What would have been the greatest moment in cinematic history, bar none.

I was looking for a quote from Being John Malcovich for a film discussion board I frequent, and I happened across Kaufman's original screenplay, which, I kid you not (and look here if you don't believe me), has the following scene, which does make it in the final movie with one major change:

INT. CRAIG AND LOTTE'S LIVING ROOM - DAY

        ...On the TV, Derek Mantini is working a 60 foot high
        marionette from the top of a water tower. The
        assembled crowd is enthralled.

                        TV ANNOUNCER
                The crowd is enthralled as Derek
                Mantini, arguably the greatest
                puppeteer in the history of the
                world, performs "The Belle of
                Amherst" with his 60 foot Emily
                Dickinson puppet, directed by the
                inimitable Charles Nelson Reilly.

        Charles Nelson Reilly floats by in a hot air balloon.

                        CHARLES NELSON REILLY
                Beautiful, beautiful! Nyong-nyong.

I am crying because that did not make the final cut.

I am very much liking my chances -- and Pamela's, for that matter.

From the ISU Alumni Association News Flash: "GIVE ME A C! For chant contest, that is. Wednesday was the deadline for entries in round two of the ISU Alumni Association's ISU fan chant contest. We received more than 30 entries, and the committee will soon be deliberating, so stay tuned for the announcement of our winner." Yet 170 people send in fully-realized choral compositions for a contest with a prize one-fifth of what this one is. People do not make the sense.

Forget my beloved Mazda5: I know what minivan I really want.

Alas, it's not coming out for a few more years.

Ode to a belly. Or a baby.

More pictures that do not require an explanation. Except to say that it is very cute. And that the pictures were taken yesterday.

After waiting and waiting and waiting...

Sometime this week or next week, all three of my handbell pieces that have been accepted for publication (other than through Silhouettist, of course) will be officially released: "Cumulonimbus" and "Fantasie on There is a Balm in Gilead" from GIA Publications, and "Meditation on Ave Maria" by Harrock Hall Music. And I will have official recordings of the first two to share with you very shortly. Yay me.

Questions with a very obvious answer since I am the person asking them of the week.

Of all players in the American League with at least 30 at-bats, who has the highest batting average? And the fourth-highest slugging average? And the fourth-highest on-base percentage? Of course. (Also, there's a really nice, lengthy article in today's Boston Globe about him that focuses mostly on his relationship with his daughter, who was born with two second chromosomes and without part of her fifth.)

Tripologue without words.

Words are not needed to comprehend this portion of the Tripologue. You will understand, or you will not understand.

"Jeremy's...iron."

No. five on my list of things that upset me out of proportion on how much they ought: I designed an e-mail yesterday and today to send out to our members, and I sent it around the office to proof it. One person found had a few errors/suggestions, and came to my office to give them to me. That's fine -- that's what proofreading is for, after all. But she had to explain every error I had made and spend 15 seconds on each telling me why it was a mistake. "See, over here you have the word 'continues' as the verb, but if you look at the beginning of the sentence, you can see that the subject of the sentence is 'areas,' which is plural, so that means that for subject-verb agreement you should use the word 'continue' rather than 'continues.'" Or, in other words, "Mm hmm, well that's...very good...for a first try. You know what? I have a ball. Perhaps you'd like to bounce it?"


---
My new car.

I am more and more thinking that it will be this will be my next car in another year or so (assuming it doesn't become early-PT-Cruiser popular and sell at MSRP or above), and according to a message board at Edmunds, it will be at a dealer in Richmond in the next couple weeks for me to look at. Yay six-seat minivans.

An earnest question from which I expect a serious answer.

Should toilet paper be strung overhand or underhand?

