Weird fact that no one else will find weird of the week.

While doing some research at work, I found out that the 100th richest Virginia individual or family has a net worth of $25 million. Does that seem incredibly low to anyone else? Doesn't it seem like there ought to be at least a few hundred Virginia families that have more than $25 million? Or I am just weird in finding that fact weird?

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It is not a good thing when it takes you until March of 2004 to find your best album of 2003.

But I did. It is Sufjan Stevens' Greetings From Michigan: The Great Lakes State. It is lovely. Even Kim likes it, even though it was released on Bro. Danielson's Sounds Familyre label, and we all know what Kim thinks of Bro. Danielson¹. And even though I do not need others to validate my musical opinions, it is nice when some do².

So. You will like "Flint (For the Unemployed and Underpaid)", and you will like "All Good Naysayers, Speak Up! Or Forever Hold Your Peace!", and of course everyone loves "Detroit, Lift Up Your Weary Head! (Rebuild! Restore! Reconsider!)"³.

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1 She does not like him.

2 On a similar subject, four years prior, I understand this, but I do not understand this.

3 Yes, there are lyrics, just not in this snippet.

The winner of the dining room competition.

It is this.

Apparently I don't read enough

I've been trying to pick out a book or two as a present recently, and I can't come up with anything. So, I now reach out to all of you, who apparently read more than I do to give me some suggestions.

Here's the background: The father of one of my friends joined the Peace Corps late last year. He is teaching English at a university in Kyrgyzstan (a former Soviet republic). As you can imagine, he doesn't have a whole lot of English language material readily available and he's a big reader. He likes things like history, biography, and current events.

Unfortunately, I haven't read a book other than Harry Potter in ages. However, I know Opie has been reading presidential biographies lately. And I think moM always seems to have a book in progress. Perhaps some good Canadian suggestions from Alex?

I'm hoping a nice set of comments from you all will help me with this dilemma. Come on, give me a nice high comment count with great ideas!

This is the thing that I am planning.

As I've been picking up my hammered dulcimer for a few Lenten performances at church -- and, hey, while I'm thinking about it, I need to write a dulcimer/handbells duet -- it is now my goal to put up a sound file of me playing each of the instruments that I can play, which at last count was something like a dozen. There was a recording, I know, of a dulcimer/flute/acoustic bass/piano quartet I played in recently; perhaps we'll start with that.

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Pick which one is better.

Old or new.

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Steve Taylor news of the week.

Um. I do not know what I think of this.

"I think that the elements, as Dr. Watson said to Sherlock, are coming together, sir."

Richmond v. Iowa State in the WNIT finals, baby! (Except that there's still those pesky semifinal games for each team, and except that if they were to meet, I'm 80 percent sure ISU would host, if only because their women draw much better than U. of R.'s.)

Maybe it's time to get XM Radio.

Not only do we have a trend in losing restaurants we like, but that trend has now spread to radio stations. In the past month, Richmond has lost three perfectly good radio stations. Not only did we simultaneously lose one sports station and one 80's station to be replaced with two stations broadcasting the same oldies station, but we also just lost our Top 40 station (which also had the morning DJs we listened to). Is Richmond really that different from the rest of the country that Top 40 isn't relevant to our market?

Um.

Kim, love, will you please tell me next time you take a new job? Also, you are a good painter.

One more dining room set.

In your mind, combine this and this. It may end up priced too expensively, however.

Back-to-back songs I heard on the radio this morning between which I swear I did not change the station.

Eminem's "Lose Yourself," followed directly by Mercy Me's "I Can Only Imagine." So y'all do not hate me, I will not mention which one I liked better.

Cool coincidence of the week.

I went to a branch¹ of our county's public library over lunch today with a mission: To find a hymnal that had a SATB part for "Be Still My Soul," so I could double-check my invented chord progression. I had gone online earlier and saw that this branch had something called "The New Church Hymnal" from 1976, which sounded relatively promising. So I got to the library, found the Dewey Decimal number, went to the stacks, and lo and behold, it was...

Sorry. Beth-Annie got dozens of comments by making people wait for the end of her "Ed" story, so I'll copy her and finish this very exciting post later².

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1 Interestingly³, this is the first time I've been to this particular branch, even though it's easily the closest to our new house; I almost always go instead to the one that's about a mile from my workplace.

2 Unless, of course, one of you guesses correctly first. And two of you theoretically could, even without using Google (which I don't think will help).

3 By which I mean "Not at all interestingly."

Thumpity thump thump. Thumpity thump thump. Look at furnace go.

