COLUMN: Earwigs

Forgive my crudity this week, but I'm afraid I need to trash talk a little.

Modern living is amazing. In my lifetime alone, we as a people have made some pretty tremendous Jetsons-like leaps of progress. I remember tube TVs that proudly picked up three local static-filled channels. I remember when records weren't "vintage" and was simply the way music came. I remember when my family was at the cutting edge of technology because my dad had a "portable" pager that was still too big to fit in most pockets.

It seems hard to fathom, but once upon a time, I survived quite easily without a phone that could stream movies, play music, keep tabs on our President, or assist angry birds in swine genocide at the push of a button. The future is here, and it's pretty amazing.

But at the same time, we're still a good distance away from proper Jetsons-level cool. Where's my jetpack? My flying car? I look outside and see no people-sized pneumatic tubes that can whoosh me to work and back. Science and technology have given us many blessings, but I'm pretty sure if we all put our heads together and focused, we could really make some historic leaps and bounds in modern laziness, people.

For example: we should have a WAY better system for handling our trash.

Landfills, global warming, carbon footprints, climate change, litter, paper vs. plastic, recycling, composting, environmentalism. These are all words that important journalists should focus on. Thankfully, I'm not one of them. I'm just tired of having to bag my trash up and take it out to the bin, over and over and over again. This is counter-productive towards my aspiring goals of laziness. 

Taking the trash out takes manhours (or at least man-minutes), motivation, and exertion -- three things that I can personally live without. I just took out a bag of trash and I'm pretty sure I missed at least two important television commercials that some poor corporation spent good money on. Taking out the trash is unfair to capitalism and the free market. Plus, it's horribly hazardous to your health. The last time I tried to walk my trash out to the curb, I fell and broke my ankle and had to spend the next six weeks in a cast.

I know what you're thinking -- Shane, didn't that happen, like, four years ago? Yes, yes it did. And that, friends, was indeed the last time I took my trash out to the curb. How my trash has gotten there since is completely beyond me. I like to think of it as one of those mysteries of science that perhaps we'll never be able to explain.

Or maybe I just have a VERY nice neighbor. All I know is every Monday, I wake up, my trash is already out at the curb, and I'm not asking questions. I don't know if someone's being nice or if someone just wants to use the excess space in my bin for their excess trash. Frankly, I don't care. I'm just grateful.

Still, though, I'm pretty sure there's room to be a little lazier. My trash might magically make its way to the curb every week, but I still have to go to the effort of bagging it up and putting it in the bin. I thought I could handle this simple task -- until this week.

Last Sunday I had a couple bags of trash that needed tossing, so in a fit of pure unadulterated motivation, I put on shoes, walked the trash down the back steps, opened the lid of my trash bin... and screamed in horror.

I hate taking out the trash -- but I hate bugs a whole lot more. And when I threw back the lid of my trash bin, I would approximate somewhere around thirty earwigs became airborne, landing in my hair, on my arms, on my shoes, and just generally everywhere you don't ever want earwigs to land.

Now, I'm a grown adult. I know fully well that earwigs don't ACTUALLY crawl into your ear and lay eggs -- but they sure LOOK like they do. In the grand pantheon of insectdom, earwigs are fairly harmless. That still doesn't mean I'm in any hurry to have dozens of the pincer-waving montrosities rain down on my head. I hope none of my neighbors heard me yell, "Gaaaaaaak!" and dance around in horror in my back yard. It wasn't my best moment. Don't worry, the denizens of my surprise earwig condo have since been evicted with extreme prejudice, but just imagine how many important television commercials I missed for THAT.

I'm just saying that if technology stepped up, I could put broken ankles and earwigs behind me for good. How? Don't ask me, I'm no scientist. Maybe some kind of hygenic hole in the floor that you toss garbage down and it disappears forever and ever, no questions asked. At the very least, you'd think I could purchase and install some kind of sassy, back-talking robot maid to handle waste management with skill and comedic one-liners aplenty.

I don't like to trash talk, but we need to step it up if we wanna be as cool as George Jetson.

