COLUMN: MDWAP

True story:  This is The Column That Never Printed.  The paper thought it was a little too taboo for a family paper.  It's the only time I've ever had something rejected outright.

I almost just wrecked my car.

On the way home earlier today, I was driving along, completely by myself, laughing SO uncontrollably hard that I suddenly became SUPER light-headed and thought I was about to pass out. I had to pull over to the side of road and put my head between my knees for a few seconds to regain composure.

I could have been seconds away from wrapping my car around a telephone pole, death by laughter. Instead of writing this column, I could be tended to by paramedics this very minute. But that's not the worst part. Had I passed out behind the wheel and required medical assistance, their first thought upon approaching my car probably wouldn't have been, "Hey, is that the dude from the newspaper?" It wouldn't have even been, "How did this guy end up crashing into a phone pole?"

No, had they come within earshot of my car, their first thought would have most definitely been, "Wait, was this guy driving around listening to PORNOGRAPHY?" This was almost my legacy.

I've been SO looking forward to this summer. Feeling the warmth of the sun. Seeing friends. Going to concerts and ballgames and being in crowds without worrying who's breathing on me. But the thing I've been looking forward to the most this summer is finally here: a new season of my favorite podcast, "My Dad Wrote A Porno."

Let's spell this disclaimer fully out: I am not endorsing this podcast. We are a family-friendly publication, and by its very nature, MDWAP is obviously NOT. If you're a wholesome and upstanding human being, don't give this podcast a second of your time. But if you can handle adult humor and you're POSITIVE there are no children anywhere within earshot, you can find MDWAP on most podcast streamers. Just don't blame me if you laugh so hard you wrap your car around a tree. You've been warned.   

In actuality, the podcast is NOT what it sounds like. But it's also EXACTLY what it sounds like. Host Jamie Morton is a British media producer who discovered his retired father had taken up a new hobby: self-publishing a series of ridiculously terrible erotic novels ("Belinda Blinked") he'd been secretly writing in the garden shed under the pen name Rocky Flintstone.

As a Christmas present to his friends, Morton took his dad's magnum opus of filth to a holiday luncheon and, through gales of laughter and embarassment, read it aloud to his best friends. One of those friends was Alice Levine, a BBC radio presenter, who immediately declared it should be a podcast. 

That was 2015. Today, "My Dad Wrote a Porno" is one of the most popular podcasts in the world. With over 250 million downloads, it's spawned a book, a world tour, and an HBO special. The sixth season debuted earlier this month, and it's as cringe-worthy and hysterical as ever. Each unscripted episode simply consists of Morton reading aloud a new chapter of his dad's work to Levine and their mutual friend James Cooper, while the three rip it to pieces mercilessly.  

Here's the thing: Rocky Flintstone has managed to create one of the least erotic attempts at erotica ever composed. It is legendarily bad. "Belinda Blinked" makes "50 Shades of Grey" seem like Shakespeare. The dialogue is stilted, the metaphors messy, and the tawdry bits are about as sexy as a stainless steel skillet.

The heroine of Rocky's tales is Belinda Blumenthal. She's the international sales director of Steele's Pots and Pans, because there's obviously no sexier industry than non-stick cookware. In each book, Belinda travels the globe selling pots and pans and, well, you know. But the plots make limited sense, even for this, umm, genre. To date, Belinda has traveled around Europe, visited the United States, taken the mainstage at the Millennium Dome, thwarted terrorists, briefly died and visited heaven, saved her friends from an avalanche, been kidnapped by villains in a hot air balloon, and was recently left for dead in the Australian outback. In the real world, all of this has taken six years to unfold; in the timeline of the book, it's all happened in roughly three months.

Over the six books, Rocky has described body parts as being "like pomegranates" and similar to "the bolts which held together the hull of the fateful Titanic." In certain risque scenes, characters appear to have grown third arms and accomplished feats that defy both common sense and the fundamental laws of physics. Some characters have entirely changed names over the course of a single chapter. Quality control is not a big concern to Rocky Flintstone.

