doesn't it?

My caricatures were drawn by my friend Tim Stuby. My eyes aren't quite that far apart, but the sour expression is pretty right.

Many of you fortunate to visit these pages ask me the same question: Where did you get those graphics? The graphics of the animals, real and imaginary, are renaissance woodcuts. I scanned them in as black and white line art at a high resolution, imported them into MacDraw Pro (don't snicker . . . it was the only application I had at the time that had painting capabilities), hand-tinted them with bright colors and fun gradients, and then reduced their size when I converted them to .gif format. I rather like the llama on the main page, and the dog (yes, it's a dog) that graces the header of the Garden of Miscellany.

And the other question: Why's your writing so florid?

Why not?

Questions? Comments? Observations on the photos? Fan mail? Write wbricel@gopher.science.wayne.edu.

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