We have a gas furnace. On occasion, that gas furnace says to itself, "Self, I would like to shut down and leave Matthew and Kimberly in the cold." And then Matthew and Kimberly are in the cold. On the first occasion, in February, Mr. Furnace Dude came out and said, "Oh, it's your Humdinger Blackmask Nelson RE493X Fallout Switch. I will switch it back where it belongs, and your indoor palm trees will not die." And they didn't. Mostly because we didn't have them. But still we had heat.

On the second occasion, which was Monday, a different dude from the same company came out and said, "Oh, it's your Humdinger Blackmask Nelson RE493X Fallout Switch again, and I have put it back where it belongs, but that's very suspicious that it would do the exact same thing that it did last time, so I am going come back tomorrow, and when I so, I will charge you $130 to take apart your entire furnace and see what the problem is." So he did, and he said, "Oh, your HD1300P Marino Duper Clayton Heat Compressor has some cells that are not performing their celling duties. Fortunately, your HD1300P Marino Duper Clayton Heat Compressor is under warranty, so you will only have to pay for labor, which will be $814." Yes, $814. That does not at all seem right to me, and as the furnace is currently working, we are ditching plan (a) (replace the HD1200P MDCHC through this company) and either going with plan (b) (get quotes on a HD1200P MDCHC through another company) or plan (c) (since the heat is working again, just let the system try to make it through summer, and then hope that it will get a nice tan and then be nicer in the cold autumn).

Owning a house is funner than fun.

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So you do not feel too sorry for us.

Last year, we vastly overpaid state and federal taxes and got a large refund. So Kim and I lowered the amount she was paying to the government every month, and we kinda assumed that this year we'd come close to breaking even (if probably still getting a slight refund). But instead, due to the Government liking married people who own houses (particularly if they pay points on their mortgages) and make charitable donations, we're getting back about a third of the money we paid Uncle Sam and about 15% back of what we paid Aunt Virginia. Yay free money. Even if some of it may have to go back to Mr. Furnace Dude.

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Tax tip number one.

If you do work for a government or charitable organization -- which apparently includes the community handbell group I am in -- you may deduct 14 cents per mile travelling to and fro.

Please help us choose a dining room set.

We are down to somewhere between two and four choices, depending how much two of the sets come out as, although we are fairly confident they will be similarly priced. (We know the prices for the other two, and yes, if anyone ever tells you that you can save money by buying furniture in North Carolina, they are telling the truth, because even with the added NC-to-Virginia shipping, the two we have prices for are running about 20 to 25 percent less than the cheapest we saw them for in Richmond [and about 60 percent off retail, as if that means anything].)

Here is choice one. It is in the Queen Anne style. The picture is pretty much exactly what we would be getting.

Here is choice two. It is in the Louis Phillipe style. The pictures are kinda strange -- particularly the top one, which looks like the chairs are set up for a television show, with everyone facing outward -- but if you look at it all, you can probably get a decent idea.

Here is choice three. It is also in the Louis Phillipe style. The picture is pretty much exactly what we would be getting, except that we would probably instead get the chairs from here.

Here is choice four. It is the only solid wood one of the set. (The others are veneers.) The pictures are crappy, but if you look at the first picture down that shows a dining room, that's what we're potentially getting, except with the chairs from the one two below that.

Pick one.

Would 40 handbell choirs nationwide buy "Be Still My Soul" (Arr. Matthew Prins) next year?

The more I think about handbell arranging as a career, the more I like the idea. I am not terribly unhappy with my full-time job -- I wouldn't have been there close to five years if I had been -- but it's by far the least interesting part of who I am (compare/contrast "I work in membership marketing for a small nonprofit healthcare consortium" to "I am a film critic" or "I am an independent filmmaker" or "I am a composer" or "I am an a cartoonist, kinda, maybe"), and it's 40 hours a week that, while I'm doing something, I'm not usually doing something interesting. So while being a full-time composer and arranger would not be number one on my most-wanted-jobs list -- "guy given $20 million to make whatever kind of film he wants" would be first -- it's certainly in the top ten, and it's leagues above what I'm doing right now (which, to be very fair, is leagues above many, many, many other jobs I could be doing). Further, as Kim and I discussed yesterday at The World's Priciest Arby's¹ (not to be confused with The World's Best Arby's or The World's Biggest Arby's, both also in the Richmond metro area), it'd be far easier to make money as a handbell arranger/composer than, say, as a film critic, simply because of supply and demand: Despite similar demands, many, many more people want to write film reviews than compose and arrange handbell music, and my talent for each is probably relatively similar. (It's hard to compare, obviously -- apples and oranges and such.)