Ha ha! That is not the question, because everyone of above-average intelligence knows the correct answer. No, no, this is the product of my sleeplessness last night, when I decided to take a look at some of my older and abandoned handbell pieces that I hadn't seen at in ages. Shockingly, some of them were pretty not-so-bad, and some of the unfinished ones were (at least the parts I had completed) as good as any of my finished works. And looking at some of my other in-progress works, I have at least a half-dozen total compositions and arrangements that I could put in publishable form with a few hours of work (some which I am listing now for my own reference more than anything):

• "Jesus Went Unto Them, Walking on the Sea" (original piece; pretty much done)
  
• "The King Shall Come When Morning Dawns"
  
• "Ordinary Time Ordinariness" (with a new title and new C section)
  
• "The World in Solemn Stillness Lay" (progressive arrangement of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear")
  
• "And They Found the Stone Rolled Away from the Sepulchre" (progressive arrangement of "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear")

I know myself too well.

The week we were leaving for California, I mentioned to Kim that one of the things I really wanted to get done before we left was sending in my entry for the Iowa State Chant contest because I knew that if I left it until we got back, I'd forget all about it and miss the deadline. I didn't have a chance to get it done before leaving, so it came as a bit of a shock to me this morning at work to, for the heck of it, look on my music contests list and see that my entry needed to arrive in the loving arms of the ISU alumni center by June 15th, i.e. two days from today, i.e. unless I want to spend $15 on mailing it next-day I needed to get it out by 5:00 today. Thus, I took a slightly long lunch at home today, but it's now All Good.

Of course, as moM and daD have pointed out, I don't have a chance at winning, so.

If I were still giving out points, I would give two points for the first correct answer.

This movie deals ultra-directly with one of the 17 items from our vacation listed in the "Sentences and sentence fragments..." post from last week. The first person to guess from which one wins...um...uh...okay, the chance to pick which of the 16 remaining items on the trip-o-logue we discuss next. (Obviously, Kim is excluded from guessing.)

A purely hypothetical question, of course.

But let's say that you're on an interview for a director of music position at a small Baptist church, and for that interview you're sitting on at one side of a table with five "interviewers" on the other side of the table. However, despite this committee being invited to jump in with questions at any time, one person is doing 80-90 percent of the interviewing/questioning, with one other person doing virtually all the rest. That's fine, no problem, but here is my question: As the person being interviewed, when answering these questions, should you generally be responding to just the person asking the questions -- with regards to eye contact, nonverbal communication, etc. -- or should you be communicating to the set of interviewers as a whole, responding to each of them at some point during your response? (This is made more difficult, I might add, by the fact that the person doing the bulk of the interviewing is at the far end of the table.)

Dear Sufjan Stevens: Bad, bad Sufjan.

I am not referring to your album Come On! Feel the Illinoise!, which on a-listen-and-a-half is almost certainly the best album I will hear all year. No, I am referring to the fact that you have chosen to make a tour stop in Washington, D.C. on September 27th, which, being that it is less than two weeks before Baby Prins is due to be born, is probably not the best time for Kim and I to be two hours away from our designated hospital. And yes, I know that your friend Br. Danielson will be in Arlington on July 7th, but it is much harder to convince Kim to go to a Danielson concert than it would be to convince her to go to a Sufjan concert. So, if you could add a Richmond date to your schedule, sometime not on top of October 7th, that'd be swell. Gracias.

Sentences and sentence fragments to entice you about our upcoming vacation report.

• because of course everyone wearing a Blue Jays shirt is automatically from Canada
  
• why yes, Kim is carrying the most active baby in the world
  
• is Matthew more successful at playing the Theremin or being a two-turntable DJ?
  
• literally six inches from two live, honest-to-God lions
  
• fake glass at County General Hospital
  
• when we say Lorelai lives directly behind Sookie, we mean Lorelai lives directly behind Sookie
  
• dude, can't you remember to say "Ameriquest Mortgage Company"?
  
• no, I don't know why "it's a small world" isn't capitalized. oh wait
  
• the search for Mr. Potato Head
  
• can you stop with the 30-inch boxes already?
  
• Benjamin Franklin's greatest invention up-close, and no, he did not invent electricity, as that was God
  
• look! it's Madonna's hedges!
  
• we are wedding crashers
  
• the liars at the Crystal Cathedral
  
• Priui v. Hummers
  
• Priui v. Insights
  
• we were so close to Tijuana, and yet...