On their way to morning worship this past Sabbath, the Christian soldiers of Christ Chapel Bible Church, with a membership estimated by its executive pastor at between 4,000 and 5,000, were met by a brigade of another kind: about 60 homeowners holding signs with such pleas as, "WWJD?" and "Save my historic neighborhood." The church is located in a 1930s-era Arlington Heights neighborhood between Pershing and Birchman avenues. For several years, angry residents say, church leaders have been pressuring older homeowners to sell on the cheap and then leveling the houses for parking lots and a future humongous sanctuary it plans to build. When residents' pleas to the church's hierarchy to contain its sprawl went unheard, homeowner Andrew Swartzfager said, they organized, taking their fight to the city's Zoning Commission (which will hear the group's appeal of the expansion on Feb. 11) and now to the streets. But when Executive Pastor Bill Egner told Channel 5 news that the church did not want to be a bad neighbor and had "agreed to certain boundaries ... that we would not go across in the future," Swartzfager, who is on the neighborhood's negotiating committee, was dumbfounded. "They've not agreed to anything," he said. Next stop: city hall.

Static likes boots, owns several pair. Some of them have even stepped in authentic cow patties and been worn while riding horses and herding cattle. In fact, deep in its dark past, Static actually rode in a rodeo grand entrance parade. (An event even goofier than most, filled with "celebrities" who clearly didn't know which end of a horse pointed north. Static's waving-to-the-crowd technique, by the way, was a cross between that of the Pope and a Dime Box beauty queen.) But the tallest pair of boots in the barn weren't high enough to wade safely through that Mount Everest of pony poo that the Star-Telegram dumped on readers in its Life section on a recent Sunday. The story, if one can call it that, was about Justin boots and who wears 'em. We'd have been a little less grossed out if Justin hadn't moved its boot factories out of Fort Worth several years ago, in favor of Missouri, El Paso, Mexico, and China and then sold the company to Warren Buffett. 'Scuse us while we scrape off the bottom of our non-Justin, non-PETA-approved footwear.