American Horror Story

Is this NOT the creepiest thing that's been on TV in a looong while?

I'm officially considering myself a passive fan of the show.  I've watched every episode since its launch... and I'm still a little torn on the show.

When I sit down and watch TV, I want to be entertained.  I want to laugh or feel excited or feel compelled or feel like I've learned something.

After every episode of AHS, I just kinda feel icky.  And I don't know yet if that's a bad thing or a good thing.

If you're un-initiated to the world of American Horror Story, here's the scoop without any big spoilers:  Dysfunctional family moves into creepy house where a seemingly infinite number of former residents have died tragically, angrily, and/or murder-ily -- and clearly, they've got a score to settle with the living still.

Ryan Murphy is the brains behind this show -- the same dude who brings us "Glee" every week.  But AHS is clearly the anti-Glee.  There are no morality plays in AHS - every character seems deeply flawed and there's really no rooting to be done for any of them... and that's where I start to have problems with AHS.

For as much as I love the tone of the show (DARK AS HELL), the cinematography (DARK AS HELL), and the slowly unveiling plotlines (DARK AS HELL), I have a reeeally hard time investing in these characters because there's never any kind of redemption at hand.  The creepiness is mad fun, but only if you as a watcher have genuine interest in the survival of the lead characters.

Thus far, it's just been nothing but darkness and death and despair behind every corner.  After a while it stops being compelling and just ends up being torture porn.  We need to FEEL for the family that bought this house... we need to see them occasionally WIN every once in a while.  Let's see them put their heads together and dispatch one or more of the former tenants to the netherworld... we need to understand why on Earth they don't just run from the house screaming and find a nice, safe apartment elsewhere.  

Instead, it's just basically 60 minutes of watching some people we don't care about slowly get tortured, and that's not fun, it's just kinda disturbing in an un-fun way.  If Murphy were to add a little humanity to the family, then we'd feel emotionally invested in the storyline.  Until then, it's little more than curiosity making me watch.

That said, tonight's episode -- focusing on the family's sullen daughter and her on/off love affair (SPOILER ALERT) with one of her dad's patients -- was a step in the right direction... especially when it's revealed (BIGGER SPOILER ALERT) that her boyfriend Tate is actually the ghost of a Columbine-esque school shooter.  The crux of the episode was the daughter (played brilliantly by Taissa Farmiga) grappling with her affections towards someone capable of something so heinous -- let alone someone capable of being, well, dead.

I'm still fascinated by this show, so I'll continue to watch it, ickiness aside... but jeez, I hope they lighten it up at some point just long enough for us to catch our breath and start actually CARING about whether or not (HUGE SPOILER) Mom is really carrying a hoofen-foot devil baby.  

I want to like this show... it's ambience is enchanting and Murphy's crafted an astonishingly creepy world without having to rely on pure scare tactics... but just occasionally give me something TO like, k?

What do you guys think about AHS?

An Old Year's Resolution Come True

So about a million billion kajillion years ago, I made a great public proclamation about how I was going to spend more of my time working on this blog.  Then life sorta got in the way.  Well... now I'm back.

My original goal for TCC wasn't just to have a place to archive my old columns.  I wanted it to become a living, breathing beastie, where readers of my newspaper column and the general public could log on, hang out, comment, argue, bicker, and just have some fun.  It's high time we got around to that.

It starts now.  When you click on each story, you should now be able to read it in its entirety, share it on social networks like Facebook, and comment to your heart's delight.

My columns will remain the centerpiece of the site... but I also want to focus on the other things we love.  Music... movies... TV... video games... ANYTHING pop culture.  If there's something YOU want to see on the blog that I don't roll out, PLEASE e-mail me at sbrown@qconline.com.

Bookmark this blog and keep checking back -- in the coming weeks, I might try new layouts or other fun stuff as things progress.  The only way this thing can grow and become a good place to hang out and debate pop culture and news items is if YOU participate.  So comment on stories... share stories on Facebook... and let's see what we can do with this thing.

Thanks again for caring about what a fat nerd has to say.  You continue to blow my mind.

COLUMN: Biscuit

As I type this column, it's Halloween night. I'm sitting in the corner of my couch waiting for trick-or-treaters. Last year, our house was so popular, it merited an emergency candy run. This year, we're already an hour underway, I've had 0 visitors, and I'm starting to worry that my diet for the next month will be consisting primarily of mini Milky Ways.

It's times like this that I like to reflect on exactly why I've always hated Halloween... and, thanks to the events of this morning, I've finally figured it out: IT NEEDS MORE BISCUITS.

My alarm clock goes off weekdays at 7:15 a.m. This gives me a precise fifteen minute window each morning to wake up, watch Al Roker tell me the weather, and desperately attempt to boot up the central processor of my brain.

At the conclusion of these fifteen minutes, I know that I have EXACTLY enough time to hop in the shower, throw on some clothes, and hit the road with just enough time to swing in to a gas station and get the iced coffee and 2 Cokes required to make it through the work day.

(UPDATE: Still no trick-or-treaters.)

This morning, though, was different. I woke up precisely on cue, turned on the Today show, and was greeted by the sad sight of Bernie Madoff's family trying to get America to feel really really sorry that their husband and father is a Class A scumbag. This was NOT the way I wanted to kick off my day, so I forced myself off the couch and into action. I ended up out the door with just enough extra time for the greatest morning bonus of all: a drive-thru sausage, egg, and cheese biscuit. Life was good. I just first needed to run into the gas station...

Which I found myself strangely unable to do, since it's employees were standing outside blocking the door.

"No power," said one.

"No sales," said the other.

"No calculator?" I asked.

"No power," replied the one.

"No sales," replied the other.

And, apparantly, no basic math skills. That's okay, I won't blame them. I still count on my fingers. If I had to figure out sales tax at 8:08 in the morning, my brain might very well explode. Back to the car.

I knew of another gas station I could get to a few blocks away, and it wouldn't eat up THAT much time. This could still be done, I thought with confidence, as visions of biscuits danced in my head.

(UPDATE: Thought I heard something outside. Nope.)

At the second gas station, I was greeted with lights that proved they had power. Huzzah! However, it turns out that having power might actually be detrimental to this gas station, since I opened up their cooler to grab a Coke to get hit in the face by a gust of HOT air.

Not just "not-cold" air, mind you. No, this was HOT air, blowing all through their cooler for HVAC reasons unknown. The Cokes were literally TOO HOT TO HOLD. This will simply not do, as hot cola sounds about as appealing as cold chili. Some things are just not meant to happen, and heating Coke to the boiling point is one of them.

Clearly, my hatred for Halloween had transported me to some ironic Twilight Zone-esque land where hot is cold, up is down, and, clearly, no one eats biscuits.

Now at this point, you're probably asking yourself, "What's the deal, Shane? Don't they have pop machines at your work?"

That's just what Halloween WANTS you to think. In fact, they DO have Coke machines at my workplace, and they work fine -- except during any time that I crave one, in which case they're usually empty. I'm not one to tempt fate, especially on the least karma-filled day of my year. And I don't often make endorsements in this column, but in Shaneland, Pepsi just doesn't cut it. I have to endure Halloween -- at the very least, let me endure it with a Coke in my hand.

Dejectedly, I walked back to my car... but then it hit me. There exists a third gas station. And if karma, fate, and luck all decided to give me a break en masse, I just might be able to score my coffee, my Coke, and still wheel it into the biscuit drive-thru without being late for work.

I arrived at the third gas station and leapt from the car like a graceful yet bloated gazelle. Inside, I grabbed the necessities and even treated myself to a candy bar en route to the counter. The clerk rang me up with ease... until she hit that candy bar.

"Hey, Cheryl," she yelled to her co-worker with a frown, holding up my candy bar. "Remind me to tell you the story about this."

Umm. Alright, brain, focus. Pay, get out of here, and that biscuit is yours. You can't waste any time whatsoever... but WHAT story? My mind had a light-speed argument with itself. Many scenarios unfolded. Perhaps it was an inocuous story about store inventory. Maybe she wanted to recall the tale of Milton Hershey turning a Philadelphia candy shop into a multi-million dollar empire. Perhaps Hershey bars reminded her of a lost love.

Yet, for every GOOD story my brain could guess at, it quickly wrote a worse one. Like the story about how they found a 10-year-old box of stale chocolate and put it on the shelves. Or the story of how she caught a kid peeing on the candy bars last night. Maybe it was the one story my brain offered that's waaaaaaay too disgusting to retell in print.

I needed that biscuit. I wanted that biscuit. But I had to ask.

"Umm... what's the story with my candy bar?"

She then spent the next several minutes telling, with some skill and grace, the story about how she, as a child, had found a fully-wrapped Hershey bar on the ground. She knew it was wrong, but it was still sealed, so she took it home, ate it, and then became violently ill for several days.

