Cowboy Justus

Want to know who the cutest trick-or-treater was on the West Coast? Look no further.


Okay Pardner. I don't want no trouble here, so don't make me reach for my gun.

Dance Dance Revolution....

If you don't hang out much in video arcades - and unless you're 10, you probably don't - then you might not know how popular the stand-up video game Dance, Dance Revolution is. It's basically a game with a platform consisting of eight lights. When those lights light up, you have to step on them with your feet, and then you get points. It's like Light-Up Whack-A-Mole. And it makes you look like you're dancing.

Unless you're this guy, who is clearly the king of this.

You can watch him here

Tieche House Burgled, Car Stolen...

So, I'm not sure how wise this is to post publically, but last night at midnight, someone broke into my 1990 Honda Accord. They then used the garage-door opener to gain access to my garage, where they took a lot of things, including all my power tools (including some my friends had loaned me recently for some work I was doing on the house), my stereo, the iPod I left in Nicole's Camry.

They then used a screwdriver in the ignition to start my car and steal it, so when I woke up this morning, my Honda was gone.

Everything is okay, except that Nicole and I are a little shaken up about the idea that we were sleeping like 9 feet away while all this was happening. Nicole and I are both pretty rattled. I keep thinking about what if I had woken up and heard the garage door go up. What if I would have caught these guys in the act. What if they had guns...

Anyway, I don't want to make a big deal of it. I mean, after all, it's just stuff, and I don't really care about it. It's just stuff. What weirds me out is the fact that we were home sleeping. I go from pissed off to kind of afraid.

Two weird things: The police found my car. It's fine, except the stereo is gone. It also appears the theives might have fixed the squeaky belts in order to make a getaway, which would be weird.

In another weird note, the thieves cleaned out an entire bookcase of Nicole's PartyLite stuff. Whole boxes of candles, three-wicks, the Viking Hearthside Candle holder. It was all free to Nicole, which is cool, but how weird. Have you ever heard of Candle thieves? Maybe they were home decorators. I can see it now:

"Jim, are those mulberry and fig tealights?"

How bizzare. Maybe they thought they'd make great Christmas gift ideas. Which they would.

Campaign for Real Beauty...

Thanks to my Texas buddy Nicki for sending me this link. It's a short clip showing the process of taking a woman and making her (through make-up and digital manipulation) into a person who really doesn't even exist. No wonder our young girls are dying on the inside trying to live up to a standard of beauty that doesn't even exist in the real world.

It reminds me of a story I read about that was originally published in the magazine Ladies' Home Journal where Jamie Lee Curtis took before and after shots of a cover photo.

You can check out the video by clicking here.

He Leadeth Me to Green Pastures...err...Ballparks...

This news story is a big unnerving. Apparently, a company called Eternal Image is selling coffins and urns emblazoned with the logos of several major league baseball teams. The graphic below is an artist's rendering.



This is bizarre to me. I find it difficult to imagine a person who thinks to themselves, "When people look at my remains, first and foremost I want them to know that I was more fanatical about the Phillies than even the Philly Phanatic.

But that's not the most disturbing thing. The most distrubing thing is this paragraph from the news story:

MLB has entered a licensing agreement with Eternal Image, which hopes to eventually make urns and caskets for all 30 teams. The company also hopes to have similar agreements with NASCAR, the NHL and the NFL, but baseball was the first to sign on.

A NASCAR coffin? Wow. It's like a sarcophagus for a redneck. I wonder what the sponsors would be...

Tieche October Update

So, it's time, I suppose, for a Tieche October Update.

The big news for the family is that last weekend, my wife heading back home to Michigan for a brief vacation. She wanted to go home and see the gorgeous colors of Autumn – that conflagration of color, that smell of warm cider, all those white people. So she and Justus flew out for a four-day weekend with her mom. My parents also drove up from Ohio, to see their grandson, which is also exciting.

The best part is that Nicole was able to redeem her old frequent flyer miles from Northwest Airlines, so the trip is going to cost her 12 dollars. And Justus is not yet two, so he’s free. That’s just awesome.

Speaking of Justus, he is in an interesting and challenging stage. He’s still so cute you can’t even stand it, but he’s also becoming more difficult. He doesn’t quite understand the consequences of his actions. He doesn’t understand, for example, that throwing a nerf ball at someone is not the same as throwing a die-cast metal matchbox car. I have the bruise to prove that.


Here is Justus, donning his cowboy hat. Unfortunately, he's also wearing his PJs, which doesn't get you a lot of style points in the Wild, Wild West.

Justus also learned to escape from his crib, which is exciting because that means he’s nimble and athletic. Which means he could have a nice future as a professional sports star. Or a cat-burglar. One of the two.


This picture is of Justus and I playing on a metal play structure at Happy Hollow petting farm and zoo. Happy Hollow is a pretty good petting farm, but it's kind of a lame zoo. The best thing they had was a jaguar, but that kept pacing back and forth in the tall grass, as though it were really pissed off about something. They had lemurs, which reminded me of this guy and made me want to sing, "I like to move it, move it."

I will close with a short rumination about Sports. My wife is from Michigan, and a lot of her family are rabid Detroit Tiger fans. And after watching a few games of the ALCS, I have to say, the Tigers are looking pretty unbeatable. Of course, I'm going to root for any team that beats the dreaded Evil Industrial Complex Syndicate Yankees. You can read more about my thoughts about the Yankees here. My buddy Jeff is a big Yankees fan, which I constantly tell him is like rooting for Big Tobacco. So, I say, Go Tigers!

I also have been delving deep into my deepest obsession, which is college football. Michigan does look very good. But there is another team very close geographically to Michigan, say, one state south, that is looking EVEN BETTER. I am looking forward to a possible meeting on Nov. 18th between two undefeated OSU and UM teams – winner plays for the National Championship. How cool would that be?


Pictured here, OSU quarterback and Heisman front-runner Troy Smith. Smith has led the Buckeyes to a perfect 7-0 record and fills my Saturdays with joy.

Is America a Christian Nation?

Not really, says author and Christian Bill McKibben. His article exposes the central hypocrisy of American Christianity and raises some tough questions for those of us who are serious about this Jesus fellow.

What's best about this article, I think, is that McKibben is not an outsider, frightened by faith and expressions of faith. He's a Christian, writing about his own people.

You can read the article, originally published in Harper's Magazine here.