All that said, I believe that if I were writing handbell music full-time, I could compose or arrange 30 high-quality pieces in a year -- two every three weeks, with seven weeks of vacation/catch-up time. I don't think that's unreasonable: I've already written or arranged about 30 pieces of (low-to-middling-quality) handbell music, but more importantly, there's a dude in the article that got me started on all this who did 100 pieces last year, and if he can do 100, I can do 30. (As another example: Cynthia Dobrinski has about 200 in print, and given that [supposedly] most music goes out-of-print in about seven years, that's about 30 per year.)

Of course, even if I got close to all 30 pieces published -- which I think is reasonably likely, actually -- how many people would buy them? I have no clue. I'm going to throw out a number, because I think it sounds good, and that number is 40 choirs in the first year, decreasing by 25 percent each year until the 7th year, after which zip. So over seven years, I'd guess each piece would be sold to about 40+30+23+17+13+10+8 choirs, which we'll round to 150. (Obviously, if any of my pieces were played at a festival, add another 15 or 20 to that number.) Including the conductor's piece, I'm guess each choir might purchase, oh, let's say eight sheets, which means that over the life of each piece of music I get published, I might see sales of 1200. From what I can gather, sheet music royalties generally run about 15% to the "author," and as handbell music is running almost $4.00 on average, I'd get about $.60 on each piece of music I'd sell, or $720 over the life of the piece. Recalling the 30 pieces of music per year, I might be able to make $21,600 ($720x30) in a year of writing handbell music (although some of that money would, of course, be deferred). That's pretty unfar from what I make in a year right now, and that's not even including where the big handbell composers make a large portion of their money: writing commissioned works ($500-$1000+ each, on top of any royalties) and directing (since most, if certainly not all, composers have three or four bell choirs they direct on the side).

So what I am saying is of the wack ideas I have for making money in a funnish manner, this is the most reasonable. The plan, then: Before the end of this month, I will finish "Be Still My Soul" and send it out to a publisher. In April, I will pick another song, arrange it, and send it out, probably to a different publisher. May, June, July, August: The same. At that point, I think I will have a much better idea how reasonable it is for me to try to make a living on composition.

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1 Our meal, which was comped by TWPA in a welcome-to-our-neighbourhood letter, would have cost $19.60. For two people. Without dessert.

My goal in for today and tomorrow, as is my goal every year:

To make sure all of my final four teams get past the first round, which, trust me, does not happen as often one might suppose. But now that I've ditched Wake Forest from the championship game -- I misread my the data that feeds my NCAA strategy, and golly gee, they're losing to hometown VCU at halftime -- I feel pretty good about my chances of Duke, UConn, Georgia Tech and Ok. State making it to this weekend.

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Wack prediction of the week:

I sincerely think the Stanford/Texas-San Antonio game will be close. Shockingly close.

The freakiest thing ever.

This.

The thing that it is that I am looking for.

After reading an article in the latest issue of America's pretty much only handbell magazine (that issue being the March/April issue, which will eventually be here), I have decided to spend the month of Marpril composing the greatest bell piece in the history of belling, and then -- and this is the important part -- actually work on getting it published. (The aforementioned article gave hints in that regard.)

Thus, it has been decided. This is what also has been decided: Level 2 to level 3. Three-to-five octaves. A medley of two or more tunes, probably public domain, probably religious. (This is what people want to buy.)

So. Help me with the tunes part, particularly if you have something that goes well with "Be Still My Soul" ("Finlandia").

"Your search - 'wnit pool' - did not match any documents."

I am starting the world's best and only WNIT Tournament pool. Please tell all your friends to participate, assuming you have any. You have until 12:00 Eastern on Wednesday. Send your picks to me in the format "First Round Winners," "Second Round Winners," etc. This is a bracket. The winner will get two tickets to the regular season women's college basketball game of their choice, unless you find some really expensive game, but somehow I doubt that. Scoring will be done in the proper method: 1, 2, 3, 5, 8. (Proper NCAA tourney scoring is 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13; I'm sorry, but no one deserves 32 points for lucking out and picking the winner.)

Also, I hope U. of Richmond is a higher seed than Iowa State, and I hope that both teams get to the finals.

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Also.

Spartan reviewlet either later today or tomorrow.

Culinary request of the week.

For those of you who don't know, the ratio of the number of dinners I make to the number of dinners Kim makes is somewhere in the vicinity of 30:1. There are numerous reasons for this -- I enjoy cooking, I get home usually an hour before Kim, I'm a pickier eater than Kim is -- but the end result is if I'm not sick, and if Kim doesn't have a hankerin' for one of her supper specialties (such as a meatless version of daD's lasagna), I'm the cooker, and she's the cookee. (Or maybe cookie. I dunno.)

