COLUMN: A Billion

By the time you read this, someone somewhere is a newly minted lottery BILLIONAIRE. I bought a ticket. They say the odds of winning are less than getting struck by lightning twice in your life. I haven't been struck by lightning even ONCE yet, so the way I see it, I'm due.

Whether it's me or not, I'm sure we've had a Mega Millions winner by now, and all of us have had our pipe dreams duly shattered and are back to earning the incomes of mere mortals. But I'm writing this column a full week ahead of time. In MY current reality, we still have two days until the drawing and there's a ticket in my hand. The possibility currently exists that I'm days away from being a billionaire.

A pretty THIN possibility, sure, but a possibility nonetheless. I'm no physicist, but I guess I'm sort of like a walking version of Schrodinger's cat. But this time, it's Schrodinger's Lottery. Since the outcome depends upon a series of random balls ping-ponging around, and since said outcome has yet to be determined, the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics suggests that right NOW, the ticket in my pocket is both a winner AND a loser, since it hasn't been observed in one state or the other. I am, in this moment, both an inconsequential average earner AND a billionaire with enough money to literally shape the destiny of the future.

That's pretty sweet.

I know, a columnist writing about the lottery is about as played out as a comedian riffing on airplane food. But this is no normal lottery. This is a BILLION dollars. If I won a million dollars, I would jump up and down, scream til I was hoarse, and probably die from shock. If I won a BILLION dollars, I'm pretty sure I'd just start laughing. That's a comically absurd amount of money for one person to possess.

If I won a million dollars in the lottery, I might take a vacation to Bora Bora. If I won a BILLION dollars, I might be able to BUY Bora Bora. I can't even wrap my head around that kind of money. Whoever wins this prize could create foundations and charities that could SERIOUSLY help the world. You could fund scientific studies that could eradicate any number of horrible diseases.

...OR...

There are some who say that laughter is the best medicine -- and I'm pretty sure I can come up with some HILARIOUS ways to blow through a billion dollars.

For instance, I'd buy up as much New York real estate next to Trump Tower that I could. Then it's just a matter of constructing an identical skyscraper. Except mine would be ONE floor taller. And I'd name it something like "The Obama Spire," just to see Trump's face grow another shade of orange. Love him or hate him, wouldn't you want to see THAT Twitter-storm? Of course, we may want to wait until he's OUT of office. When I said I wanted to reshape destiny, accidentally causing World War III via temper tantrum wasn't what I had in mind.

Maybe I'd track down Tommy Wiseau. You know about "The Room," right? Universally accepted to be perhaps THE single worst movie of all time, "The Room" is SO bad that viewing it is one of life's great pleasures. Wiseau is the astonishingly untalented writer, director, financier, and actor behind this most rotten of tomatoes. It's said Tommy spent eight million of his own money making "The Room." Imagine what could happen if he spent $100 million of MY money on a sequel. Sure, some characters didn't make it out of the original alive, but I guarantee people returning from the dead wouldn't be the least crazy thing in "The Room 2." The world needs to see Tommy Wiseau interacting with CGI dinosaurs, I'm just saying.

And speaking of incredibly talentless people, I'd say it's about high time I record my debut album. I might not have a lick of musical talent, but when has that ever stopped someone with $1.6 billion in his wallet? With fancy producers and some auto-tune, I can probably make a banger or two. And if not, I know how it'll sell regardless. Paul McCartney's headed our way next year. Macca could SNEEZE on a record and countless Beatle completists would line up to buy it. I just need to find out how much Sir Paul charges to record sneezes. Sample it, loop it, rap over it, top the charts, date Taylor Swift, dump Taylor Swift, Taylor Swift records a hate album about me, and finally I attain my dream status as a certified Hollywood Bad Boy.

Oh, and as for Paul McCartney: if I won the lottery, Paul would be staying for a SECOND night at the TaxSlayer Center -- I mean the Shane Brown Is Awesome Center -- and THOSE tickets wouldn't go for $200 a pop. REAL Beatles fans don't have that kind of disposable income because they're already in debt with basements full of 180-gram Japanese import vinyl records. Instead, I'd give all the tickets away for free, provided you score high enough on the giant Beatles trivia quiz that I'd publish in this very paper.

The news has spent all week going back and forth telling us how great it is to win the lottery but then how TERRIBLE it is to win the lottery. For every happy winner, there's horror stories about lottery windfalls leading to murders and lawsuits and bankruptcies.

