COLUMN: Handball

I write this column every 4 years without apology, and I'll continue to do so until America starts celebrating the greatest sport in the world.

It was the olden times -- you know, the 1990s -- and I had just returned home from a long night of DJing. It was 3:30 a.m. and I was WAY too amped to sleep. That's when I remembered the Olympics were on. I turned on the TV thinking I could drift off to swimming or basketball or gymnastics. But at 3 a.m., you don't see those events. You see the WEIRD stuff.

For the next hour, I sat transfixed by the most awesome sport I'd never heard of. That was the night I became a HUGE fan of team handball.

Imagine water polo -- without the water. And instead of water, they replace it with PURE UNADULTERATED VIOLENCE. Team handball is the most pointlessly high-impact sport I've ever watched. If you want the energy and insanity level of rugby, except INDOORS, team handball is the sport for you.

Like soccer, it has goals on each end of the court and a goalie tasked with defending them. Teams of 7 advance a ball the size of a cantaloupe up and down the court. You can carry the ball for no more than 3 steps and no longer than 3 seconds, at which point you have to pass or shoot.

From what I can gather, the goal of team handball is to leap through an army of defenders while chucking the ball at breakneck speed squarely at the goalie's head. Sometimes the ball will miss the defender's head and instead accidentally sail into the net, thus scoring a point. The winner is presumably the team with the most points or fewest decapitated goalies by the end of the match. It's amazing to watch.

Don't believe me? Every Olympic sport has its own logo, right? Track-and-field has a little stick figure running, cycling has a little stick figure on a bike, etc. Stop what you're doing right now and go look at the Olympic logo for team handball. The little handball stick figure is on a suicidal dive, arm cocked back, ball in hand, milliseconds away from decapitating some hapless goalie. EVEN THE STICK FIGURE LOOKS INSANE AND THREATENING. If it had a mouth, it would have fangs and be yelling, "MURRRRRDERRRRR!"

I'm not a bigtime sports enthusiast. If you want to watch me fall asleep, turn on a baseball game. Soccer can take an hour for anything to happen, and the "anything" is often a tie. Handball games end in scores that are like 52-41. I'm sure there's strategy involved, but from an amateur spectator standpoint, it just looks like crazed bloodlust for an hour straight. It's the sports equivalent of a mosh pit and crazy fun to watch.

The problem is figuring out when and how TO watch it. Team handball isn't exactly a high priority in America, and Team USA seldom qualifies for the Olympics, so it's the kind of thing you can usually only catch at 3 a.m. on CNBC or something.

It's a shame, because this sport needs to be seen. We should be cheering on American handball players like Amar Amitovic, Maximillian Binderis, and Abou Fofana. (Even their NAMES sound intimidating!)

I think the first time I wrote a handball column years ago, I said I wanted to play. I take that back. I prefer to keep my head safely ON my shoulders, thanks. But I WOULD pay good money to see a handball match live. Maybe Team USA needs an official DJ? I'm all in and mostly available between the hours of 3-5 a.m., unless something even weirder's on TV.  

COLUMN: Switch

What's the best way to achieve a stress break? I honestly want to know, because I think I'm doing it wrong.

Last week was crummy. There wasn't anything especially challenging about past 7 days. No particular ills befell me. It was just one of those weeks, y'know? I prefer to live a relatively unstructured life, free of burdens and plans. Sure, I work and eat and sleep and all that, but in my down time, I'm not one to make schedules. LAST week, though, it felt like my every hour was mapped out with mundane activities and chores that certainly weren't high on my to-do list. 

Ergo, I was grumbly.

By the time the weekend hit, I needed a break. Just one day of full-throttle, unbridled, no-responsibility ME TIME. I woke up on Saturday unwilling to meet the day head-on. Determined to stay in bed as long as possible, I rolled over, grabbed my phone, and thought maybe some wacky internet videos would put me in a better mood. 

For once, Youtube's "Recommended For You" suggestions hit the nail right on the head. Its top suggestion for me that morning was a video simply entitled, "Why You Need A Nintendo Switch."