COLUMN: Alien Hunting

As I type this, it's 9:30 at night. I'm sitting alone in my car, just me and my laptop, in the parking lot at Schwiebert Park in downtown Rock Island.

Why I am writing a column in such a peculiar locale and not in the usual position of lying sideways on my couch with a cat precariously balanced on my shoulder? Simple. I'm on a stakeout for UFOs. Duh.

Scoff all you want, people, but it's happening. A couple days ago someone uploaded a video to Youtube showing a creepy white light hovering unnaturally in the sky before it appears to ascend vertically into the clouds. The video was purportedly shot by a truck driver, and it was supposedly filmed somewhere just south of the Quad Cities.

Last night, a friend of mine captured grainy cell phone footage of two green lights he saw travel across the horizon, hop the Missisippi, and disappear somewhere over the Rock Island horizon. It appears the Quad Cities is rife this summer with unidentified flying objects. This is entirely unacceptable.

My whole life I've wanted to see something cool like a UFO in the sky. I've been on countless roadtrips, umpteen aimless drives, and more wasted hours than I care to admit staring wistfully at the night sky, and I've yet to catch even the tiniest glimpse of any wayward alien tourists. Now people in the Quad Cities are spotting genuine unexplained lights in the sky, and none of these people are ME. This is super unfair.

I am a firm believer that we are not alone in the universe. The odds are just too stacked against it. We're standing on merely one of eight (sorry, Pluto) planets that orbit our sun. Our sun is but one of 250 billion stars in our galaxy. Our galaxy is but one of 100 billion galaxies that we've been able to identify with the Hubble telescope. On the big map of the universe, we are less than a pinpoint. We are less than a molecule dancing on the head of that pinpoint. You simply can't tell me that out of the infinite abyss of the endless universe, we're the only ones with enough common sense to grow legs and stroll out of the ether.

Maybe there's life on one of Jupiter's mysterious moons. Maybe the nearest life is a kajillion light years away. Maybe that version of "life" is little more than a lump of moss chilling on some space rock somewhere. Or maybe that "life" is a race of sentient space wolves who've mastered interstellar travel. We literally have no idea.

The internet is awash in UFO videos, and I'm enough of a dreamer and/or idiot to watch them all. Most are fake, silly, and easily explained -- but a few of them are genuinely creepy and maybe, just maybe, the real deal. Perhaps it's the military testing new technology, maybe it's E.T. waving hello, or maybe it's those space wolves looking for an appetizer. Who knows? The only thing I'm sure about is that I'm not letting a UFO go unseen by me tonight. I'm here for the long haul, eyes skyward.

9:45 p.m. Nothing yet, but I feel all kinds of Fox Mulder cool. Truth be told, if I DID see a UFO, I'd probably just freeze and pee my pants, but for now, I feel like a cool FBI alien hunter.

9:55 p.m. It's a good thing I'm NOT with the FBI, because the kids in the car over there are passing around what does NOT look like a normal cigarette.

10:05 p.m. OMIGOD I CAN'T BELIEVE IT! LET ME GET MY CAM -- no, wait, that's just an airplane.

10:10 p.m. I will never not love the way the downtown WHBF aerial tower looks at night. It's my Eiffel.

10:15 p.m. NO. FREAKING. WAY. I TOTALLY SEE A -- oh, that's just Jupiter.

10:25 p.m. I'm starting to think I look less like a cool FBI alien hunter and more like a weird middle-aged creeper hanging out by himself at a park after dark. If a cop asks me what I'm doing, I'd better have an answer that isn't "looking for aliens."

10:35 p.m. Okay, so the "long haul" I was in for turned out to be roughly 45 minutes. I'm now back home, safely sideways on my couch with a cat on my shoulder. It turns out my desire to see a UFO is tempered only by my desire to NOT be seen as a park creeper. Plus I'm pretty sure I saw ANOTHER park creeper there, and I'm pretty sure he had dibs.

So if you see an eerie light in the sky, don't tell me about it. I'll be mad jealous. Just put it on Youtube and I'm sure I'll see it soon enough.