I suppose the story had a good moral. Ground candy is BAD, kids, so leave it be -- but at least MY candy bar was safe. And, as I sat there at work, it was pretty tasty. But it sure wasn't a biscuit. I hate Halloween.

(UPDATE: One kid! Dressed in street clothes with a crudely drawn marker moustache, but still, a kid nonetheless. And I just gave that kid so much candy that he's probably gonna still be awake when this paper hits his front door on Sunday.)

COLUMN: Kadhafi

Ah, yes -- Halloween. Our time-honored and cherished holiday where we celebrate the spooky, the macabre, and the things that go bump in the night. When we can channel-flip through the TV dial and see zombies and vampires and blood and guts and dead bodies aplenty. It's good to see everyone getting into the spirit of things this year -- up to and including CNN.

Last Thursday, the scariest thing on TV wasn't a werewolf or a zombie or Elvira, Mistress of the Dark. No, instead it was the morning newscast just as I was stepping out of the shower.

"...we can now confirm the death of Moammar Gadhafi. We're beginning to receive video. Caution, these images are graphic."

Now, I suppose a person 100% in control of his or her impulses would be able to think to oneself, "This is an intriguing and fascinating news story. That said, there's no need to assault my brain with graphic images of death at 7:50 a.m. in the morning. Therefore, I will choose to turn away." I also suppose that a person 100% in control of his or her reflexes would be able to quickly avert their eyes in the rough .08th of a second that CNN gave us between announcing the graphic video and PLAYING said graphic video.

Instead, I started my day standing statuesquely stark naked and dripping wet, hypnotized by rough video of a freshly dead and extra gross Libyan that I've never especially cared about. I must have stood there with my mouth hanging open for a good 30 seconds before I announced to no one at all: "Ewww!"

Why would the major news networks feel the need to treat us to what's essentially Assassination Porn at breakfast-time? Or heck, ANYtime for that matter? Just because somebody sticks a dead body in front of a camera doesn't mean that you need to broadcast it willy-nilly to an innocent nation. I was relatively creeped out by the images of a dying and subsequently dead Gadhafi -- I wonder how many KIDS got to unwittingly witness that same news coverage? Shame on you, news networks.

And the images carried on and actually got worse and worse as the day progressed. By the time I got off work, it was like an amateur Libyan version of "Weekend at Bernie's." I channel-flipped from one gory video to another. The networks couldn't get enough dead man walking. A week later, I'd like to say that it's stopped. But I kid you not, the lead story on Globalpost.com as I write this is:

"Gadhafi Sodomized: Frame By Frame Analysis (GRAPHIC.)"

Really? REALLY? THAT'S what it's come to? We're taking gruesome images of a bad guy's death and having a CSI frame-by-drame dissection in order to fully appreciate and maximize every individual second of torture inflicted on the dude? This is a sick world. I'm not remotely trying to defend Gadhafi, either - he was clearly a scumbag who arguably deserved his grisly end. But that doesn't mean I want to WITNESS said grisly end, and I hope for humanity that most of us feel the same way. I mean, I'd hate to meet the guy who came across that headline and went, "Ooh, sodomy, you say? (CLICK!)"

Our downfall, it seems to me, is two-fold:

(1) We've gradually become desensitized to gore. I first realized it when I played the video game Mortal Kombat. Two characters fighting to the death was intense enough, but no. MK took it to the next level with finishing moves -- if you were REALLY good with the game controller, furiously tapping in the right code at the right time could make your character grab your opponent's head and triumphantly rip out their spinal cord. In short, it was AWESOME.

But violent video games gave birth to TV shows pushing the grossness boundaries to new and exciting levels. You can't say naughty words on TV -- and you certainly can't have a wardrobe malfunction -- but if you'd like to catch a virus that liquifies your body, you'll have a starring role on the next episode of "Bones." Have you guys ever SEEN this show? Every episode goes something like this:

"Hello, Bones."

"Hello, Angel the vampire."

"No, that was my last show. Now I'm just a run-of-the-mill FBI agent despite being so superhumanly attractive that guys like Shane immediately develop inferiority complexes when they watch my show."

"Ah, yes. So I hear Mr. Smith has been murdered and you'd like my help."

"Yes, please."

"So why did you bring me here to this gooey red pile of maggots?"

"This gooey red pile of maggots IS Mr. Smith, Bones."

(2) We've become an untrusting society. Once upon a time, all it took was a stone-faced, chain-smoking newscaster to deliver what we took for granted to be the truth. Nowadays, we question EVERYTHING. The moon landings were fake, the government's poisoning us with jet vapors, 9/11 was an inside job -- there's a cockamamie conspiracy theory out there for everything. I'm not saying that we shouldn't question authority -- the fact that we CAN is what makes our country inherently better than, say, Libya. But if a newscaster comes on my TV and goes, "Gadhafi is dead. We've confirmed it with DNA," I'm good with that. I'm not going to stand there and go, "The hell he is. Until I see townsfolk playing soccer with his severed head, I refuse to believe."

At the end of the day, press coverage of the death of Moammar Gadhafi makes you think. Primarily, it makes me think that you'd have to be out of your dang mind to become a dictator. It just doesn't ever seem to end well, does it? You don't often hear stories like, "He ruled his country with terror and oppression for twenty some odd years… and then had a nice retirement party. He and his wife now have a charming little bungalow up the coast." No, if you dictate for a living, you might have a few years of golden toilets and opulent statues, but the odds are better than decent that you'll eventually end up in a ditch, cave, or on the receiving end of a good NATO strike.

So here's to you, Moammar -- you got what you deserved. I just didn't need to see it first-hand.

COLUMN: Autumn

Fall is my favorite season. This is the statement I've made with confidence for years and years now. I just can't for the life of me figure out WHY.

First off, the concept of favorites eludes me. Well, I suppose there are some things in life that I can easily play favorites with. I have a favorite restaurant (D'alessandro's,) but in saying so I could hurt the feelings of Ross', my favorite DINER. I have a favorite band. In fact, I have ten or twelve of them, depending on the mood, season, time of day, and about 1800 other factors. I tell everyone that my favorite movie is "Dazed and Confused" in order to hide the fact that my REAL favorite movie is "Twister."

But some things just shouldn't have favorites. I have never understood, for instance, how a person could have a favorite color. Colors are just a part of life that I don't feel should be given preferential treatment. I'll accept that certain colors work well together in design, and I'm not so devoid of artistic emotion as to deny that certain colors can be awfully pretty. Still, I've never thought that one color is innately or inherently prettier than another. I've never been able to declare anything like "Ooh, I'm Team Blue!" or "I'm a Red Man, me!" To me, saying you have a favorite color makes as much sense as saying you have a favorite letter of the alphabet. They're just colors, man. Well, maybe except yellow. Yellow kinda sucks.

And to me, seasons are kinda like colors. Especially given the confines of the Midwest, we have to live the highs and lows of all four seasons, and there's pros and cons to each. There's nothing more magical than a snowy winter night… until you wake up the next morning and realize you have to stand in a -23 wind chill scraping an inch and a half of solid ice off your car window. Nothing's as life affirming as the first blossoms of spring… until they start spitting out asphyxiating pollen. The long days of summer are full of fun and excitement… except when the humidity starts making it actually painful to be outdoors.

I guess that's why I've always deferred to fall as my favorite season. There's not much to complain about when it comes to jacket weather and a bright crispness to the air. Still, though, I've been trying to think about all of the things that go hand-in-hand with fall, and as it turns out, I'm not exactly smitten with any of them:

• Pumpkins - They make for decent pies, I suppose -- but on the whole, they're kind of disgusting. Don't believe me? Cut one open and stick your hand inside and tell me I'm wrong. Pumpkins are slimy, sticky, seed-riddled weirdness that just happen to come in an aesthetically pleasing shell. I just wanna know who the first person was to pull out a stringy handful of pumpkin guts and go, "Mmm, I bet this is GOOD eatin'!"

• Haunted Houses - Wandering around in the dark trying not to get fake blood on your shirt while some kid half your age chases you amok with a plastic axe? And I'm paying money for this privilege? No thanks.

• Halloween - I've made my opinions on dressing up in costume time and again in this column, so I'll refrain from standing atop my soapbox yet again. Suffice to say, when you have social anxiety and a hard enough time making awkward small talk with near strangers, please don't complicate matters by dressing the strangers up as Chewbacca. My parent's photo albums are littered with snapshots of the various costumes they forced me into as a child -- and in every one, I look mere seconds from crying. What are you this Halloween, Little Shane? Sad Uncle Sam. Then next year I'll be a sad hobo. Then a sad ghost. The cycle had to stop, and that time was puberty.