Okay, realistically, no one over the age of fifteen needs a Nintendo Switch. There's not many occasions in my adult life where I've gone, "You know what I need right now? A hand-held video game console."

"But," said my mind, "You know what might be crazy fun right now? A hand-held video game console."

Maybe a Nintendo Switch was just what the doctor ordered. It really is a pretty great device. It looks stellar when connected to a TV, but then you can just unplug it and take it on the go and bust out some Super Mario Brothers anywhere you fancy. I realize this is fairly unnecessary in the lives of most 50-years-old. But I am NOT most 50-year-olds. Finally, I had my reason to get out of bed.

Two hours later, I walked back into my house with a shiny new Nintendo Switch in hand. What a great idea this was. If I ever again find myself stressed out by life, I can just take a five minute break, pull out the Switch, and for a few precious moments, my only care in the world shall be helping my buddy Mario rescue Princess Peach from the evil Bowser.

Poor Mario. I thought I had it bad. Just getting to work in the morning is sometimes enough to send me over the edge. Imagine doing it while jumping over barrels, bouncing off mushrooms, and falling into a never-ending array of pitfalls and pipes. There might be days I wish I wasn't at work, but it sure beats a world where the only apparent source of income is bashing your head against boxes all day hoping one of them contains gold coins. 

So I plugged in, turned on, and prepared to let all my cares float away into a haze of nerdy abandon. I just need to move Mario a little to the left here annnnd -- oops, I died. Okay, I just press X to jump to this platform thingy annnd -- I died again. But then I jump onto this little mushroom here annnd -- the mushroom killed me. Grr.

As it turns out, whoever said video games are a stress relief is a moron, or at least someone who's never played video games before. Within five minutes, I was cursing into the open air. Ten minutes after that, I threw the game controller in disgust, causing one of my cats to jump about five feet into the air. By the end of the hour, those poor cats heard about every swear word in the book, and a couple new ones I made up on the spot.

This isn't stress-relieving. It's stress-INDUCING. I spent another half hour learning 27 new ways for poor Mario to die before I gave up in disgust.

Later that night, I had a couple friends over and we all decided to try our hand at Super Mario Brothers like some kind of geriatric tag-team. Thankfully, I wasn't the only one terrible at it.

"This game is awful," my friend said.

"It's the exact same game we played for hours straight in college," I said.

"It's gotten harder," my friend insisted.

"Dude," I replied. "I think we've gotten softer."

As of press time, I've yet to reunite Mario with his beloved princess. It's probably for the best. I get the feeling Princess Peach could probably do better than a vertically-challenged plumber with an accent so bad it borders on being a hate crime. I think I'll set the Switch down for a bit and go back to being stressed out. Now, if someone would kindly point me towards any boxes I could break open with my head, that'd be swell. I need to find some gold coins to pay off this thing.  

COLUMN: Aesthetic Time Warper

"You're not a real journalist, Shane," they say. "You just write silly columns about the internet and your cats."

That changes today.

Ladies and gentlemen, I have a genuine scoop. A full-on, no-holds-barred, stop-the-presses piece of breaking news that could shake our fundamental understanding of the world, and it's all thanks to my relentless search of the truth.

Or maybe it's thanks to those tacos I ate too close to bedtime.

Either way, I was up late last night riding out a case of insomnia by pointlessly scrolling thru the TikTok app, watching moron after moron lip-sync and dance their way to fleeting moments of internet fame. That's when I found him -- perhaps the most important human being on our planet today.

Except I have no idea who he is. No one does. All we know is his TikTok handle, @aesthetictimewarper.

If Mr. Aesthetic is to be believed -- and who can you trust if not a complete stranger on the internet -- we're in for a doozy of a year.

You see, @aesthetictimewarper claims to be a time traveller from the year 2714 who has come back to 2021 in order to, well, tell us stuff.