So maybe it's best that I don't win the big payout. After all, if I could ever beat THOSE odds, I'd suddenly start being REALLY afraid of lightning.

COLUMN: Jill Johnson

Well, it's that time of year when columnists like me are supposed to regale you with spooky tales of haunted happenings. The thing is, I'm fresh out.

My house doesn't seem to be a supernatural hotspot. It's devoid of tragic backstories and doesn't appear to have been built over any ancient burial grounds. The only things that go bump in the night around here are cats.

But something a tiny bit terryifying DID happen last weekend. I was moonlighting at a DJ gig when one of the employees came up to chat.

"Hey, one of my best friends went to school with you," she said.

This is a somewhat ghastly thing to hear. If you guys think I'm nerdy NOW, you should've peeped me back in my school days. There's no way I could've left a good impression.

"Ooh, I bet she told you I was crazy nerdy," I replied.

"Actually she said you were really cool and nice. Do you remember Jill Johnson?"

Wow. Talk about a blast from the past. It's good to know that I was cool -- when I was ten, because that's the last I ever spent quality time with Jill Johnson. At some point, we ended up on different sides of the district map, so we only ever went to grade school together.

I actually knew that Jill ended up in the Quad Cities. She came up to me once at another DJ gig and introduced herself. I didn't recognize her, but she knew ME right away, which confirms my fear that I apparently look like a taller and fatter version of my ten-year-old self. Regardless, it was good to see her and harken back to old memories.

But Jill Johnson and I can never share my MOST vivid memory of her -- because it never happened.

Do any of you remember your first real nightmare? The very first time you had a dream SO scary you woke up in a cold sweat shaking? A dream so awful you spent the rest of the night tossing and turning, afraid to go back to sleep? A dream that you can't forget, not even 40 years later? There aren't many things in my life that I'm capable of keeping secret -- but I've never told ANYONE about this dream. Mostly because of how stupid it was.

I was in third grade when it happened. Here's the dream: One of my classmates was secretly an alien trying to take over the world. The ONLY person who knew about it, naturally, was ME. And like the plot of SO many bad monster movies of yore, absolutely no one would believe me. Meanwhile, all of my friends were being turned into alien zombies. Heavy bummer.

If this WAS a bad movie, it'd be up to me to step up and somehow stop the alien menace. Except that I couldn't. Instead, I spent the entire dream hopelessly afraid and unable to change fate as more of my friends became mindless slaves at the hands of the evil alien. An evil alien named Jill Johnson.

Creepy, right? But I left one part out. In the dream, I knew that Jill was an alien because I accidentally saw her in her TRUE ALIEN FORM -- which looked identical to Olivia Newton-John's Sandy at the end of "Grease." Slowly but surely, Jill the Alien turned our entire student body into Evil Zombie Sandys.

We all know "Grease," right? It's the movie musical that teaches us we can woo the boy/girl of our dreams if we simply change every aspect of our personality and find some hot pants. Sandy's a goody-goody who's in love with Danny, who's a baddy-baddy. At the end (spoiler alert,) Sandy shows up in a wicked perm and a leather jacket and she and Danny go together like rama-lama-lama-ka-dinga-ka-dinga-dong. Some say it's one of the most sexist movie plots of all time. Others argue it's a feminist manifesto. And at least one eight-year-old thought it was 100% alien.

I suppose Freud would tell me this dream was symbolic of a young man's search for understanding of the alien nature of blossoming sexuality. Either that or too many Cheetos before bed. But I was in THIRD grade, and I'm pretty sure at that age, girls were just boys who had cooties. I could probably debate the deep meanings of this dream forever. I've certainly pondered it numerous times over the past 40 years.

The only thing I know for certain is that it had nothing to do with Jill Johnson. I don't ever recall her auditioning for the role of Sandy the Hot-Pants-Wearing Nightmare Alien. She's an innocent party in all this, which is why I'm not using her real name. In reality, she was -- well, she was cool and nice, as I recall. I like bumping into her, and on those rare times we DO talk, I hope she can't tell that a small part of my brain is always worried that she's going to start singing "Summer Nights" and eat my face off.