COLUMN: World Cup

WHOO! Oh man. How are you guys holding up? Is anybody even still conscious enough to read a paper today? I've barely recovered from such an exciting final match of the 2018 FIFA World Cup. That was intense!

Well, okay. I'm writing this in advance, so I have absolutely no idea how yesterday's final match turned out. Let's just say that [FRANCE OR CROATIA] really deserved that win after playing such a hard-fought game against [FRANCE OR CROATIA]. Even though [FRANCE OR CROATIA] didn't end up with a win, they can be proud to have even advanced far enough to play a team like [FRANCE OR CROATIA].

The World Cup is exciting stuff, folks. Every four years, top athletes from around the world gather in the spirit of competition, sportsmanship, and a united desire to kick each other in the shins as hard as they possibly can. Occasionally, one of these formidable athletes will miss a shin and instead kick a ball into a net. This is called a "goal," or "GOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOAAAAAAAAAALLLLLLLL!!!!" for short. I've watched enough matches to know that goals are important, but not so important that a preliminary game can't end in a 0-0 tie, which shows you right there JUST how exciting of a tournament it can be.

The World Cup is a grand spectacle. There's only two problems: (1) We live in America, and (2) the sport they choose to play is soccer.

I know, I know. Shut up, footie nerds. I'm well aware that soccer has made some serious inroads in American culture over the past decade. Major League Soccer teams presumably exist because I've heard of them, and major U.S. networks are now even starting to carry British Premier League matches on the weekends. Soccer in the U.S. is probably the most popular its ever been right now, which means it's now our nation's favorite sport just behind football, basketball, baseball, hockey, NASCAR, golf, horse racing, pro wrestling, pumpkin chucking, hot-dog eating contests, and whatever American Ninja Warrior is.

YES, I'm kidding. There's a lot of people out there who love soccer. They just tend not to live in our country. Even the most ardent American fan of soccer has to admit that, while popular in the states, soccer isn't exactly a way of life over here like it is in most parts of the world. Still, I like soccer. Watching it makes me feel worldly and sophisticated. It looks like it'd be great fun to play. I'm just not entirely sold yet as to whether or not it's great fun to watch.

I'm well aware that I'm NOT remotely qualified to comment wisely on soccer pros and cons. The only sport I watch regularly is NASCAR, which is (a) a character flaw that I'm well aware of, and (b) a sport that many sportspeople don't consider a sport. Other than racing, the only sports I tend to watch are: baseball (when the Cubs are in the playoffs,) basketball (when the Bulls are in the playoffs), football (when the Bears are in the playoffs,) and yes, World Cup soccer (when England are in the tournament.)

Why do I root for England? Well, it's tough to root for the U.S. when we didn't even qualify this year. If you've got to adopt a team to root for, you can't do better than England. When it comes to droughts, Team England is basically the Bill Buckner of World Cup soccer. When they're predicted to do well, they do awful. When they're not expected to dominate (like this season,) they always come thiiiis close to glory before mucking it all up in the end.

England is a soccer crazed nation. When the World Cup rolls around, their pop charts fill with soccer anthems -- and even the ANTHEMS can be depressing as all get out. Probably the most recognized UK soccer anthem is a song called "Three Lions." You can hear thousands of fans chanting its "football's coming home" chorus every time Team England takes the pitch. But the rest of the song pretty much just bemoans their team's reputation for failure. "So many jokes, so many sneers, but all those oh-so-nears wear you down through the years... Three lions on a shirt, Jules Rimet still gleaming, thirty years of hurt never stopped me dreaming." It'd be like if Wrigley blared a song called "Fail Cubs Fail" after every loss.

But if you thought the party in Chicago was insane when the Cubs won, I promise you we'll be able to HEAR the Brits screaming the day that Team England eventually wins the World Cup, and it WILL happen one day. But it definitely won't be this year, after last week's heartbreaking loss in the quarterfinals. Instead, we ended up with France (a team I don't especially care about) vs. Croatia (a team whose country I couldn't even point out on a map, other than "somewhere by Russia.")

