Thanks John. I appreciate it.

But for what it's worth the statements I crossed out are working now. I did a cache.do and simplified everything and tested again. And it appears to use JSUtil.notNil() and just .nil() correctly.

I recorded it just so that I'm not insane:

http://screencast.com/t/AaRkfENAx2ZF

Or maybe I'm doing something totally different than what you're expecting. But at least you can see what I'm doing.