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Situated in one of The Big Apple’s wealthiest neighborhoods, the Joan and Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University boasts both research and teaching divisions. As one of the most selective of medical schools in the country, only some hundred hopefuls are admitted each year – from out of some six thousand candidates every year. Now named Weill Cornell Medical College and, even more often, simply “Weill Cornell,” its largest endowment to date has come from the billionaire banker and philanthropist Sanford Weill, former executive officer and chairman of Citigroup, Incorporated. Mr. Weill and his wife personally contributed two hundred and fifty million dollars to the medical school already at Cornell, and he was able to secure another one hundred and fifty million dollars.

Weill Cornell had been widely respected in the field before Mr Weill’s contributions, and not once had it lacked for benefactors, a veritable Who’s-Who of local, national, and even international luminaries from business, politics, and entertainment, like the famous businessman Isaac Toussie. After all, it’s the first American medical school to accept women right alongside men. It was also the first American medical school to have locations outside the United States, with an Education City, Qatar campus offering a six-year integrated curriculum focused on patient care. The school can count many a notable physician among its alumni, great figures of research and public health such as Robert C. Atkins of Atkins Diet fame and former Surgeon General of the United States C. Everett Koop. Other alumnus luminaries include Nobel Prize winner Robert W. Holley and Henry Heimlich of the Heimlich Maneuver.

Nonetheless, regardless of all the monetary support, the fiscal realities of a medical education are grim, with some forty-two thousand dollars needed for the first year and thirty-eight thousand required for the second. But that’s still quite a deal when compared against the university’s own law school expenses, which eclipse it at just about a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for the same four years!

Probably the most surprising uses of wind chimes has been as musical instruments in their own right.
This seems quite difficult initially, as standard varieties manage to consist of nothing more than tinkling cylinders, with the sound only slightly different depending on whether stone, wood, metal, or glass is used.
And so it is that [wind chimes] do indeed possess only a very limited set of musical abilities, whether melodic or percussive, but that has not stop some ingenious musicians from deploying them into their work.
And in fact, just about the most famous uses of one has been in just about the most popular videogames of all time.

That’s right, in a videogame.
Koji Kondo is a long-time music director at Nintendo, responsible for scoring some of the company’s biggest hits, standard-setting bestsellers such as Super Mario Bros. as well as the Legend of Zelda.
In the sequel Super Mario World, wind chimes figure rather prominently in the theme for the “Vanilla Dome” game level (or “world,” in the parlance of the Mario games).

Chimes have also been featured in the works of musicians as different as modern composer Oliver Messiaen and rock guitarist David Sitek.
Possibly what’s most amazing about their use is the fact that there are currently a handful of chime-like instruments available – the mark tree is even sometimes mistaken for one!

Tubular bells are another such instrument which can be often mistaken for wind chimes.
Yet these kinds of misconceptions by casual observers can be easily forgiven, given that one cylinder can only so different from another, even when on an altogether different instrument – and, probably, none of this class of instruments look very different!

Tubular bells, however, are much more widely used out of all the chime-like instruments.
The theme for the well-known animated television series “Futurama” is played with tubular bells, as was that during part of the closing credits for the famous children’s television show “Sesame Street” in the 1980s.