Flying Cats and Cars

Talk about too close for comfort.

Check out this video taken from a police cruiser of a near-accident on the highway.This guy is religious now, if he wasn't before.

And if that frightens you, then cheer yourself up with this clip. Apparently, evolution can occur as evidenced by this flying cat.

Poetry and the Dukes of Hazzard

One of my favorite things to do is read good writers react to life, especially art. In college, one of the most eye-opening experiences of my life was when I took a class called "Poetry and the Visual Arts." It was here that a professor showed a room of us self-absorbed sophomores famous paintings. He had me stare at them until I was forced to contemplate, and the read what poets - people far better than I with words - wrote about those works of art.

It was astounding how often the poets articulated something that I couldn't even barely begin to describe. This is when I felt, for the first time, the power and importance of poets. They help us feel. They observe.

Although this is going to sound far-fetched, I consider Roger Ebert one of the great poets of our generation. His writing on film is easily the best out there. And often I observe that it's not really about the stars he gives movies, but about the review itself. If the film inspires Ebert to eloquence, it's worth seeing.

Which is why everyone should read this review of the movie The Dukes of Hazzard.. It's simply hysterical. I don't know if the movie was really that bad, or if Ebert was just in a mood. But this is one funny bit of writing. Consider the wit on display even in the cutline underneath this photo accompanying the review.



The cutline?
Jessica Simpson, Johnny Knoxville and Seann William Scott wear clothing in a scene from "The Dukes of Hazzard."

That's just plain funny.

Tieche's Favorite Stories: Number 21

Being a school teacher, I have a captive audience to test out my material on. Over the years, I've learned that there are a few stories that kids consistantly remember. "Hey Mr. Tieche," they'll say. "Tell us the story about the time you wound up in Nova Scotia with the rain slicker and the folk singer from Argentina." So I'm trying to compile them and hopefully will turn them into a booklet at some point. This is a story that I use to illustrate the importance of proper decision making to my out-going seniors. I hope you like it. - DAT

My freshman year of college was a time of tremendous change. You could sense it on that first day of school, as my classmates and I filed into the dorms. This college thing was a big deal. For the first time in our lives, there was no one telling us what to do, checking to make sure we did our homework, or threatening to not let us use the car that weekend if we didn’t clean up that pig-sty that you call a room.

There was a guy on my floor named Eric. Eric, like me, was experiencing for the first time an unparalleled amount of freedom. And Eric used that freedom – like many college students do – to cross formerly forbidden boundaries. Eric used his freedom to get drunk. And I don’t mean a little drunk. Oh no. Eric jumped into the alcohol pool with both feet. One morning, I trudged into the bathroom, wondering what in the world I was thinking scheduling myself a class at 8 a.m. As I opened the door, I saw Eric, lying across the line of sinks. Face down. His forehead was resting on the porcelain rim of the sink, and a dried yellow trail of vomit led down to the drain.

I tried to wake him up so I could brush my teeth, but he just smiled and rolled over.

That was just the beginning.

One night, Eric had been drinking heavily (again) and had to get out of bed to go to the bathroom. He went to the restroom to use the urinal. Well, at least he thought it was a urinal. It turned out to be Tim (his roommate’s) sock drawer. Luckily, Tim had purchased a brand of socks that was ultra-absorbent.

A week later, continuing his quest to perfect the drunken stupor, Eric was so inebriated that he fell off the top bunk in the middle of the night, and his head slammed into the back of a chair. The impact shattered his eye socket, leaving him with a nasty purple bruise over most of the left side of his face for several weeks. He looked like a cross between Rocky and Spuds MacKenzie.

You might think that breaking your face might lead one to reconsider one’s decision-making paradigm. Not with Eric. He drank more than a Hummer on the freeway. My sophomore year, we were in the same creative writing class and he wrote a short story about a guy who got drunk with his friends, took his dad’s boat out at night, fell overboard, nearly got run over and killed, and then deftly guided the boat up onto a nice rock for the night. While this is only conjecture, I’m guessing Eric didn’t have to reach too far back into his imagination for that story.

You might think that the novelty of imbibing massive amounts of beer might wear off after, oh, say the first two years. But not with Eric. He was committed to this lifestyle. His fraternity bedroom was wallpapered with flattened 24-pack boxes of Miller High Life. Tasteful.

Our junior year, Eric had been drinking so much, so he decided to go to bed. Having learned form his earlier incident, Eric now steered clear of top bunks. So he crawled into bed, a lower-level bunk. He slept next to the window, where he and his roommates had installed a window-unit air conditioner. Earlier that day, Eric and his roommates removed the unit, because it was now November. Eric, however, didn’t remember this important fact, while he was getting into bed. And he crawled right out of the window. He plunged, head first, two stories below right into the thick shrubs surrounding his fraternity.