On the podcast, Levine and Cooper constantly interrupt Morton to remind him that the filth he's reading was written by his DAD. I always thought my dad was a little weird because HIS favorite hobby is building replica Civil War cannons. I've never been more thankful of those cannons in my life. Dunno about you folks, but I'm perfectly 100% happy in my delusions that my parents sleep in separate beds Dick Van Dyke-style and I must have been some kind of immaculate conception. 

Oh, and speaking of Dick Van Dyke, in one famous bit of Rocky's novels, Belinda dies and goes to heaven, where she meets Dick Van Dyke. Jamie had to later tell his dad the unfortunate news that Dick Van Dyke is still very much alive. Oopsy. 

Again, if you're a virtuous and wholesome person with any sense of scruples, don't ever listen to this nonsense and feel free to pretend that I'm far too upstanding a person to listen to this hilarious filth. But if you're driving along and pull up next to a chubby guy barely in control of his vehicle because he's laughing like a lunatic, he might NOT be entirely deranged. He's probably just listening to porn.

COLUMN: Pickle Wrap

We live in turbulent times. This was made perfectly clear by the harrowing events of last weekend.

I spent Friday in my cubicle, blissfully unaware of the growing brouhaha outside. While I was returning e-mails, finalizing ad campaigns, and putting the finishing touches on a hard week's work, war was breaking out in our fragile community.

Only after I left the safety of the office did I discover life would never be the same. Great events in history come and go, but we shall always remember where we were and what we were doing when the Great Pickle Wrap War of 2021 broke out.

If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you (a) live under a rock, and (b) that rock is definitely NOT in the Quad Cities. But I'll recap one last time in case you were, I dunno, camping or something.

Late last week, a certain Bettendorf restaurant posted their daily special on Facebook: thick-cut dill pickle deliciousness surrounded by cream cheese and a dainty slice of deli meat. You know, those tasty concoctions that always make the menu at family reunions? You never know who made them. You never know where they came from. They just appear on the potluck table thanks to magical pickle pixies, or at least thanks to that one weird cousin whose name you can never remember. 

Well, this outraged the owner of another local deli. You see, she's been serving pickle wraps as a side dish for years, and she was a little irked to find another business copying her gimmick. But rather than take it on the chin and perhaps grumble about it to friends, she opted to air her grievance in a public post on Facebook while insinuating some kind of dibsies on the general concept of pickle wraps.

The post took approximately 32.6 seconds to go viral. By the time I got off work, EVERYONE was talking about pickle wraps. Memes were flying around social media, Lopiez was selling pickle-wrap pizza, bars were offering pickle shots, tattoo shops were etching pickle wraps onto ankles, and even the Moline Police Department tweeted out their diplomatic support of pickles in general. It was a viral celebration of dill, vinegar, and vitriol. Within two hours, a friend of mine from California was texting me asking why "Quad City pickle wraps" was trending across the country. 

Over the past week, I've now been stopped on the street by FIVE complete strangers, each saying they're looking forward to my take on the pickle wrap controversy. While I appreciate the support and love the assumption I'd be our paper's go-to authority on the much-coveted pickle beat, I may be about to disappoint you.

I have no horse in this race. I don't even really like pickle wraps. I won't NOT eat them should they be in front of me, but I've never sought them out. Call me steampunk if you must, but when it comes to vegetables floating in brine, I'm what you might call a pickle purist. I'd honestly much rather just chomp on pickles right out of the jar. They're perfect as is. I'm in full support of augmenting my ham with pickles, but I've never encountered a pickle that needed to be augmented by ham.

I have no hot-take on pickle wraps. Besides, I'm far too busy planning my lawsuit.