If I want a good Halloween fright, I don't need a house full of ghosts or alien lights in the sky to get creeped out. I just need a bad musical and the name of an old classmate. For now, I'm putting this column and this nightmare to bed. Here's hoping I don't spend the next eight hours being chased by a hatchet-wielding Man of La Mancha. 

COLUMN: GPS

I love technology.

If I had a nickel for every column I've started with those words, I'm pretty sure I'd have at least thirty-five cents by now.

But it's true. Some people are thrilled by antiques and flea markets and crusty old items from yesteryear. Not me. I don't marvel when I see a relic like a butter churn. We as a species have evolved beyond churning our own butter. I await a future where butter is brought to me at the push of a button from either a robot maid or a highly advanced system of pneumatic tubes.

I vowed long ago that I would forever stay at the top of my technological game. I wonder if my parents ever said the same thing? My dad is amazing. He built the house I grew up in from the ground up. He designed the blueprints, captained the construction team, and saw the project through to completion. He cannot, however, figure out how to turn on a television, play a DVD, or find the power button on a computer. My mom, on the other hand, loves computers. She has a home PC that rivals mine in processing and memory, complete with a multi-speaker surround sound system. She uses it to check the weather and play mah-jong. I've explained iTunes to her at least two dozen times. She "doesn't get" Facebook.

But against both desire and determination, I think I'm starting to reach that stage myself. Every time some new piece of tech comes along that's supposed to make my life easier, I find myself weighing the benefits of an easy life against the amount of time and patience it takes to learn and understand it. I steadfastly believe that I am neither fuddy nor duddy, but I'm starting to get fed up with keeping up with technology.

Case in point: You guys know I DJ on the side, right? Well, one of the lines on my high-tech DJ controller is acting up right now. The tech support section of their website suggests that I update the firmware, which seems like sound advice. I just need to learn what "firmware" is and how one goes about updating it. They also recommend that I install the newest version of my DJ software. No problemo, I thought, until I logged on to discover that the software I use is so old they don't even MAKE it anymore. In the three years since I bought my "top of the line" gear, everything's become outmoded and outdated.

At some point, we should get to put a cap on tech evolution and take a breather. Do we really need 5G televisions? I mean, 4G's are plenty enough G's as far as I'm concerned. Technology is cool, but sometimes it's more trouble than it's worth.

Last week, one of my favorite bands was playing the Windy City. I was meeting up with old college friends at the show, but I had to face a long solo roadtrip to a club and neighborhood I'd never been to. The Old Shane would have pulled out his trusty map and familiarized himself with the route beforehand. But not NEW Shane. Not technologically adept Shane.

Instead I did what anyone under 30 does now: I punched the address into my smartphone and put complete blind faith into an annoying little robot voice who tells you where to turn. At first, this made for a relaxing and confident drive up without a care in the world. In fact, Google's guidance system comes with real-time traffic avoidance, which was neat. It told me right out the gate that I-88 had traffic backups and recommended I take I-80 to I-55 instead. Cool, right?

Well, until I got to Joliet, when it told me that I-55 had backups and I should take I-57 instead. Well, okay. And then I got on I-57 and it told me there were immediate backups and I should take the next exit -- which was four lanes over at rush hour. I simply had to risk life, limb, bumpers, and the death glares of a half dozen drivers as I merged my way over to Google's handy shortcut.

A shortcut that involved driving for twenty minutes through, shall we say, some of the more murder-y parts of southern Chicago. I wasn't exactly positive that I'd be murdered at any second, but it was certainly a bit more murderish of an area than I ever cared to be in.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if I had my choice of waiting in traffic for a few extra minutes versus finding myself at stop lights where people literally come banging on your windows yelling "GIMME SOME MONEY," I now know for SURE which one I'd pick. But Google didn't care that it just sent me on a scenic tour of burned-out warehouses from the nightmares of Snake Plissken. Google only cared that I shaved seven minutes off my commute.

And that's the problem with new technology. Sometimes the cost outweighs the benefits. Is an easier life worth the effort? Should I be satisfied with my current non-smart refrigerator or should I upgrade to one pre-installed with Twitter and Facebook? (Which seriously exist, apparently for those of us who don't want to access leftovers without losing immediate access to the public thoughts of Kanye West.) For now, I'm still trying to stay as high-tech as possible, within reason. I don't have any offspring to explain the new Facebook to me in twenty years, so I need to have game. But next time I go to Chicago, I'm using a paper map like some butter-churning fuddy-duddy.