Seems super legit to me. After all, if you lived in a future world with time travel, what would you do? Go back in time, kill baby Hitler, and stop World War II? Nah. Maybe you'd go to Max Yasgur's farm in 1969 and experience Woodstock first-hand? How boring. Would you jump to prehistoric times and see dinosaurs roaming the Earth? Blah.

No, if you lived 693 years in the future and had time travel capabilities, clearly the first thing you'd do is journey back to that one year when a killer virus plagued the earth and hop on a social media app to impress teenagers. Makes perfect sense to me. 

If I were trying to scam the world into believing I was a time traveller from the future, I'd offer some vague predictions that could easily come true. "Tomorrow, someone famous will die!" "Next week, a climate event will occur!" Then I'd find the nearest obituary and/or thunderstorm and go, "SEE? HEED MY WARNINGS, MORTALS!"

That's not how @aesthetictimewarper rolls. He goes for broke. Among his predictions on TikTok:

* On August 3rd, NASA will discover a "mirrored Earth, with opposite everything, including physics, gravity, and motion." Umm, ok. If NASA discovered a parallel Earth, I don't think they'd announce it with glee. They wouldn't even put that in Area 51. They'd put it in, like Area 58 or 59 at the very least. But what does "opposite motion" even mean? A world where everyone walks backwards? For a while, I entertained myself wondering what Opposite Shane might be doing right now. But if there's "opposite gravity," wouldn't that mean he'd be floating away into the empty vacuum of space? Bummer for him.

* On September 14th, "a Category 6 hurricane will hit South Carolina." Wow. This is especially impressive, considering there are only five categories of hurricanes. When someone pointed this out, @aesthetictimewarper revealed it'll be SO destructive, they'll have to make a sixth category. Dang. My buddy just moved to South Carolina. Bummer for him.

* On February 22, 2022, "three scuba divers will find the ruins of Atlantis, along with fish-human hybrids." To date, there is no mention as to whether or not these fish-people pair nicely with a white Zinfandel and some tartar sauce. If so, bummer for them.

Also: Bigfoot is real and lives in Brazil. Underground worms will attack us next decade, humans will soon develop superpowers, and aliens called Nozics will soon infiltrate the US government (but I'm pretty sure that one's already happened.)

As much as it pains me to admit, maybe @aesthetictimewarper is full of hooey. Then again, people would probably think I was full of hooey if I travelled back to 1850 and told everyone that in the future, you could log on to your phone and watch strangers lip-sync and dance. Then they'd ask me what a "phone" was.

I wouldn't answer, because I'd have already travelled back to the present. Time's a-wastin', and I've got an Atlantis Hotel to start constructing. Our restaurant will serve the best fried fish-people around. Senior, Nozic, and Sasquatch discounts available upon request.  

COLUMN: Fireworks

I've spent most of my life trying (and failing, rather spectacularly) to be cool. The last thing I ever want to turn into is a jaded and bitter old man past his prime using this platform to air some grievances.

That said, forgive me right now while I use this platform to air some grievances.

Well, okay, just ONE grievance -- and yes, I'm perfectly aware that it sounds like something straight from a manual on How To Be A Jaded And Bitter Old Man. But come on, Quad Cities: Can we just have a tiny talk for a couple seconds about fireworks? Look, I wanna be cool. I wanna be in with the in-crowd. But please, oh pretty pretty please, can we maybe cool it with the pyrotechnics for a bit? Say, until next July 4th?

We've already succeeded in turning the winter holidays into a three-month celebration that may as well just be called Thanksmas'oween. There's no need to turn Independence Day into Independence Month. The bastardization of Christmas can be blamed on retail fever and capitalist greed. But from what I can tell, the only reason we start celebrating the 4th of July in mid-June is that we, as a people, like to watch stuff blow up. 

By and large, I'm okay with this. I like to watch stuff blow up, too. If Netflix ever released a series called "Stuff Blowing Up," I'd binge-watch the whole season in one day, guaranteed. But "Stuff Blowing Up" should not be the ONLY TV show on the air -- for 24 hours a day -- that you're forced to watch for a month straight.