Regardless, as Chef Matthew, I have an urge to make something different for supper tonight, and thus I am eliciting suggestions. Ground rules:

• No onions.
• No green peppers.
• No mushrooms.
• In fact, just think of any non-meat, not cheese topping you might put on a pizza, and consider that off-limits.
• No ground beef, unless the general beef-taste is masked by something else (although neither Kim nor I is opposed to ground pork).
• No soups.
• No gravies. (Or "gravys," which looks more correct to mine eye.)
• No chocolate (so to not tempt Edward and Annie).
• No caviar.
• No foie gras, which sounds horrific.
• In fact, just keep the whole thing cheaper than about $8-$10 for the two of us combined (and ideally more like $4-$5).

New film that you will help me with of the week.

I am going to start working on a new film. Here is the fun premise of the film: 240 shots, no more, no less. Each shot lasts exactly one-half second. The story, as David Mamet likes to say, will be told in the cuts. Also, this is what the film is about: __________ __________ ______ __ ___________, __________ _________ (_________ _____ _ ________) __ ____, ______! __________! I think it will be a great film.

Yeah. So please give me an idea of a storyline for my film, preferably one in which people like Andrew and Edward can help me film in spots. (But if you do film in spots, please verge on overlighting scenes, just because that is part of another idea I have.)

Take the final exam.

In the University of Georgia's Coaching Principles and Strategies in Basketball class.

Clue no. 3.

Orange.

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Why didn't anybody tell me (no. 1)...

...that The Mayor is having perhaps the best season of his career?

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Why didn't anybody tell me (no. 2)...

...that Steve Taylor just had an interview with CCM Magazine where he talks about his upcoming film?

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Why didn't anybody tell me (no. 3)...

...that Kim's birthday is Saturday and that I am required to buy her one or more presents? Ha ha. I kid because I love.

Fact I choose not to believe of the week.

There's no way John Edwards is 50.

Clue two for yesterday's puzzle.

Ten feet.

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Question of the day.

Roth or traditional?

Walter Cronkite is bisexual.

I'm sorry, but that's how I'm choosing to read this quote, from when Cronkite was asked to what he attributed the longevity of his marriage: "I do think one of the factors was we were of different sexes. That doesn't mean I wouldn't have been happy to be married to several friends I had of the same sex."

Annual tradition of the week.

Assuming that this doesn't get a 2004 release, this is my 2004 top ten list, as predicted before I've seen any of the films. (I cannot believe I've had the no. two on my list for two months now -- thank you Ed, Annie -- and haven't yet seen it. I really need to make time for that.) According to history, about a third of these films will very much disappoint me, and at least a few will make me very very happy.

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Pros: Michel Gondry. Strong advance reviews. Michel Gondry. Michel Gondry. Charlie Kaufman. Michel Gondry. Cons: Gondry's only other feature-length film, Human Nature, which was also written by Kaufman, was pretty eh.
   
2. Dogville. Pros: Rapturous praise from like-minded critics at Cannes last year. Lars von Trier's last three films have ranged from very good to among the best of last decade. Certain artistic decisions von Trier's made (that I've heard about through those Cannes reviews) sound unbelievably awesome. Cons: Lars' only other American film was the weakest of those aforementioned three.
   
3. Before Sunset. Pros: Sequel to my number three film from 1995. Linklater's The School of Rock was also muy bien. Strong advance reviews. Cons: The last sequel I loved was Babe: Pig in the City six years ago.
   
4. Spartan. Pros: One of my five favorite filmmakers of those who have made gobs of films, David Mamet rarely makes directorial missteps... Cons: ...although his last film, Heist, was one of them.
   
5. Triple Agent. Pros: One of my five favorite filmmakers of those who have made gobs of films, Eric Rohmer rarely makes directorial missteps... Cons: ...although his last film, The Lady and the Duke, was one of them.
   
6. The Incredibles. Pros: Brad Bird part of the best years of "The Simpsons." Craig T. Nelson casting makes me grin. There's never been a Pixar film that's gotten lower than a B+ from me. Cons: There's only been one, Monsters, Inc. that's gotten anything higher.
   
7. The Five Obstructions. Pros: My main man Lars von Trier. Premise sounds oh so awesome. Cons: Reviews all over the place.
   
8. The Saddest Music in the World. Pros: Good reviews. Premise sounds oh so awesome. Guy Maddin's last two films have been very good... Cons: ...although I didn't care for any of his work prior.
   
9. Distant. Pros: Very good reviews. I'm a sucker for a good loneliness film. Cons: Other than that, I know nothing about the movie.
   
10. 2046. Pros: Mucho buzz. Kinda a sequel to my no. 6 film for 2001, apparently. Cons: Wong Kar-Wai has only made one-and-two-thirds great films; the rest is pretty eh.
    
11. Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. Pros: Along with "Dude, Where's My Car?," one of the greatest titles in the history of cinema. Cons: Um.