COLUMN: Ham Candy

(Yep, that's an ACTUAL PHOTO.)

There are a lot of things in life that I don't want to be.

I don't want to be murdered. I don't want to build any type of city on rock and roll. I don't want to be nominated to the Supreme Court. And perhaps more than anything, I don't ever want to be one of those people who posts pictures of their dinner to social media.

You know the type, right? "I'm so much better than you because I made perfectly plated pecan-crusted salmon with mango chutney and capers!" Look, it's not tough to best me when it comes to food. I have no idea what chutney is. I don't even know what a caper is. Truth be told, I barely know what salmon is.

I'm not so great in the kitchen. Fairly early in my adult life, I discovered that it's far easier to sit at a table or drive past a window and pay strangers to cook and serve me lunch. And dinner. And sometimes breakfast. This, however, is not exactly the healthiest way to live. At any given point in time, there's a strong possibility that I am legally taco-toxicated. It's probably a good thing for everyone involved that there's no breathalyzer to test for blood-salsa levels.

But a couple years ago, I set about to change things. I started learning about some of these weird devices in my kitchen like, umm, a stove. I went grocery shopping. I bought cookbooks. Well, truth be told, my friends sort of threw cookbooks at me when I told them I was going to "wing it." I even cracked open a few of those dusty tomes my mom passed down (sample sentence: "When your husband gets home from a hard day's work, he DESERVES a hot, tasty meal!")

It wasn't always pretty, but I daresay I've made some giant culinary steps. I can grill fish. I can bake chicken. I can roast potatoes. Someone came to my last party just because they'd heard about the food (and presumably didn't show up just to laugh at it. I hope.)

Last week, though, I discovered it's possible to become a little over-confident in one's cooking ability. Last week was a big oops. An oops big enough to send me back to fast food while I re-evaluated the progress of my life. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, and sometimes you inadvertently create a toxic bio-hazard. Plates had to be DESTROYED, people.

I know what you're thinking. I probably attempted a recipe well beyond my skill level, right? Something complex with multiple steps and foreign ingredients requiring an experienced delicate touch. I wish.

Instead, I ruined a HAM STEAK.

That's kind of impressive. It takes a certain level of skill to improperly cook something that comes PRE-cooked. I might be lousy at cooking, but I'm clearly awesome at blunders. The worst part? I still don't exactly know what I did wrong, but I'm blaming Youtube.

You name the recipe and there's a kajillion videos on Youtube to help you. I found over 50 different videos alone on how to cook ham steak, which is notable considering all you have to do is warm it up, and even that's optional.

But Chef Shane wanted to elevate his ham steak game, so I found a video that seemed super easy to follow. Cook the steak until "it browns nicely." Add some pineapple juice, brown sugar and dry mustard to the leftover juices, let it caramelize, and then pour your delightful glaze over your delightful steak, presto bango.

Well, I cooked that ham steak like a champ and it didn't brown one bit. Either I'd discovered a race of heat-resistant pigs or I was cooking too low. So I turned up the heat and kept at it until I finally gave up some fifteen minutes later and plated my decidedly NON-brown steak.

Then I added pineapple juice, brown sugar, and mustard. A few minutes later, it started bubbling just like the video, so I let it caramelize for a minute and then poured the glaze over my steak. At this point, things looked pretty good. I suppose my first clue something was amiss was when I touched my knife to the ham steak and heard a noticeable "clink."

Somehow, some way, in the two minutes between pouring the glaze on the steak and attempting to eat it, the entire concoction had solidified into a hard blackened plate of nightmares. Instead of a succulent and juicy ham steak, I'm pretty sure I had just invented ham candy, and let's just say no one would turn up at a party to sample it (at least not without a pickaxe.) I tried my best to chisel and scrape away the smellier and/or more carcinogenic parts of my meal, but it was a lost cause. All that's left now are some photos that are blurry because I was laughing too hard at my ineptitude to hold my phone steady.

Maybe one day charred ham candy will be a delicacy and I'm simply waaay ahead of the curve. Or maybe I just royally botched it. But I'm not giving up. After a few days of self-doubt, laughter, and a LOT of carryout tacos, yesterday I attempted a casserole that came out so perfectly, I took a picture and put it on Facebook without hesitation.

I guess if there's one thing I REALLY don't want to be, it's a quitter.