Honestly, though, I enjoyed the matches I saw this year. If you've got to pick a sport to support, you could do a lot worse than soccer. I recently read an article about other sports as old as soccer that didn't quite catch on. Let's just say it's a good thing. Many were weird variations of tennis and baseball. A truly alarming number involved the use of live roosters, often as, err, the "ball."

So if you're a fan of soccer, I hope you enjoyed this year's World Cup. Maybe next time we'll have a Team USA to continue England's disappointments. If you're NOT a soccer fan, just be happy that we weren't all tuning in to watch organized chicken homicide. I just hope you didn't miss out yesterday when history was most definitely made by [FRANCE OR CROATIA].

COLUMN: Ready Player One

Over the years, I've amassed a fairly decent movie collection. But in today's age of streaming media, I've been buying fewer and fewer Blu-Rays lately. This week, though, I had to make an exception.

When Ernest Cline released his novel "Ready Player One" back in 2011, it became one of my fast favorites. Spielberg's film adaptation earlier this year was equally awesome. I saw it in the theater, and I've now been watching it on repeat viewings at home this week. With a fun nerdy plot and non-stop references to the 1980s, it's the kind of movie custom-made for a pop culture geek like myself. But I also discovered that after you watch it umpteen times, you can easily get lost daydreaming about Cline's world.

"Ready Player One" is set in a not-too-distant future where global warming and overpopulation has plunged much of the world into poverty and slums. As a result, most people instead spend their days in the OASIS -- a virtual reality universe where you can live, love, work, and play from the confines of your dilapidated shack. Strap on some VR goggles, plug yourself in, and suddenly you're anywhere you fancy. You could climb a virtual Mt. Everest or drive a virtual Batmobile -- the possibilities are limitless. The virtual currency inside the OASIS is valued more than real world money. Even if you live in a real world shantytown, you could be a mansion-owning millionaire in the OASIS.

If you want to know what happens, watch the movie or read the book. I recommend doing both, since they're quite different from one another.

But it's made me ponder: What if the OASIS really existed? What if there was a virtual world that we could escape to any time we fancied? Where would I go? How would I live? What would I do with my time?

If I had to pick the ideal virtual location for my virtual mansion, my mind immediately goes to mountains. I have no idea what makes tall stacks of ground majestic and beautiful, but nothing wows me like a good mountain vista. I think having some kind of Stanley Hotel-type mountain fortress with spectacular virtual views would be my first choice.

Then again, I know a guy who just went to Colorado and crashed his mountain bike to avoid running into a rattlesnake. If I had my global pick of locales, I think I'd rather live someplace without venomous and/or beclawed wildlife. Even in a virtual world, I'm enough of a weenie to be virtually afraid of virtual snakes and cyber-bears. I sincerely doubt the existence of Bigfoot, but in an imagination-fueled world where anything's possible? I'd be surrounded by robo-Sasquatches by sunset.

My next pick, then, would be ocean-side. Nothing centers me quite like staring out over an infinite sea. Going to bed with the sounds of waves crashing against craggy rocks would beat the heck out of any white noise machine the real world could offer.

Hmm, but once broke my foot walking down a sidewalk. I should probably avoid craggy rocks. I can't swim in the real world, so what makes me think my virtual avatar would fare any better? I don't want to be the first virtual corpse to wash up on a virtual beach. It'd be safer to set up virtual residence somewhere land-locked. Maybe I should just settle for, like, a river or something.

A desert? Too virtually hot. A medieval castle? Too virtually cold. I suppose it really doesn't matter WHERE I virtually live, as long as I have a massive mansion that I could deck out any way I saw fit.

Then again, in all the virtual worlds and virtual homes in "Ready Player One," I never once saw a virtual maid. I don't want to exhaust my imagination building a massive virtual dream house only to spend all my virtual time having to virtually clean the place. Plus, unless I round up a virtual girlfriend, which is virtually unlikely, I'd be stuck by myself in some echoey mansion that, knowing my luck, will be virtually haunted.

No, I'd probably be better off in a small simple imaginary home with a nice TV and a couple of virtual cats.

In other words, if I had access to a virtual world where I could live anywhere and do anything, I'd probably live in Virtual Rock Island, in a house identical to my own, sitting on a virtual couch playing virtual video games and watching movies about people who live in other virtual worlds.