You see, the most outrageous thing happened to me. I went to a fast food restaurant for lunch the other day, and you'll never believe what happened. I ordered a cola, and this restaurant had the unmitigated audacity to serve my cola with little cubes of FROZEN WATER floating in it. 

But here's the thing. I've been putting frozen water cubes in my drinks at home for YEARS. "I was taught to make them as a kid and have made them ever since. Being a person that operates with integrity and 100% originality [except when I'm copying other people's angry Facebook posts verbatim,] I have zero respect for people who snatch ideas."

Clearly, it seems a bit of a stretch to claim ownership of the "idea" of a single item on a restaurant menu, especially one that's been around since those weird 1950's cookbooks that mostly featured umpteen intriguing ways to suspend things in Jell-O. If you think you're the owner of the "idea" of pickle wraps, I know a few dozen Mee-Maws and a limitless number of church basements that might beg to differ.  

If a restaurant could claim ownership to a food item, McDonalds could sue Burger King. Burger King could sue Wendy's. Chick-Fil-A could sue pretty much everyone. You'd have to drive to a mining town in central Mexico just to get a taco. You'd have to go to Frankfurt to get a hot dog or Hamburg for a Quarter Pounder, and God forbid you want to sauce it up without a voyage to Dijon or Worchestershire or wherever those Thousand Islands are. About the only thing we could eat with legal impunity in this neck of the woods would be Quad City style pizza -- and as much as I love it, an exclusive diet of fennel sausage probably isn't wise. 

The only way to claim "100% originality" in the restaurant game would be to sell something so weird and disgusting you can ensure it's never been invented before. If you opened a food truck that only sold pickle milkshakes with cream of opossum soup, you might not ever have a single customer, but you could at least wear the mantle of "100% originality" with pride.

Honestly, though, I truly couldn't care less. I like BOTH these restaurants and hope they both thrive. My only wish is that maybe this whole episode will translate into a Quad City pickle renaissance. I'm all in favor of increasing my overall pickle consumption. Maybe we should apply the best of our local 100% originality and create Quad City style pickle wraps. Take a pickle, cover it in a malted crust, top it with fennel sausage and Jim's rib sauce, and serve with a side of Boetje's.

Hmm. That actually sounds pretty good. Anyone have a food truck I could borrow?   

    

COLUMN: Instant Pot Cult

Welcome back to the continuing misadventures of Kitchen Shane: A Learning Experience.

As I've mentioned before, the only hobby I picked up in quarantine has been my ongoing quest to attempt to figure out how to use these strange devices that take up space in my kitchen. For decades, I had assumed that the sole purpose of the "refrigerator" device was to keep leftover pizza cold until you used the "oven" device to warm it back up. But, as it turns out, you can actually use these devices for tasks OTHER than cooling and/or warming pizzas.

My kitchen skills have always been slim to none, but I'm nothing if not someone with the time, fortitude, and committed laziness to waste entire evenings watching instructional videos on Youtube. With a little knowledge, a fair share of trials, and a whole lot of errors, it turns out I'm not entirely incompetent at mixing food with other food in order to make better food.

It started off fairly slowly by learning some simple bachelor-in-the-kitchen truths. For instance: Frozen vegetables are boring. Chicken is boring. But if you cover both with cream of mushroom soup and a positively unhealthy amount of cheese, you can pass it off as a casserole and suddenly you are a chef. If you add tater tots, it becomes a "hotdish" and you are now a master of regional cuisine.

My triumphs with casseroles slowly grew into more and more experimental territory. I'm not saying I've developed Julia Child skills or anything, but, people, the other day I braised short ribs. A year ago at this time, I didn't know what a short rib WAS. As for braising, I thought it was some fancy skateboarding move or something, i.e. "dude, you totally braised that rail!" Even more shocking? The end result was somewhat edible, and even worthy of a Facebook food photo. Yep, I've turned into THAT guy. Thanks, COVID.