• Cornucopia - Now this I might like… if I only knew what the heck it was. Pictures of cornucopia adorn most Thanksgiving decor, but has anyone actually seen a real one? As I recall from pictures, they're basically oversized Bugle chips full of random vegetables and fruits that I hate, right? So I think I'll take a pass…

• Leaves - That pretty much leaves… leaves. The essential symbol of fall. That magical time when trees shrivel up and die for the year and we're supposed to bask in the beauty of their death throes. Actually, I DO bask in their beauty -- fall really IS quite pretty. At least that's what I thought BEFORE I bought a house. As it turns out, leaves quickly lose their lustre when they start landing on YOUR lawn. And I've got a mammoth tree in my front yard that poops down leaves pretty much year-round. My professional raking career came to a halt last fall when I accidentally raked up a snake and almost peed myself, so nowadays I pay for the service, and it's just not cheap to be a lazy wuss these days.

Still, there are some inarguable wonders to fall. You can't beat a glass of apple cider. Indian corn might be the coolest thing I've ever seen. Long-sleeved shirts are comfy. Bonfires are romantic. The whole town has an awesome smell to it (especially now that you can't burn leaves, for which me and my allergies are eternally grateful.)

At the end of the day, I have no idea if fall's my favorite season or not. All I know is that it's a season of change, and forced change is never a bad thing when you need an occasional kick in the pants like me. Now, I'm off to go look at pretty leaves on and off trees. Except for the yellow ones. The yellow ones kinda suck.

COLUMN: Single

Well, Quad Cities, I'm in a bit of a pickle.

Let's say -- hypothetically, of course -- that you're an aspiring humor columnist with humble dreams of global adoration, world conquest, and riches beyond all imagination. And let's say that you've spent the past two and a half years charming the socks off your readers with innocent tales of burgeoning young (or at least middle-aged) love. Let's say that it's to the point, even, when strangers stop you on the street to ask when wedding bells will ring for you and your dream girl.

How, then, should one handle breaking the news that The World's Most Perfect Relationship Ever has gone down the drain like a half bottle of Plumber's Helper?

I suppose the best way to save face would be to paint the newly labeled ex as a She-Devil incarnate, and regale you all with the many ways that she done gone and done me wrong in a charming yet biting Hank Williams kinda way. That the poor hero of the story (that'd be me) went and foolishly gave his heart to the female Vordemort, yet somehow -- with the utmost conviction of personal strength and character -- made it out the other side wiser and world-weary with a little charm and a lot of style.

Too bad that'd be a lie.

It is true that I have sadly parted ways with She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named -- but it wasn't anybody's fault. Truth is, it had been coming for a while. We're just two different people who turned out to be too different of people. And yeah, it's a huge bummer. No one was a hero and no one was a villain. It was just the culmination of a lot of issues and a lot of hard work on both our parts. At the end of the day, I still love her and I hope she still loves me. We're working hard at staying friends, and while a reconciliation down the road is doubtful, I've definitely seen weirder things happen, so who knows.

In the meantime? Bachelorhood, thy name is Shane. It's been a while, and not much has changed. I've had little to do over the past month except weigh the pros and cons of single life, so let's run through the checklist:

PRO: I can eat what I want, when I want.

CON: Except when the refrigerator is empty, which it now always is, because I haven't mastered the basic art of cooking or caring for myself. I've also discovered that when you're in a relationship, you eat out often at moderate to fancy restaurants, and I fear I've developed a taste for the stuff. Problem is, I have a hard enough time eating lunch at a diner by myself -- I couldn't imagine rocking a steakhouse solo. I've tried carry-out a few times, but it's not the same. So if any of my friends are looking for second or third wheels for dinner, call me up. In the meantime, I've been having an awkward and beloved reunion with my true soulmate: the Taco Bell drive-thru.

PRO: I can watch whatever shows I want to watch whenever I want to watch them. (Also related: I will never have to sit through another re-run of Law & Order (her fave show!) ever again.)

CON: An eight-hour marathon of "Storm Chasers" sounded way better in my head than it turned out to be. And TV's boring when you only get to share it with your cats.

PRO: I can decorate this house however I want. Down with the holiday-themed hand towels! Off with the doilies! I now have a fully-finished man-cave basement to go with the rest of my man-house!

CON: I now have a fully-finished man-cave basement that I never go down into because I can't hear if someone's trying to break in upstairs. Having a paradise escape retreat only works if you have something in your life worth escaping. And it always used to smell like flowers in here for reasons I've never been able to figure out. Now it just kinda smells like feet.

PRO: I never have to spend my weekends at one of her extended family get-togethers!

CON: I really like her family -- and Lord knows there's a BUNCH of them. I feel like I just broke up with 27 people at once, most of whom can cook like the dickens, too.

PRO: Whenever I would write a column about the two of us, she'd demand on reading it before-hand, often insisting on changes to anything she disapproved of. No more of that poppycock.

CON: Without her inspiration, I fear lots of columns about cats, crankiness, and the catastrophes of single life in my future.

I'm trying to look at it like the story arc of "Friends." When the show started, everybody loved Ross because he was the lovable hapless loser. Then he hooked up with adorable Rachel and everyone cheered. Then it got kinda stale, so the show broke 'em up. And then they paired Ross up with a hot (albeit kinda bitchy) British chick. Well, just for the record, I'm a sucker for a British accent, so if that's you, get in touch. Of course, then the British girlie left Ross at the altar when he accidentally said Rachel's name during the ceremony, so that's no good.

Who knows what the future holds? For now, I'm just trying to keep my head above water. If I stay lucky enough to keep getting this coveted piece of Sunday newspaper real estate, you're all invited for the ride. Wish me luck.

COLUMN: Teleport

Remember last week when I wrote about the fall TV season? Remember how it was kind of a cop-out column to hide the fact that I really spent the entire week doing nothing but free-form laziness?

Well, apparently, I did ONE thing last week other than create a Shane-shaped indentation on my couch: I somehow managed to get off my butt just long enough to catch a gnarly virulent cold. LAST week, I stayed on the couch for no good reason. THIS week, I've been on the same couch hacking, coughing, sneezing, and generally being a phlegm factory. I was hoping for a change of pace this week, but a riveting round of "Contagion: The Home Game" wasn't exactly what I had in mind.

None of this is particularly conducive to good column-writing. Normally, when I'm bone dry on column ideas, I've always got two topics to fall back on: my girlfriend and my cats. Well, the cats haven't done anything this week other than sleep by my side, and as for the girlfriend…? I'll currently leave that with a terse "no comment," but perhaps one day I'll fill in the details should I ever change jobs from humor columnist to despondent-loser-who'll-forever-be-unlucky-in-love columnist.

In the meantime, though, I needed inspiration. That's why late this weekend, I wadded up a pair of Kleenex, shoved them in my nostrils in the most attractive of fashions, grabbed some orange juice, and hit the road. Perhaps a good old-fashioned aimless drive around the QC would provide some column fodder.

I wondered what to write about as I detoured around the barricades on 15th St. in Rock Island… I wondered what to write about as I merged down to one lane on Moline's 6th Ave… to not be able to use the 7th Ave. on-ramp to I-74… to not be able to use the Airport Rd. off-ramp of I-280… (do you see a pattern developing here?)

Not to get all Seinfeld on you, but what's the deal with all the road construction? At this rate, 2011 will clearly be remembered as The Year You Can't Always Get Where You Want. You simply can't get from Point A to B these days without getting slowed down, re-routed, or stared at menacingly by a guy holding a "SLOW" sign. And don't get me started on Iowa, a state I barely remember thanks to this summer's bridge work.

I should be happy, I suppose, and in a way I am -- a lot of this road work is being done thanks to allocation of federal funds that help keep folks off the unemployment line, and that's never a bad thing. I guess I just never expected all the work to be done SIMULTANEOUSLY -- and I never expected it to drastically impact my morning commute. But the work on Moline's 6th Avenue often causes morning traffic to back up all the way to Rock Island's 7th Avenue, and that's my daily terrain. At this point, I've used up any brownie points I've ever gained at work on habitual road construction-related tardiness, and it's frankly too much drama to be had before I've even had a sip of coffee.

We are supposed to be a technologically evolved society. What happened to the future we were told to expect from a kajillion different sci-fi books? We were promised jetpacks, flying cars, robot maids, food pills, and Mars colonization. Well, ancient books of the past, I'll let those things all slide -- in exchange for ONE of your should-have-happened-by-now advances: I want teleportation. Every day, men of science make countless achievements in countless fields. And I'm pretty sure that, given enough time together in the same room, they could figure out how to zap us across the river to avoid bridge construction.