Ever since firework stands opened this year, my neighborhood's been a haze of gunpowder and smoke. Each night, the arrival of dusk has been heralded by a cacophony of pops, bangs, booms, and what I presume are majestically-colored fireworks illuminating the night sky. I wouldn't know, because I'm usually inside. I just get to hear the mortars and explosions.

I hate jump-scares. That's why I don't watch horror movies. I don't get the fun in getting the bejeepers spooked out of me. I'm also painfully aware of the amount of French fries I've consumed in my lifetime. I'm pretty sure my arteries have a finite number of jump-scares left. Let's not waste them on things going kaboomie in the night sky.

I'm all for fireworks that have a gentle little pop and make an aerial spectacle. But those aren't the kind of fireworks my neighbors buy. They tend to prefer the ones so loud they rattle windows. At some point, they stop being really impressive fireworks and start being really mediocre bombs. They might not decimate a village or anything, but they're certainly capable of putting the "hyper" into hypertension.

If you want to make a loud noise, that's fine by me. I hang out in DJ booths all weekend -- disturbing the peace is my usual side hustle. But if you're going to detonate explosives in the neighborhood, maybe a heads up? If someone knocked on my door like, "Hey, we're about to explode a dozen firecrackers," I'd be first in line to watch. But don't wake me up in a cold sweat at 2 a.m. with them, that's all I ask.

My one pandemic present to myself was a fancy new air purifier for my house. I thought it might help my tendency to start the day with a 21-sneeze salute to hay fever. It has a fancy gizmo that monitors the indoor air quality and doesn't even turn itself on unless it senses dangerous impurities. It has a gauge that displays toxic whatzits. Usually it reads 0-5 microns. If I use the Instant Pot, it goes up to 50-75. If I fry bacon, I've seen it raise to 125. 

On July 3rd - not even the holiday proper, mind you - I took a bag of trash out to the curb. I probably had my back door open for no more than fifteen seconds max. By the time I got back in the house, the air purifier had kicked on at max power and the readout was displaying 215 microns of particulate matter. That's how quick it took for the air quality of my home to go from "good" to "extremely poor / severe." That just can't be healthy.

Independence Day is an awesome holiday. As long as you keep a fire extinguisher nearby and aren't overly concerned about the number of fingers you'd like to retain, I'm cool with you blowing up whatever (legal) fireworks you want on the 4th of July. But maybe less so on the 3rd. Or the 5th. Or mid-June. Or, as the case may be, RIGHT NOW (one just went off a few doors down from me this very minute.)

Or maybe you should just let the professionals handle the red-white-and-booming and not waste your money on something that will literally explode before your very eyes. Better yet, just give ME your money and then sometime in the coming month, I promise to sneak up behind you and yell "BOOM!" real loud. Unless, that is, I'm at the record store -- if I'm going to make an unholy racket every night, I promise it'll at least have a beat you can dance to. 

COLUMN: Blog Stats 4

Once upon a time, I was an avid blogger.  It lasted about three months.

Back when I started this column 15 years ago, a friend of mine suggested I start maintaining a public online blog.  "Yes!" I immediately agreed. "It is unfair that the poor souls of the Quad Cities can only experience my wisdom once per week. I must have a platform from which to bestow my keen insights unto the world on a daily basis. PREPARE THY BLOG!"

Turns out, I was a horrible blogger.

It's hard coming up with ONE thing to write about, let alone anything worthy of communicating daily. My excitement rapidly turned into posts like, "I am having a sandwich for lunch. Here's a picture of it. What are YOU having for lunch?"

I stopped posting after just a few weeks. But a couple times a year, I still upload my weekly columns to it, just in case someone feels like binge-reading my archive. Honestly, though, there's just one reason I've kept it around: the analytics.

Anytime I fancy, I can see how many people visit my blog. I can see where they're visiting from (I appear to have one ardent fan in Belarus.) I can see which entries people read. But best of all, I can see what keyword searches brought them to my blog.