And something tells me, as long as I had access to virtual Harris Pizza, I'd get along okay. Virtually.

COLUMN: Spit

I'm never here to dispense gross-out humor, mostly because I'm easily grossed out myself. I prefer to eat my cookies rather than toss them. But we are human beings, and we need to admit that a lot of things human beings do are inherently gross. That still doesn't mean I want to think or write about it. When it comes to matters of basic bodily functions, my general rule of thumb is: Whatever happens in the restroom stays in the restroom -- unless it needs to be flushed far away from said restroom. Whatever you do in there is your own business.

Of course, some restrooms are public, and that's where it gets sticky (hopefully not literally.) Whenever I go into a crowded restroom, I do my very best to stare at my shoes and pretend I'm the only one there. But if you're being gross, sometimes it's hard to ignore you. And yes, that goes for you, green-shirted guy from last weekend. Don't think I didn't see you shuffle past me in the restroom, do your duty, and then go high-five your bro's -- without washing your hands.

Lately, I've had the misfortune of noticing another trend in the bathroom. It's disgusting, but we need to dive into this one just a little bit. I promise I will do my very best NOT to gross you out, but we need to have a quick, tasteful heart-to-heart -- about saliva.

Saliva shouldn't be gross. Most animals produce it, and with all due apologies to John Merrick, we are nothing if not animals. Saliva helps us chew and swallow, lets us taste food, fights germs, and prevents our teeth from decaying. Birds use it to make nests. Cats use it to groom. We let our dogs slobber all over the place without a care in the world. Heck, when we find someone we like, one of the first things we try to do is mix saliva. It's a part of life.

Then why is it so disgusting to watch someone spit on the ground? I swear to you, nearly every time I'm in a public restroom, some dude comes in and hocks a wad of spit on the ground or in the urinal or toilet. I first started noticing it a few months ago, and now I can't NOT notice it. Any time my public bathroom space gets invaded, I brace myself for the inevitable hack-n-spit, and it usually ALWAYS happens.

And it's not just bathrooms. Pay attention the next time you're out on the weekend -- you're bound to catch some guy spitting on the ground like it's no big thing. I swear to you all, if you go to the gas station by my house, you can look at the parking lot and see clear evidence of spitters of yore. Everywhere I go, spittle can be found.

Maybe I shouldn't say anything? Is it some testosterone-fueled guy thing? Am I betraying the man club by complaining here? Nope. I used to work with a couple girls who I'd see spitting on the ground every time their shift ended. Spitting is a hobby of equal opportunity crassness. Just try it in Singapore. If you get caught spitting there, it's a $1500 fine.

It isn't the grossness of spitting that worries me, though. What worries me is that I clearly must be broken.

I've never once felt the urge to spit on the ground. I'm pretty sure I've never done it. I'm not even sure I know HOW to do it. It's just something I've never had want nor need to do. I've never once thought, "Man, I could sure use a good spit right about now." Am I just being civil? Or is there something wrong with me?

The other day, I brought up this nonsense to a close friend.

"Can you believe how many people these days just spit on the ground?"

I was expecting one of our usual we're-better-than-everyone-else moments. Instead, he replied, "What, you've never just spit on the ground?"

"No!" I said, aghast. "Do you?"

"A few times a day, I guess," he replied to my shock and horror. "So what do you do when you feel the need to spit?"

As God is my witness, I have never felt the need to spit. If my nose gets plugged, I blow it. If my throat gets a tickle, I clear it with a cough. None of these events have ever made me want to spit, publically or otherwise.

This is worrisome. I just read that the average human produces between 2 to 4 pints of saliva per day. If apparently everybody in the world is spitting theirs out on a regular basis, WHERE IS MINE GOING? Am I going to keel over of acute saliva intoxication? It's no secret I've put on some unwanted weight over the past few years... OR HAVE I? Maybe I'm just carrying an extra hundred pounds of unused saliva. It wouldn't surprise me -- people have often told me that I'm full of spit (or something like that, at least.)