This notion caused me to fantasize about a world where you could yell, "Beam me up, Scotty" and be swept away to any part of the world you fancied. It sounds absolutely delightful, but when the cold harsh reality sinks in, I can easily imagine some problems with the advent of teleportation:

(1) For one, you can't tell me that it wouldn't HURT. I'm no expert in Trekkian physics, but I believe the basic idea of the teleporter beam is that one's body is converted into a kind of molecular energy and then essentially re-assembled at its destination point. Well, I can tell you that when microscopic portions of my finger lose molecules due to a paper cut, it hurts like a mother. I can't believe that the dis-assembly and re-assembly of my entire body wouldn't produce the kind of pain that would merit years of therapy to get over. Maybe that's why the red-shirted guys were all too happy to join the landing parties and face their certain death -- they'd already lost the will to live from a lifetime of gut-wrenching teleportation pain.

(2) Teleportation would do BAD things for the local economy. I mean, the Quad Cities are neat and all, but when your lunch options are either driving to Hardee's or teleporting to Paris real quick? I don't think the Thickburger would win out.

(3) How would the logistics of a teleporter work? Let's say that you wanted to teleport yourself to the summit of Mt. Everest for a quick look-see. How would you work it so that you weren't teleporting into the exact same quadrant of real estate as 342 other people at the exact same second? Clearly, you'd need some kind of extensive teleportation air-traffic control system manned by incredibly well-trained professionals. No offense if you're one of them, but I've seen some of the folks they hire to man our toll roads, and I'd hate to think that those same people would be my only safeguard against teleporting directly into the spleen of a sherpa.

(4) The teleportation industry had better require extensive manpower, since its inception would be simultaneously sending planes, trains, and automobiles the way of the dodo. The only way to save those other industries would be to make teleportation an incredibly expensive luxury -- and it would be a horrific to drive to work every day in a world where Snooki and The Situation could teleport themselves to the Jersey Shore anytime they wanted. Plus, teleporters would probably be big and cumbersome and take up an entire room of your house -- until Steve Jobs III invents the iPort, and then you'd have to deal with Apple recommending a bunch of destinations to you every time you wanted to take a simple teleport to the grocery store… it'd just be a hassle.

The moral of the story is clear: In the future, I should probably take Nyquil AFTER writing my column. As for teleportation, maybe it's best to deal with road construction and let our children's children's children conquer the space-time continuum -- as soon as they've had their food pills.

COLUMN: Fall TV

Have you ever had one of those certifiably lazy weeks? The kind of week where all you wanna do is plop down in front of the TV and accomplish as little as possible? For the past week, I've been living that dream. I say it's occasionally good for the psyche to kick back and let your muscles atrophy a bit. Good for the psyche, but bad for the newspaper column -- as it turns out, inspiration doesn't come a-knockin' when your highest form of brain stimulus for the week is "Two and a Half Men."

It's good, though, that my week of inactivity just happened to coincide with Fall TV Premiere Week. Now I can officially claim that I did NOT spend a week on the couch in a state of perpetual laziness. No, siree. I spent a week doing RESEARCH for my column on the fall premieres -- which, apparantly, I present to you right now. Here's what I caught and what I've thought:

MONDAY:

How I Met Your Mother (CBS) - Once again, another season begins and we still haven't met that mother. Once upon a time, this show was edgy and hip. Now, it's softened with age and all the characters want to get married and have babies. It's the "Friends" curse -- which is understandable, since the two shows are almost interchangeable. We should be heading to a quick finish, though. With Jason Segel and Neil Patrick Harris both bonafide stars now, they won't make it past the next contract negotiation. I only hope that they end the show as anti-climatically as possible, with Ted going, "Oh, and then I went to a gas station to get a Coke, and that's how I met your mother. The end."

Two and a Half Men (CBS) - Charlie Sheen is history, and there's clearly no love lost for the fella, since they announced his death in the first scene and spent the rest of the half hour making jokes about it. Jeez, remind me never to tick off Chuck Lorre. Ashton Kutcher serves as a fine replacement, though, and this show might have some legs still.

2 Broke Girls (CBS) - Kat Dennings is one of my favorite indie hipster actresses, but I'm not sold on her here as a big-haired, trash-talking waitress. Still, it's one of those brainless sitcoms that's just non-stop offensive one-liners, which means it's moderately entertaining and destined to be a huge hit.

TUESDAY:

New Girl (FOX) - When it comes to playing charming, cute, and awkward, no one does it better than Zooey Deschanel. Here she plays a charming, cute, and awkward girl forced to move in with what appears to be three carbon copies of Joey from "Friends." Hilarity ensues. Actually, I'm still kinda waiting for it to ensue. But Zooey's great, so I've got high hopes.

WEDNESDAY:

The X Factor (FOX) - The biggest surprise in the premiere of The X Factor was that Simon Cowell didn't come off as the bad guy. In fact, compared to new judge L.A. Reid, Simon's downright huggable. As for the show, it's the same ol', same ol'. Everybody's got a sob story except for the token crazies paraded out for their 15 minutes of fame. In the premiere, one of them drops trou mid-song and poor Paula has to go be sick. When the highlight of the show is some guy's blurry manhood and a vomiting judge? Not off to a good start.

Revenge (ABC) - Finally, a TV show about incredibly wealthy people living incredibly wealthy lives. Sigh. This time, though, there's a twist: One of the wealthy people is secretly the daughter of some wealthy guy whose life the other wealthy people somehow destroyed in some as-yet-untold wealthy way… and now she wants revenge. Frankly, I don't care what she wants -- but she's seriously cute, so count me in.

THURSDAY:

The Office (NBC) - History will prove The Office to be one of the greatest sitcoms of all time. With Steve Carell gone, most think that the show's jumped the shark. I'm reticent to write its obituary quite yet, even though the season premiere wasn't that great. Still, I like the addition of James Spader's CEO character.

Parks and Recreation (NBC) - Hands down the funniest show on television. I want Ron Swanson to be my boss, Tom to be my friend, and April to be my girlfriend. Never before has central Indiana come across as a place I'd like to live. I'm voting Leslie Knope in 2012, are you?

Whitney (NBC) - Sandwiched into the middle of what's arguably the greatest comedy line-up in the history of television is this dud of a sitcom that I predict will be out the door by Christmas. Whitney Cummings is a really funny comic when she's allowed to be raunchy and edgy. Here, she's just abrasive and unpleasant, and someone needs to tell her that the definition of "acting" is NOT "talking, but louder." Cummings is also the writer and creator of "2 Broke Girls" on CBS, and she shoulda stuck with that.

Person of Interest (CBS) - Ah, yes. The show where creepy Ben Linus from "Lost" hooks up with Jesus Christ (or at least the guy who played Him in that Mel Gibson snuff film) to stop crimes before they're committed, all thanks to some secret government computer that watches our every move. Everything's so tense that it's silly, but I love Michael Emerson, so I'm sticking with this one for a while.

Prime Suspect (NBC) - I'm told this is based on a fantastic BBC series that starred Helen Mirren -- but as far as I can tell, it's a standard crime drama with Maria Bello as a hardened detective trapped in a world where all men suck. Her entire life is a boy's club that she's not invited into, ergo she spends the entire episode railing against her abusive co-workers, who all appear to hate her for no other reason than she wears a bra. By the end of the episode, I felt like pondscum just because I can pee standing up. Oddly, though, based on the gore and violence, the show appeals to be designed for men. Conundrum.

FRIDAY:

Fringe (FOX) - And I'll end my Week o' Sloth by telling you that the greatest show on television continues to be a little-known sci-fi epic that airs on the one night hardly anyone watches TV. Fringe is a world of parallel universes, complex characters, mind-bending plots, and a third season cliffhanger that might take this entire year to work out. You REALLY need to start watching. There's just one problem: By now, the storyline has gotten so deep that any new watchers will be hopelessly confused. So hurry out to the video store, rent the first three seasons, have an epic marathon, and then join along in the fun.

COLUMN: Escape From Rock Island

I've now been a Rock Island homeowner for just over a year, and on the whole, I don't regret a thing.

I know Rock Island occasionally suffers from a bad rep, but you don't hear me complaining. We've got a wicked arts and entertainment district, great local businesses to support, and hands down the best winter roads crew in the Quad Cities. I've got a house I adore, neighbors that I like, and a commute to work that's still under 15 minutes. All things considered, it's a great place to live.

Except, of course, for all the damn zombies.

As a humble and devoted employee of the newspaper industry, I know that there are 3 primary issues in life that cause us all untold sleepless nights of anxiety and concern: (1) John Marx's irrational hatred of the Cubs, (2) finding out exactly what they're putting into the water at Cordova city council meetings, and (3) the constant and ever-present threat of one day being overtaken by hordes of the undead roaming the city streets at night in search of delicious brains.

One of these things I may now have an answer to.

As a pop culture junkie, I like to stay ahead of the game by keeping tabs on all upcoming releases for music, movies, TV, etc. And in scanning one of those lists, I stumbled upon the oddest thing. A new video game is coming this fall for your Android cell phone. It's a zombie game of strategy, survival, and what I can only hope to be blissful amounts of video game gore. Zombie games are a dime a dozen these days, but one thing makes this game stand out from all the others: the name.