But I think I've reach the zenith of my cooking skills. There's nothing more I need to know about braising, baking, or broiling. I'm done with simmering, stir-frying, and steaming. I have no need to knead. I can pass myself of as a master chef simply by knowing how to press ONE button. Thanks, Mom and Dad.

When I didn't give my parents a wish list for Christmas a couple years back, I ended up with two presents I never knew I needed: a breadmaker and an Instant Pot. 

Okay, let's be honest. The breadmaker was kind of a bust. I think I've used it three whole times, and each attempt has resulted in a dense, unpleasant, almost-edible loaf of something that could charitably be called "bread-ish" at best. 

I'm okay with that. Bread isn't easy. I know this because I've watched every single episode of the Great British Baking Show. I've seen some of Europe's best bakers absolutely botch a loaf of bread. One time a guy mistook salt for sugar. I haven't even done that, and I once started a kitchen fire trying to make a hot dog. If pro chefs can screw up bread, I don't feel so bad when I mess it up. Maybe one day I'll again be inspired to carefully measure ingredients and put them into an angry box that vomits out a tasteless rectangle of flour. For now, though, I'm focused on the other gift.

I think I wrote a column last year after playing around with my Instant Pot for a bit. At the time, I thought it was a neat novelty and something to fool around with once in a while. After lockdown, I'm now convinced it's the only appliance worth owning. Well, that and a dishwasher. And a clothes washer. And a vacuum. I'm not a heathen.

But for the past year, my oven has once again returned to its natural dormant state of hibernation. Every meal I've made has been in that magical pressure cooker, and I'm nowhere near satiated yet. At first, I thought, "Cool, a faster way to make chili and pot roasts. Sign me up." Then I discovered one of the most magical channels on all of Youtube: Pressure Luck Cooking. I divorced my oven soon after.

Pressure Luck is the brainchild of Jeffrey Eisner, an amateur home chef and self-proclaimed "nice Jewish boy from New York." Eisner was an early proponent of the Instant Pot, and when a video of his pressure-cooked mac & cheese went viral, he quit his day job and launched his Youtube channel. Since then, he's released two best-selling cookbooks and is a frequent guest of the Food Network, Good Morning America, and the fateful day I happened to catch him on the Rachael Ray Show.

On a whim, that next weekend I attempted to replicate the recipe he featured that day on TV. It didn't come out good. It came out GREAT. Like, the kind of great that I'd pay good money to eat in a restaurant. Except that I made it. Well, I guess technically the Instant Pot made it. But I put all the stuff INTO the Instant Pot and hit the "start" button, so that counts, right?

Does it officially mean I'm getting old when the day I look forward to the most is Sunday, because it's become my official Instant Pot Day? Every week, I keep trying different recipes from Pressure Luck and other Youtube channels, and I've yet to find a loser in the bunch. A couple weeks ago, Eisner was doing an online Q&A and I asked a question. I didn't get a response from him, but I DID get private messaged from another Instant Pot user who runs an invite-only group for Mexican Instant Pot recipes. Someone else invited me into a forum for people to share their Instant Pot secrets.

Everyone is super nice. Almost scary nice. I'm eating really well, but I also might now be in a cult. If you catch me actually worshipping my Instant Pot, please send deprogrammers. But they'd better have, like, a ton of pizza. 

COLUMN: E.T. Phone Home

Other journalists may hem and haw about with "fact checking" and "being professional" and "taking their job seriously, Shane," but is it safe for me to just come out and say it?

UFOs ARE REAL, PEOPLE. We should all probably run or something.

Scoff if you must, but it's a 100% actual honest fact that in the coming days, maybe even by the time you read this, the Pentagon is supposed to be releasing a report purported to confirm, in simple language, that UFOs exist.

Don't get me wrong, this isn't the government owning up to the existence of little green men. Even if the feds had a warehouse full of ETs somewhere, I doubt they'd ever invite us over for show-and-tell.