The next morning, one of his housemates was walking their dog, and heard a soft groaning from the bushes. Eric had slept all night, wedged into the shrubs, with only the tops of his sneakers visible peeking up from the top of the bushes.

Again, you might think any activity that leads you to have a a near-fatal encounter with shrubbery might make the list of “Things I Need to Reconsider.” But not with Eric. He was astounding in his resilience. He was the Energizer Bunny of Inebriation.

I thought of this today when considering how I make decisions in life and how I want to live my life. Honestly, a large part of me wants to be the kind of person whose life doesn’t serve as a warning for others. If my life is going to be made into an anecdote, at least let the ending not involve me, head-first, in a hedge, vomiting Pabst Blue Ribbon.

Can I get an amen?

Muppets: Puppets made of felt, but still oh so funny

If you have 10 extra minutes, and need a good laugh, then check out the Summer Movie Review by Statler and Waldorf.

If you don't know who Statler and Waldorf are, they're the crotchety, grumpy old Muppet cynics who sit in the upper balcony and let loose a shower of invectives. It's funny.

The weird thing is, though, this is not your parent's muppets. This is more "The Muppets meet Conan O'Brien."

Click here to see the old guys go to work.

I Didn't Hear Him Say Bahrain, Did You?

If you've ever wanted to hear a song featuring someone list all 270 nations of the world in less than two minutes, then click here. Prepare to be astounded.

Not-so-Super Friends

If you grew up in the 80s, like me, you probably were addicted to a show called "The Super Friends." It wasn't a good show, in retrospect, but then again, neither was Night Rider or the A-team, but we loved those with a love that could not be tarnished by such things as actual quality of programming.

I found this site which outlines, in hilarious fashion, some of the funnier points of the show. take, for example this excerpt about one of the lesser-used heroes, and the only African-American superhero, Black Vulcan.

Black Vulcan, though, talked almost exclusively in electricity puns. "I'll electrify you with the shock of your life!" So unlike Luke Cage, we knew what he was trying to say, but we still wanted him to shut up.

He didn't show up very often, and when he did, he took Robin's job of shouting whenever something weird showed up. And no matter how many space blobs, giant monsters, or alien robots he ran into, he seemed genuinely surprised at each and every one of them. I know I would probably scream, "Great Lightning!" if I ran into something made out of lava and big enough to eat me, but Black Vulcan saw this kind of crap all day. The Super Friends couldn't even go to the drive-in without a damn creature dropping out of the sky on them. You'd think they'd get desensitized to that kind of thing after awhile. Most people are pretty scared the first time they see a snake, but I don't think the zoo-janitor at the reptile house spends his whole day going, "Great soaking mops! A venemous cobra! Got to keep from sticking my hand in the cage AND FAST!"

That's just plain funny.

Hurricane Katrina

I am not being hyperbolic when I say this. I'm not sure what's worse. The devesatation brought about by Hurrican Katrina, or the inept handling of the disaster. It's unclear how many lives were uselessly lost because of horriffic leadership. These two clips are two of the most powerful I've seen in documenting both.

In this clip, FOX News' Shep Smith is speechless over the lack of response and leadership and Gerarldo Rivera shows his raw desperation to show the world the conditions in New Orleans.

In this clip, Ted Koppel interviews Michael Brown, the director of FEMA. You can tell that Brown strains Koppel's trademark - nay legendary - patience to the breaking point. At one point, after Brown says that Friday morning was the first day that FEMA knew about the conditions at the SuperDome, Koppel says. "Do you guys not watch TV? This is not the first day we've been reporting this." Click here to watch.

If you've seen pictures or read particularly moving stories about the hurricane, link to them here. I don't like reading those types of stories, but we need to.

Three-oh

On this Day in History

VJ Day
On this day in 1945, the USS Missouri hosts the formal surrender of the Japanese government to the Allies. Victory over Japan was celebrated back in the States. This does not refer to MTV, or video disc jockeys.

The Battle of Actium
At the Battle of Actium, off the western coast of Greece, Roman leader Octavian wins a decisive victory against the forces of Roman Mark Antony and Cleopatra, queen of Egypt. Before their forces suffered final defeat, Antony and Cleopatra broke though the enemy lines and fled to Egypt, where they would commit suicide the following year. The act consolidated the power of the Roman Empire into the hands of Octavian and unified rome in 37 B.C. Octavian became Augustus and would later say that he was God incarnate. He said that would bring salvation and peace to the world through the Roman Empire, which used its massive military to utterly destory opposition.

Later, Augustus made coins that circulated around the empire that said, "There is no other name under heaven and earth by which men will be saved." Later, another man would make that same claim.

1666: Great Fire of London
In the early morning hours, the Great Fire of London breaks out in the house of King Charles II's baker on Pudding Lane near London Bridge. It soon spread to Thames Street, where warehouses filled with combustibles and a strong easterly wind transformed the blaze into an inferno. When the Great Fire finally was extinguished on September 6, more than four-fifths of London was destroyed. Miraculously, only 16 people were known to have died.