Let's say you hop on Google and search for "hotels near me." There's a SLIM chance you might get to my blog because I've probably used the words "hotels," "near," and "me" collectively in my columns over the years. My site tracks these keyword searches, and the things you learn from them is amazing.

These are actual keyword phrases people have searched recently that have led them to my blog:

"I LIKE BIG COWS WITH SPOTS" - And I'm fine with that. To each their own cow fetishes. I just want to know what you were hoping to accomplish by entering that into Google. I'd also like to know how disappointed you must've been to be taken to MY website.

"IS A SEXY PIC QC WEATHER MAN?" - Every year I look at these keywords, and every year I find at least one person visiting my blog through a search for intimate photos of local meteorologists. Is there a secret fanclub for people who want to see weathercasters in their skivvies? Is someone right now cutting out heart-shaped pictures of James Zahara and Erik Maitland? I'm nothing if not a committed journalist, so I went straight to the source on this one. WQAD meteorologist Eric Sorensen is a local fan favorite, and this is his last week on-air before leaving to explore other opportunities. The time was now or never to get some answers.

So, Eric, are there weather groupies out there?

"Yes, they exist!" Sorensen replied eagerly. "But I've never thought those people think of me as anything more than just their morning weather guy."

But Eric, the public (and clearly the internet at large) are eager to know. Can you officially confirm or deny: "Is a sexy pic QC weather man?"

"There are... not," Sorensen sadly confirmed in this exclusive. "None of those exist. I'm thankful all my college shenanigans occurred in the days before digital photos."

Sorry to disppoint, Quad Cities. But there's always hope. Theresa Bryant had no comment as to the existence of sexy pics. Mostly because I didn't ask her.

"COTTAGE CHEESE LOOKS GREEN, IS IT SAFE TO EAT?" I am neither a food scientist nor a nutritionist. I can barely microwave a hot dog without burning my house down. But hear me now, stranger: The answer is no. It is not. Whatever's growing in your cottage cheese is likely to either cause or cure cancer. Throw. It. Away.

"IS SHANE BROWN SEXY?" Well, let's take stock of the situation. I'm writing this column while laying on my couch in an ill-fitting t-shirt with a recent salsa stain while watching a re-run of Ghost Adventures and eating a chalupa. You tell me. Is Shane Brown sexy? You're darn tootin' he is.

Or maybe you're looking for a different Shane Brown. There's a Shane Brown on the internet (shanebrown.net) who sells performance horses. He wears jeans and cowboy hats and denim shirts with his own embroidered Shane Brown logo and seems to enjoy belt buckles the size of Silvis. I guess he must be sexy, in a guy-who-sells-performance-horses kinda way. Which brings me to:

"SHANE BROWN PERFORMANCE HORSES" The other Shane Brown must be SERIOUSLY irked that when customers try to find him online, some instead end up on a webpage where a weirdo newspaper columnist talks WAY too much about his cats. And they're not even PERFORMANCE cats. They just mostly lie around. Sorry, Horse-Shane. But if you ever find this column, please send me one of those embroidered denim shirts. I would wear it every day.

"TOM CRUISE IS AWFUL" No matter what accolades or achievements I may earn in my remaining years, nothing will make me prouder than creating a landing page for people searching the phrase, "Tom Cruise Is Awful." He's just the worst. He stole Katie Holmes from my heart, and that's unforgiveable. Who's Katie dating now? According to gossip, it's some guy named Emilio Vitolo. He's awful, too, whoever he is. He can't be sexier than me or Horse-Shane, that's for sure. He probably doesn't even own embroidered shirts with my name on them. 

"PEOPLE WHO ARE AWESOME" Someone searched for "people who are awesome," and it took them to MY blog? Some poor soul out there now has a seriously twisted idea of what "awesome" is.

Sometimes we all feel a little weird. But the next time you're feeling like a square peg in a round world, just sit back and realize there's always someone weirder than you. Right now, someone somewhere could be trying to Google sexy pics of local weathermen. Someone somewhere is thinking long and hard about eating green cheese. Someone might think that I'M awesome. Maybe you're more normal than you realize.