But this IS one of the few times the government has been willing to admit that sometimes, in our skies, there are unidentified flying objects. Most recently, a video from the Navy leaked showing high-speed objects with no visible means of propulsion out-manuvering and outflying some of our fanciest fighter jets. 

The video itself isn't much to look at -- just a grainy TicTac-shaped object in even grainier night vision. It isn't exactly the Death Star or anything. But it really IS captivating to see a flying breath mint run circles around fighter jets despite a lack of noticeable wings, rotors, or engines.

No one's saying it's aliens -- but no one's saying it's NOT aliens, either. Maybe there's a bunker somewhere in Who-knows-istan where scientists have invented some seriously next-level drone gadgetry. Maybe Elon Musk has more tricks up his sleeve than he's letting on. Maybe it's some crazy weather phenomenon we've never seen before.

One thing's for sure, though: it's weird. And I like weird.

I don't know if I'm a firm believer in alien visitors. But when you look up at the sky and realize there's a hundred thousand million stars in our galaxy, and then you realize that ours is but one of at least two trillion galaxies, it seems a little short-sighted to presume that ours is the only planet whose one-celled organisms had the wherewithal to grow legs and go for a stroll. I'm positive there's life out there.

I'm just not quite as positive that I ever want to meet it. Movie aliens are often portrayed as friendly, humanoid folks who visit Earth in order to share their wisdom of the universe. REAL aliens could be ravenous mosquito-monsters who visit Earth in order to share their wisdom of what condiments go best with people-meat (in which case, enjoy COVID, suckers.) There's a fine line between inviting us TO dinner and inviting us FOR dinner.  

Still, I'm fascinated by the idea that we're not alone in the universe. These are the times I like to go night driving and stargaze, but it's sadly cloudy out tonight, so I was left to peruse the newest UFO videos on Youtube to get my sci-fix in.

Most are super disappointing. One channel I found hyped a video entitled, "PROOF POSITIVE THAT ALIENS EXIST," and then proceeded to show a home movie of someone in their car filming a purported UFO. Except it wasn't a UFO. It was very obviously a dead bug on their windshield. If that's proof positive of alien life, the aliens are disappointingly small and REALLY easy to smoosh.

You could waste hours watching crackpot UFO conspiracy theory videos online. I should know because I just did. I'm now rife with important and crucial knowledge. In just one hour, I learned that:

- Aliens, working alongside the US government, have built 129 underground mile-deep bases throughout the US, and they're all interconnected by electromagnetic trains that whizz under our feet at the speed of sound. 

- "Nordic aliens" (??) are building large spaceships in conjunction with the Illuminati. Soon they'll tell us the Earth is dying and we need to board their spaceships to flee the planet. But don't believe them, it's a trap!

- COVID was genetically engineered by harvesting toxic alien, umm, droppings.

- The International Space Station exists in order to secretly forge alien metals that can only be smelted in zero gravity outer space.

- 64,000 secret black helicopters roam the skies nightly looking for aliens by spying on us all.

- The House of Windsor are descendents of shape-shifting, dragon-worshipping alien vampires intent on world domination. (I must've missed that episode of "The Crown.")

I'm glad the internet is here to bring us such clarity. If aliens ARE visiting us, they probably don't come here to study us or share their widsom of the universe. They're probably just here to laugh at us. Maybe Earth is just the universe's top-rated sitcom of all time. Or their trashiest reality show, I'm not sure which.

All I know is that, like Fox Mulder, I want to believe. But I'm not sure about the old X-Files tagline, "The Truth Is Out There." If it is, it's REALLY out there, and only after you hang a left past the royal shape-shifting vampires. 

The nerd in me will still read every sentence of the Pentagon report if and when it comes out. And I'll still gaze at the stars with the awe and wonder they deserve. But if I spent a year in isolation only to have aliens invade before I can make it to my first post-pandemic concert, I'll be seriously ticked off. Give us a breather, aliens. It's already been a rough year.