The game is "ESCAPE FROM ROCK ISLAND."

It's the brainchild and debut release from aspiring developer Mark Dudek and his start-up company, Number Eleven Road Software. It didn't take long before I was able to track down Dudek for an interview.

"'Escape From Rock Island' is an attempt to bring a serious zombie game to the Android platform," he explains. "There are plenty of casual zombie games out there, but I wanted to create something a little deeper that would involve strategy, creative thinking, and decision making."

Dudek, who hails from Pennsylvania, made EFRI all on his own. So why the title? What's it got to do with us?

"Rock Island just kind of popped out of my head," he says. "It's familiar, it rolls off the tongue, and it had the right feel. As a fan of country blues music, maybe I was subconsciously referencing 'Rock Island Line' by Leadbelly."

Dudek has never stepped foot in the Quad Cities, let alone Rock Island -- but his wife has. She works as an executive producer for the TV show "Snapped" airing on the Oxygen Network, and they were in town a while back shooting an episode.

"It's entirely possible that her work on that episode influenced me on some level, but it wasn't intentional," Dudek insists. "I didn't have a specific Rock Island in mind."

Or so he'd have us believe.

Being the intrepid investigative reporter that I am, I visited the website of Dudek's company (www.numberelevenroad.com) only to find NO references there to Dudek himself -- only a mysterious figure nicknamed The Proprietor. Everywhere I looked, it seemed as if this Proprietor fellow knew a little TOO much about zombies. My guard was raised, my senses tingled. Knowing I had to get to the bottom of this, I pressured Dudek until he granted me access. What follows is the world's first known interview with The Proprietor.

Me: At last we meet, Mr. The Proprietor! Every good zombie story needs an intrepid reporter to break the scandal wide and perhaps earn a Pulitzer. I am that guy. Tell me, how did you really find out about our zombie problem? The government seems to have gone to great lengths to keep it hidden from the press, the public, and well, pretty much everyone.

The Proprietor: Believe it or not, there was one single post about the Rock Island zombie outbreak on Google Plus. When the government locked down all communication to and from Rock Island, I guess they forgot about Google Plus… just like everyone else on the planet. And yes, I did +1 that post.

Me: What started our zombie plague? I always thought those buildings on the Arsenal smelled funny…

The Proprietor: Our sources are currently investigating the cause of the zombie outbreak in Rock Island and will present their findings shortly. To me. Not to you. In the meantime, I advise all residents of Rock Island to stay in their homes and do NOT, under any circumstances, approach the Arsenal. We're also asking that all residents kindly refrain from all that screaming -- it's driving our sources crazy. That's all I can say.

Me: With the District in the center of town, it might be difficult at 3 a.m. to properly discern the difference between a brainless zombie and an over-zealous patron of Rock Island nightlife. How can we tell the difference?

The Proprietor: Excellent question. I refer you to official government publication BR-549, "Zombies vs. Drunks." Here's a short excerpt:

Wants to eat your brain: Zombie

Wants to eat Taco Bell: Drunk

Stumbles over visible object: Zombie

Stumbles over invisible object: Drunk

Chews on cell phone: Zombie

Loses cell phone: Drunk

Is drinking a St. Pauli Girl: Drunk

Is eating a St. Pauli Girl: Zombie

Screams "BLAAAARRRRGGH!" in the street at 3 a.m.: Toss-up.

Me: When I'm playing Escape From Rock Island, will I be able to identify particular zombies as being, say, an irritating ex-girlfriend or sadistic former employer who might just need some "extra" killing?

The Proprietor: It depends on how freshly dead the person is when you run into them. The game starts roughly 3 weeks into Rock Island's zombie outbreak. That's plenty of time for the "early adopters" to get nice and ripe, so they're going to look pretty much the same -- like week-old hamburger left out in the sun. However, should your ex-girlfriend have gotten infected the day before? Well, yeah, you'll recognize her as she's trying to bite off your middle finger, so do what you gotta do.

Me: You say that your (cough) -- I mean, Mr. Dudek's -- wife was in town recently shooting a TV show?

The Proprietor: Yes. In fact, your newspaper was even featured in the episode. I believe her contact there was a Jerry Taylor…

Me: Yes, that's our publisher and highly revered boss-type guy. Can we somehow ensure that he's saved from the forthcoming zombie plague? And if not, as a follow-up question and to the best of your knowledge, can zombies still sign paychecks?

The Proprietor: Sadly, no-one's safety can be guaranteed during a zombie outbreak, not even newspaper publishers who know my wife. On the plus side for your, it's pretty easy to forge a zombie's name -- he's not going to know the difference. He's only concerned with eating your brains; it's doubtful he's care that you forged his name on your paycheck. Heck, while you're at it, give yourself a big bonus. I would.

Me: If we somehow manage to, as the game challenges, escape from Rock Island, will we ever be able to return? Or will our ragtag team of survivors be forced to pick up and start life anew in Iowa? And in your estimation, is that a better fate than getting our brains eaten?

The Proprietor: IF you escape Rock Island, assuming there's somewhere to escape to, and IF society hasn't utterly collapsed and the zombie outbreak is contained, then yes, at some point the survivors can try to reclaim Rock Island. But those are some pretty big if's. You guys won't be hosting any dinner parties for a while. However, I really hope you do manage to escape and come back, because "Return to Rock Island" will make a really good sequel -- much better than "Escape to Iowa: Farm or Die."

Me: I'm pretty sure everything I need to know about dealing with the recently deceased can be found in the classic movie "Weekend at Bernie's." How does Escape From Rock Island differ?

The Proprietor: Escape From Rock Island is a stark, intense survival experience about fighting off zombies, managing meager resources, suffering loss, and making tough and cruel life and death decisions, all in the face of what seems to be a hopeless situation. It's still funnier than "Weekend at Bernie's."

Dear Mr. Pulitzer, you can send my prize - provided I don't get my face chewed off - to the usual address.

Escape from Rock Island will be available to download to your 1.5 or higher Android phone sometime between now and Halloween. Find out more at numberelevenroad.com. Happy escaping!

COLUMN: Grey

I'm not the kind of person who's easily predisposed to violence.

Heck, I'm not EVER predisposed to violence. In fact, should the situation present itself, I wouldn't have the slightest clue what to "do" in a violent manner. This probably isn't the brightest thing to admit in a widely-distributed local newspaper column, but I'm not too worried about it. Unless you're a really big fan of Carmex and/or charmingly ironic New Kids on the Block keychains, there are FAR better targets for mugging out there, trust me. Besides, I might not be able to HURT you, but I can definitely scream loud and long like a wee schoolgirl.

I've seen neutered and declawed housecats with better hand-to-hand combat skills than myself. I am a pacifist, a non-arguer, a non-confrontational weenie who believes in the inherent goodness of human nature and tries his hardest to be as nice as possible to anyone and everyone. That said, an interesting thing happened to me the other morning.

I woke up in a BAD mood. A seethingly bad mood. The kind of bad mood where my only hope was to make it through the work day talking to as absolute few people as I possibly could. It had been a LOUSY weekend. The kind of weekend that has no place being discussed in a column like this because it'd just bring everybody down. And now it was Monday, and here I was, getting to work in the nick of time and just hoping to slide into my desk and nurse my coffee as unnoticed as possible.

I got onto the elevator with one of my favorite co-workers -- but on THAT morning, I didn't have favorites. I just had an aching desire to avoid eye contact and most forms of interpersonal communication altogether. I even went for the tried-and-true method of human avoidance: I took out my cell phone and pretended as though the most important text message of my life had just arrived. But all the while, my brain was just thinking three words over and over again like a mantra: Leave. Me. Alone.

No such luck.

I've worked with this co-worker for over 15 years, and I love her to tears, I really do. It wasn't her fault. She didn't know I was a posterboy for Snuffleupagus Anonymous that morning. But she DID think it was a great time to say the following:

"Wow, you sure are getting a lot of grey hairs."

Like I said, I'm not a violent person. Violence isn't even a concept in my brain. Yet at that moment, I kinda wanted to put my fist through something. Not my co-worker, mind you -- but something that would make a statement, like maybe the elevator door. In my mind, I would slam my fist into it and it would cave in like in the Hulk movies. Then I'd cut loose with a primal scream and perhaps turn all green and muscle-y.

Of course, in reality, I just stood there, put on a fake grin, and made some kind of gutteral "heh heh" that would hopefully pass for a socially acceptable response. Had I actually HIT the elevator door -- should I actually even KNOW how to "hit" something, which I absolutely don't -- the elevator door wouldn't cave in. It wouldn't even bruise. My HAND, on the other hand, would have shattered like dainty porcelain. Why? Because I'm a wuss -- and now I'm apparantly an OLD wuss at that.