The Great Fire of London was a disaster waiting to happen. London of 1666 was a city of medieval houses made mostly of oak timber. Some of the poorer houses had walls covered with tar, which kept out the rain but made the structures more vulnerable to fire. Next to actually having cisterns on kerosene on your roof, there's not much more you could do to ensure a fire hazard with standard building materials. In addition, the firefighting methods of the day consisted of neighborhood bucket brigades armed with pails of water and primitive hand pumps, and an utter lack of Dalmatians.

Jackson's You are Not Alone debuts at Number 1
Michael Jackson's song You are Not Alone is released and goes immediately to Number 1 on the charts, behind the solid sales of his final album History, and the strength of the number one hit Scream. It is the only song to ever debut at No. 1 on the charts. The feat also pulls Jackson into third all-time for number of No. 1 singles with 13, behind only Elvis (17) and the Beatles (20).

Born on this Day

Jimmy Connors: Tennis great. Ranked as the number one tennis player for an unprecedented 159 weeks.

Keanu Reeves: Movie star, best known for his role as Neo in the Matrix trilogy and his horrendous acting in "A Walk in the Clouds". I love you so much, Victoria.

Selma Hayek: Best known by all of my college buddies for her scene in the stunningly mediocre film "From Dusk til Dawn" when she dances with a snake. Unfortunately, at the end of that scene, she turns into a vampire.

David Tieche: I can't play tennis, mispronounce "Socrates" or dance with a snake. But I can turn 30 today.

New Leadership Class by Tieche...

For most of my young adult life, I was on a mad quest for acceptance. Ask anyone who knew me. Looking back at it, I'm surprised that my best friends in college (Jon Fortt and Eric Hawker) - were able to tolerate it. I must have seemed like a giant attention addict. Just thinking about it makes me kind of shiver. I don't know if I could have put up with me. It makes me very grateful that they saw something in me worth sticking around for.

Now, we can go into reasons why I would do things like walk down the beach at Myrtle Beach and trip and fall, just to get attention. Or why I was so loud. Or why I would write 10-page response papers when the professor only asked for 2 pages. But on the cusp of my 30th birthday, I'm starting to feel as though I'm maturing.

Well, at least a little.

I don't crave attention so much anymore. There's a new pot of gold, I suppose.

Now, my greatest desire is influence.

This whole shifting kind of began when I heard a sermon by a guy named Andy Stanley (not my college roommate - who was also named Andy Stanley). He did a sermon series called iMarriage. Now, I listen to a lot of sermons. But this is probably one of the top 5 most influential sermons I've ever heard. He talked about things in ways that I never thought about. His basic premise was that God loved me so much, that he created Nicole and put her on this earth to be a tangible, physical reminder of His love and what unconditional love means.

Which means, conversely, that God loves Nicole so much that He made me.

Which is a big responsibility. But if I do that, I can have a tremendous infuence on her life, like no other person.

From there, the circles of influence should kind of go out. Justus. My close friends. My family. People at Take2. People at FCC. Kids at school.

I wanted this year to be different, in terms of the influence I was having on the kids at Gunderson. And in thinking about that, I started talking with my close buddy Matt Hewitson, an amazing government and history teacher at Gunderson who heads up our leadership and student government class before school. Before school started, he and I were talking, and I threw an idea out there that part of leadership should not just be about planning for events, but it should be about character. I started thinking about that after reading an article by Dallas Willard who said that every graduation speech in college talks about the importance of moral character, but no class in college ever does.

So Matt and I talked and he agreed to let me pilot a program I've been throwing around in my head for a while. It's on leadership, but I'm trying to concentrate on some ideas for character development.

1. Actively working to improve yourself
2. Being a peacemaker and seeking include everybody
3. Having moral authority
4. Serving your community.

These, of course, are brand new ideas that I just came up with just now, and certainly aren't taught by Jesus as part of his core teachings. This morning is my first go-round. I'll have 95 of the student leaders. It's a little tricky, because so much of my thinking is wrapped up around my theology. But good ideas and truth are good ideas, and there are some things that just don't go out of style. Generosity. Kindness. Compassion.

I'm going to talk about some of the greatest leaders of the last 50 years (Vaclav Havel, Lech Walesa, Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King, Jr.) I'm going to show that more than anything, each of these men believe one crucial thing: that all people had incalculable, inherent worth.

And then I'm going to transition and ask the student leaders if they believe that. If they actually treat people that way. And I'll tell some stories about how treating everyone as though they're important can change people's lives.

I heard a kid refer to it as Tieche Thursdays. Hopefully, I'll say some stuff that will inspire kids to live better lives, and really improve themselves and the school.