Grey hair is just NOT cool in my world. I don't wanna be the old guy. I'm just not ready for it yet. It's no secret that most of my life's passions are clearly being designed for a demographic I'm no longer part of. DJ booths, indie music, video games... these are clubs that I'm no longer supposed to be a member of. At some point, I'm supposed to start thinking that video games are too violent, too fast, and too silly for someone my age. My musical tastes, meanwhile, are supposed to stop at some arbitrary year along the road of life so that I'll flock to an oldies station. Thus far, that's not happened.

I can't get around the fact that I'm 40 years old. But at least I don't think I look the part quite yet. And I know that sounds vain, which is really weird, because vanity isn't something I'm usually concerned with. I'm an out-of-shape uncoordinated oaf -- and I'm pretty much cool with that. Call me fat all you want, so long as you don't call me OLD and fat.

Why the huge concern with age? Your guess is good as mine. I've had a lot of women tell me that grey hair adds character and makes you look distinguished. But there's no "distinguished" when you're sitting around in a baggy t-shirt, eating frozen pizza, and playing Call of Duty. "Distinguished" folks go to supper clubs and discuss politics. Well, my friend and I tried that action the other night and it's just not for us. The place looked like a funeral home, the food was nearly tasteless, and any awkward conversation we attempted was drowned out by the multitude of oxygen machines attached to other patrons.

I will NOT go gracefully into that good night. Frankly, it's unfair biology that hairlines turn grey and recede from the head while new crops rise to life in your nostrils and ears. I caught myself in the mirror the other day, and the hairs that were sprouting out from my nose looked like a bad Star Trek special effect. That's why I spent a few minutes in the bathroom, diligently plucking out nose hairs (yes, I know, NOT recommended,) which of course made my nose plug up so I walked around all morning like I had a cold...

Which was PART of my bad weekend. The rest of it was when I was DJing at a downtown nightclub later that night and a customer came up and wanted to hear "something from the 80's." When I asked what song, she replied, "Your choice. Just something retro that we'd enjoy. You know what to play -- you're no spring chicken yourself."

I know, I know -- I should just suck it up and count my blessings. I made it to 40, which is more than some people even get. And while I may have "a lot" of grey hairs, grey hair is better than NO hair, and besides, they've yet to take over completely. When they do, hopefully I'll handle it with grace and dignity and a bare minimal amount of hands shattered against elevator doors. If I wanna play video games and DJ hip-hop when I'm 70, who really cares? In the meantime, I promise to shoot for sunnier Mondays and fighting the good fight against age. And if all else fails, like it did the other morning, I can go to my desk, take out a pencil, and break it in half in an act of random and senseless violence. Sure, it may have taken a couple tries, but it felt gooood.

COLUMN: Baby Fever

I'm really worried, people.

I first noticed it in her eyes the other day. I didn't want to say anything because I was too afraid of the truth. I couldn't admit it to myself, but I knew something was wrong. My girlfriend just wasn't acting herself. Little did I know that it was the beginnings of a medical crisis that could change our lives forever.

I was right. It turns out that my girlfriend has an acute case of... baby fever. This is NOT a good thing.

I suppose she's had it for a long time. For as long as I've known her, she's loved kids. I mean, she's a first-grade teacher, so she'd BETTER love kids. (Though, come to think of it, I'm pretty sure that MY first grade teacher HATED children. True story: instead of a time-out corner, if you acted up in HER class, you had to sit under a dark cardboard refrigerator box that smelled of pee. I was never a fan.)

Ever since we've been together, I've seen my girlfriend go ga-ga for babies and wee kids that she spots in restaurants. She'll sit there and make faces at them and laugh and coo and I'm fine with all this because it gives me more time to peruse the appetizer menu. As for the babies? Well, sure, I guess they're cute and all... but the minute I take a gander is the time when they'll decide to spit up or put their finger up their nose or pick up something off the ground and eat it.

I guess I don't understand why both science and religion inform us that human beings are the smartest and most superior race on the planet, yet our offspring need to endure years of training to understand that food goes in the mouth-hole and pee-pee goes in the potty. My girlfriend, on many an occasion, has made claim that my two cats are, for lack of a better word, stupid. And as much I love my cats, she's pretty much correct in her assessment. Yet even in their dumbest moments as wee kittens, my cats knew to hike on down to the litterbox if they were plotting a doodie. The only thing human babies know how to do is occasionally look cute whilst emitting disturbing amounts of disturbing things from pretty much every hole in their bodies. I don't get it.

I just sort of assumed that we'd be together for a few years, work our way into engagement and marriage, and maybe by then I'd be prepped to handle a gooey, phlegmy, urine-soaked progeny or two. But then the unthinkable happened:

One of her best friends got pregnant.

This has been a learning experience for me. Primarily, I've learned that baby-crazed females require a wide berth, a lot of patience, and the ability to develop a repertoire of sincere responses like "mm hmm" to be used often and repeatedly. But this has already gotten me into trouble -- I zigged when I shoulda zagged. I weebled when I shoulda wobbled. I "mm-hmm"-ed when Amy asked if she could throw her friend a baby shower in my basement.

A basement might not sound like the warmest, most relaxing environment for a gaggle of girls, but we're talking about MY basement. For the past year, I (and as always, "I" means my dad, who spends most of his time in indentured servitude to me) have been working tirelessly to turn my basement into a multi-media respite, a testosterone-fueled nerd paradise... the man-cave of all man-caves. It's nearly done. All I need are a few more speakers, some ethernet cable, and a couch just WAITING for a permanent indentation in the shape of my butt.

But how does my man-cave get inaugurated? By looking like the place where Strawberry Shortcake and Rainbow Brite go to purge their sugar and spice and everything nice. I walked downstairs on the eve of the party to find... lollipops. Pastel hues of pink and blue. Little ornamental cakes with little ornamental frosting. Balloons. Flowers. CUTENESS everywhere. Shudder.

I was told not to worry. While the girl gaggle was downstairs doing whatever girls do at baby showers, I was promised an afternoon upstairs of relaxation without interruption. But do you think this came to be? Nope. Not when a couple of the invitees surprised us by bringing THEIR children... which resulted in me being becoming the de facto babysitter of the gala. Little did I know I'd spend the next two hours saying phrases like, "Err, no no. We don't take the game controller and throw it at your brother, little dude." I barely survived with my sanity, and it took days before my man-cave was back to its drab neutral earth tones that bring me solace. A pile of deflating balloons in its corner still serves as a reminder of its once-hellish past.

So now it's a waiting game until my girlfriend's friend pops out her screaming, crying, adorable little phlegm factory. And she wants Amy in the delivery room when it happens. I'm praying the sight is so gross that it creeps her out a little, but I'm going to guess that it'll be a magical experience that'll take baby fever to an altogether new level. I'm just hoping that it doesn't happen on a Sunday, Wednesday, Thursday, or Friday night -- because those are the nights Amy babysits for extra cash, and guess who gets to be the on-call babysitter du jour? My man-cave's destined to be a nursery before I know it.

In the meantime, the girls are a-twitter running around buying last minute baby essentials. Today at lunch, I found out she bought a car seat and a book for the as-yet-to-technically-exist human-ling. I want to be supportive, I really do. I thought long and hard about what I could bring to the conversation. I chose this:

"A book? It won't be able to read for at least four years, right? And a car seat? Already? Don't you want to wait and make sure it doesn't come out with, like, 8 legs or something? That'll be a waste of money if she has an octo-baby, I'm just sayin'."

For future reference, this is NOT the right thing to say.

Don't worry, I'm sure her friend's baby will come out with the correct number of everything and be all super-cute and make everyone gush and goo and talk in REALLY silly baby voices and cause my girlfriend to go from baby fever to baby pneumonia and then it'll be my time to put up or shut up, I guess. For now, I'm okay watching others live the baby experience. Like last weekend, when we were at this party, and there was this little guy there who clearly had just learned to walk, and he was waddling around, wearing a pair of oversized sunglasses, and came up to us with the dopiest little smile on his face and he was just the cutest little k...

AAGH! BABY FEVER IS CONTAGIOUS! NOOO! RUN AWAY!!!!!!!!

COLUMN: WM3

I'm somewhat of an expert when it comes to the criminal justice system. I don't mean to brag, but I've seen at least 200 episodes of "Law and Order." When it comes to murder, I know how things go down:

A body is found. The victim -- a pillar of the community whose tragic death shocks the neighborhood -- is loved by everyone. Then the police investigate and discover that the victim is a philandering drug abuser with secret lives, shady business dealings, multiple spouses, a fixation on the underground world of dog fighting, and/or one, if not many, shockingly deviant fetishes. Suspicion will immediately fall on the most likely suspect, who, after a short commercial break, will always be completely exonerated of the crime. The REAL murderer is always the least likely suspect and/or best actor on the show. From there, it's up to Jack McCoy to put the criminal away while teaching us valuable lessons about morality and ethics by ending every episode with an overstated but unsaid: "we win... but at what cost?"

Reality never works that way.

The same fiery addiction for bad TV like "Law and Order" is what led me one channel-flipping Sunday to an HBO documentary called "Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills." This documentary would grab me so hard that researching this case would become one of my favorite pastimes. After two decades of confusion, condemnation and frustration, the case "closed" last week in the same unjust manner in which it began -- but that's what you come to expect when you're a supporter of the West Memphis Three.

On the afternoon of May 6, 1993, a search team discovered the bodies of three 8-year-old boys in a muddy wooded creekbed in the Robin Hood Hills neighborhood of West Memphis, Arkansas. It was a tragic and horrible crime that shocked the sleepy community, and local police were eager to make an arrest.

Suspects were plentiful. Two local teenagers with a history of drug arrests suspiciously packed up town and left four days after the bodies were found. When the two were given polygraphs, both indicated deception when they denied involvement in the crime. Reports also came in from a nearby restaurant that a man had shown up covered in mud and blood and locked himself into the ladies restroom for over 45 minutes.

Instead, though, the police focused their suspicion on a local boy -- 18-year-old Damien Echols. Based on the murder scene, investigators theorized that the boys had been killed as part of a Satanic or cult ritual, and if there was one person in West Memphis who had cultivated a reputation for the occult, it was Echols.

I don't pretend to know anything about the occult, but I do know a thing or two about rebellious teenagers. When I was in high school, a teen dance club opened downtown. As one of the regular DJs at that club, I had a front row seat to the year punk rock hit Galesburg. It started with a group of kids from Peoria who drove out to the club. Within days, the craze had hit our school.

Seemingly mild-mannered teens suddenly dressed in torn clothes, safety pins, and mohawk hairdos. It was adolescent rebellion at its finest, and our newfound punks wore it with pride. One of them was my friend Brian, who decided one day that the easiest road from nerd to cool was a can of green hair dye and a Dead Kennedys t-shirt. I'll never forget the day we were at his house and spotted his mom not-so-discretely reading a self-help book, "Help! My Son Is A Punk Rocker!"

Soon, rumors swirled all over school. So-and-so is a devil worshipper. So-and-so sacrifices chickens. All I know is that it would have made an excellent Sociology 101 paper. As a fringe member of this newfound scene, I knew the truth. This was just another way for kids to tick off their parents and assert their individuality. Another of my friends announced she was Wiccan and bought a handful of spell books and candles. Today she's probably a rep for Partylite. She called herself a witch back then, but last I heard, she's living in Chicago with a husband and a doctorate.

That same teenage rebellion grabbed Damien Echols. He had long hair, dressed in all black, read horror novels, told people he was a pagan, and listened to heavy metal music. And that, apparantly, was enough for police to focus their suspicions. Within days, Echols and everyone in his circle were brought in for questioning.

Eventually, the police questioned a neighbor, Jessie Misskelley. Echols claimed they'd never met, but after being interrogated for 18 hours straight, Misskelley CONFESSED. He told police that he, Echols, and Daniel Baldwin had stalked, tortured, and killed the three boys in the woods. Arrest warrants were soon issued.

The trials were quick. Prosecutors used Misskelley's confession along with testimony of classmates who claimed Echols had bragged about the crime. A knife was found behind Baldwin's house that could have been used in the killings. Misskelley and Baldwin were sentenced to life in prison. Echols? Death row.

But things started not to fit. Witnesses recanted their statements and blamed police intimidation. Forensic experts proved that the supposed knife marks on the victims could have been bites from animals. Absolutely no DNA evidence from the crime scene implicated any of the three alleged murderers. As for Misskelley's confession? It turns out that he got hardly any of the facts right, and his IQ of 72 (borderline mentally challenged) made him a easy candidate for police coercion.

After the HBO documentaries aired, the public began to rally. Celebrities like Johnny Depp, Eddie Vedder, and "Lord of the Rings" director Peter Jackson became involved. "Free the WM3" became a rallying cry and popular t-shirt slogan. I should know - there's one hanging in my closet.

Finally, Echols' defense won the right to a hearing on the lack of DNA evidence. That hearing was to occur this coming December. Knowing that the tides might be about to turn, prosecutors made a surprise offer. On August 19th, after 18 years behind bars, the West Memphis Three walked out as free men. The condition? They had to take what's called an Alford plea: no contest to murder charges, conceding that prosecutors had enough evidence to convict while reserving the right to maintain their innocence.

The good news is that the West Memphis Three are free, something I never thought I'd see. The BAD news is that they essentially had to plead guilty to achieve it, thus ending the police investigation of the case and finding out what really happened to the boys.

It's a bittersweet ending to a bittersweet case. Do I think the WM3 murdered those boys? Maybe they did, maybe they didn't. What I've rallied against for years, though, is the way those kids were railroaded into guilty verdicts on little more than bad reputations and Satanic panic. Hopefully one day the truth will come out and real justice will be had for three little boys and three grown men. For now, I'll take the Jack McCoy ending: We won, but at what cost?

COLUMN: Labels

I like to wear a lot of hats in life -- newspaper columnist, telesales representative, disc jockey, boyfriend, son, homeowner. But despite my many interests, there's ONE pigeonhole that you can ALWAYS find me in, regardless of what particular hat I'm wearing that day:

I am a music nerd.

I blame my parents. Apparantly my mom used to take headphones, put them around her pregnant belly, and pump up the jams so that I could have a fierce little rave in utero. My folks had an 8-track player in their bedroom, and I can still picture my dad cranking Santana into floor-shaking terrain. My mom, on the other hand? Well, let's just say my ultimate point of mortification was when it hit 3:00 and I hadn't even made it out the doors when I, and the rest of my junior high, could hear my mom belting along to Barbara Streisand on the car radio.

From their love of music came my own. I was just a little kid when I got my own console stereo, and it rapidly became an only child's best friend. I was the only kid in middle school with a subscription to Rolling Stone.

But quite often, Rolling Stone would heap praise on bands that I'd never heard of, bands that weren't on the radio dial. And when my mom let me join the Columbia House tape club and I could choose 20 tapes for a penny, I devoted that entire penny to bands I'd read about in Rolling Stone but had never heard: R.E.M., The Cure, The Smiths, Echo & the Bunnymen, XTC, New Order, and so on. That box of tapes changed my life.

In high school, there were only two paths to follow: (a) Become a devotee of the mainstream and pick up a quick fondness for hair metal bands, or (b) embrace the counter-culture and listen to indie music. Sure, you'd be ostracized by the Bon Jovi crowd and get derogatively called a "corn chip" for reasons none of us have ever understood -- but you could live with being a corn chip because you knew you were secretly in a gang too cool for the cool kids.

Bands like Poison wrote lyrics like "don't need nothin' but a good time." Instead, I worshipped at the altar of The Smiths' frontman Morrissey, famous for refrains like, "There's a club if you'd like to go/You could meet somebody who really loves you/So you go and you stand on your own/And you leave on your own/And you go home and you cry and you want to die." Overly dramatic? You betcha. But when you're an ostracized teen in the throes of puberty, Morrissey was the only guy you wanted to turn to. Morrissey understood. Morrissey KNEW.

Some twenty-five years later, I'm not quite as depressed -- but my love for indie music has never waned. The music business is in serious jeopardy these days. With the decline of CDs and the advent of swapping mp3 files willy-nilly all over the internet, it's tough for a record label to stay in business. In order to best compete and stay viable in the market, the major labels have trimmed their rosters down to the core and put all their money on those artists most homogenized to reach the widest audience possible (see: Ke$ha.)

Meanwhile, struggling acts who don't have MTV looks or banal bubblegum choruses are ignored by the big labels. Their only hope is to get picked up by a fledgling independent label -- the little guys with no capital, no massive marketing departments, and no sales in Wal-Mart. Without indie labels, the world would have never known Kurt Cobain. Oasis might have ended up a bar band. Arcade Fire wouldn't have cleaned up at this year's Grammies.

With all apologies to the ghosts of Mr's. Holly, Valens, & Bopper, last Monday was the day that the music REALLY died.

You've heard about the riots in London, right? Well, what barely made news is that one of the buildings that got torched by rioters was a non-descript warehouse in the Enfield region. But this warehouse just happened to be owned by Sony and operated by Play It Again Sam, the #1 global distributor for indie record labels. MILLIONS of records and CDs were lost in the blaze, including the entire inventories of some of the world's most important indie labels.

I know what you're thinking: The stuff's insured, right? The answer to that is thankfully yes, but it could take MONTHS for replacement stock to arrive. Most indie labels operate on a shoestring, month-to-month basis, and cutting off all sales while they wait for restock could spell the end for some of the most cherished, ground-breaking, and under-appreciated record labels in the world. Among the labels hit by the fire:

- Rough Trade Records, the original home of the Smiths and one of the most seminal labels in the world. Home to The Strokes, The Libertines, Belle & Sebastian, and others. If you see a Rough Trade stamp on a CD, you know it's a great record.

- 4AD Records, the boundary-pushing, storied label that was home to the ethereal dreampop sounds of The Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, The Pixies, and scores of other acts.

- One Little Indian, the label that found an unknown Icelandic band called The Sugarcubes and ended up making their frontwoman (Bjork) a global superstar. Paul McCartney recently left his life-long home of EMI Records and signed exclusive distribution rights of his back and future catalog to One Little Indian.

- Mute Records, worldwide home of Depeche Mode and Erasure.

- Domino Records, one of the hottest indie labels on the planet right now. Home of Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, Animal Collective, etc. The brand new Arctic Monkeys single was due out this week - thanks to the fire, it'll never see the light of day.

- WARP Records, perhaps the most innovative dance music record label in history.

That's just a handful of the labels that have been all but wiped out by the fire. Without the continuation of these small companies (most so small they're run out of bedrooms, basements, and garages,) some of the greatest musical artists out there will remain undiscovered, unheard, and unappreciated.

I've never used this space before to hustle moolah, but this cause is well worth it. The Association for Independent Music has set up an emergency fund to support the labels, and they're urging consumers to hop online and make some digital music download purchases that will help these struggling companies survive until their physical inventory returns. You can go to www.musicindie.com to read about all the labels affected, learn what purchases you can make to help save the indie music industry, or just make a monetary donation that'll go straight to the labels.

Be a music nerd, lend a hand, and help teach those kids in London that the BEST way to rebel isn't with a riot. There's only one time-honored, tried and true way to rebel: Go out and buy a record that you just KNOW your parents will hate. Take it home, crank the volume to 11, and rock out.

COLUMN: Barbie

This may come as a horrible, horrible shock to many of you, but I was kind of a weird kid.

Like every aspiring nerd, I used to be crazy for comic books and constantly begged my folks to take me to Dave's Book World in Galesburg for the newest issues. But it wasn't Batman or Superman or The X-Men that I was after. No, when I was a kid, there was only ONE comic book hero for me:

RICHIE RICH.

My hero didn't need a silly bat suit or a bite from a radioactive spider to fight crime. No, Richie Rich fought crime with little more than keen intuition, unending amounts of cold hard cash, and an alarming sense of entitlement. Richie spent most of every issue making horrible puns about his sickening level of wealth (example: Having saved the day, Richie and his friends are riding in a convertible in a ticker tape parade while crowds of people throw spare change at his head. Caption: "Put your hard hats on, everybody! They're throwing COIN-fetti!" Cue crazy laughter from 8-year-old me.)

The moral is: You always win if you're a nice guy... but having a butler, a robot maid, and a diamond plated dollar-sign shaped swimming pool doesn't hurt, either. Richie Rich was pretty much THE worst fiscal responsibility teacher on the planet, and might be the very reason why I live near the poverty line due to spending every dollar I earn on ridiculous gadgets and toys. I hoped that with the decline of Richie Rich comics, perhaps today's youth might have a better understanding of the value of a dollar. I was wrong.

As you may know, my girlfriend frequently babysits a pair of precocious siblings, ages 6 & 8. I like to refer to them as my "practice children" -- around juuust enough to give me a taste of what fatherhood would be like, yet thankfully they return to their nana every day before I've had a chance to accidentally inflict any permanent emotional scarring.

The other day, we took the girls to Incredible Pizza. The next night, they wanted to go BACK.

"I wish I had the money to take you guys there every day," I said.
"Well, go get some!" replied the 8-year-old.
"How do you propose I do that?" I asked back.
"Go to the money machine at the gas station and tell it that you need money!" she said.
"How does that work? Will the money machine just give me money anytime I want it?"
"Yep," she affirmed. "Just go, 'Hey, money machine! Give me money please!'"

There's no learning the value of a dollar when you believe that ATM's are magic money machines that disperse unending amounts of dough to anyone and everyone in need. So if Richie Rich isn't to blame for this generation's lack of fiscal appreciation, who is? I'm pretty sure I know.

I'm lookin' at you, Barbie.

I always thought she was a nice girl. I mean, sure, she's taken some heat over the years for her impossibly hourglass figure and her perpetuation of female stereotypes, but personally, I always thought Barbie was a pretty hip chick. And I suppose Ken's a tad bit Aryan and has a slightly alarming "buddy" named Allan (Google it,) but all in all, Barbie seems to have her act together. After all, she must do SOMETHING productive with her life to afford the mortgage on that Dream House, right?

Then I checked her phone. Specifically, the toy Barbie phone that the 6-year-old brought over the other night. Aww, cute, I thought at the time. A little play cell phone that looks like an iPhone, and when you press the buttons, Barbie talks to you. Super cute, right? Until I started to pay attention to what Barbie actually had to say. These are actual lines that Barbie says to your child:

"We're going to have a blast together!"

Well, okay, Barbie. I'm down for hangin' out, as long as we keep it on the cheap. I've got a house payment due this week.

"Let's go shopping together!"

Uh-oh.

"Do you want pizza for lunch?"

Well, okay, I suppose I can buy you some pizza.

"Want to get some ice cream?"

Jeez, Barbie, aren't you a little full of pizza? I mean, you've got to watch your figure, right?

"Let's stop for a snack!"

Barbie, you might have what's called a binging disorder. I'm starting to get a little worried.

"Let's go shoe shopping!"

Umm, I just spent my last $30 on pizza and ice cream, lady.

"I know a great boutique!"

Boutiques are PRICEY, Barbs. Can't we just go to Wal...

"Let's pack for a picnic at the beach!"

We live in Illinois, Barbarella. The nearest beach is, what, the Indiana Sand Dunes? That's about $100 in gas round trip + food + expenses...

"Hotel reservations - how can I help you?"

HOTEL?! You can help me get away from this spending succubus is what you can do...

"Let's find a tour bus!"

WHO are you dating? The guy from the Monopoly board? No wonder Ken left you for Allan...

"I'm all ready for our flight!"

Barbie is the devil.

"Don't you want to upgrade to first class?"

AAAAAAAGH! RUN AWAY!!!!!!!!!!!!!

For the rest of the night, the 6-year-old waltzed around telling Amy & I that she needed to upgrade to first class, despite not having any clue what it meant. I should have told her that it meant eating her vegetables and opening a savings account.

Maybe I wasn't as weird a kid as I thought. Compared to ol' Barbs here, Richie Rich is a fiscal planner. He was just guilty of HOARDING money, not SPENDING it. I don't want to live in a world where I could surprise my daughter with a trip to Disneyworld and have her pout because I had the gall to fly her there in coach.

Thanks a lot, Barbie.

COLUMN: Bunker

Nothing on Earth heals my soul quite like a drive in the country. The rural midwest countryside is my confidant, my therapist, and my rock of stability. Sure, I love bright lights and big cities and nightclubs and theatre and hustling and bustling, but nothing beats an open road, a full tank of gas, and the complete and total lack of an agenda.

In college, I met my best friend Jason, and together, we have trekked thousands of countless and needless miles driving for the sake of driving. The trouble is, in this day and age, aimless driving is about as politically incorrect a hobby as one can possibly have.

For one, it's dreadful on the environment. I know for a fact that every dirt, gravel, and paved road within a 100-mile radius of the Quad Cities has seen my carbon footprint at one time or another. This week, we honored hordes of people riding their bicycles across Iowa, and I celebrated this eco-tastic feat by wasting an entire tank of gas driving in circles throughout rural north-central Illinois. Not good.

ESPECIALLY not good given the current price of gas. Once upon a time, five bucks could score you multiple hours of aimless driving fun. These days, it requires forethought, checkbook balancing, and budgeting a good percentage of my weekly paycheck. In this economy, it's a crazy pastime to have -- especially considering the average temp this summer has been about two degrees away from the boiling point of human blood. I've already worked my way through one a/c compressor in my car this year, and its newly-installed replacement is already getting a doozy of a workout.

But the worst part about aimless driving? We've done it too much. Half the fun of cruising around without an agenda is not knowing what's around the next bend. A crazy water tower? Historical marker? One of Ronald Reagan's seemingly endless supply of boyhood homes? But when you've been sputtering around rural Illinois for 20 years like we have, you start to memorize the bends and nothing's a surprise anymore. In order to get good and properly lost these days, I've got to drive at least 100 miles away from town, and that's quite a commitment. Put me in a car for more than two hours and muscles start seizing up, backs start going out, and the whole affair just becomes a big exercise in contemporary pain management.

Ergo, we've been spending time lately trying to RE-visit weird places we vaguely recall from drives of yore. For instance, there was one night in college that a carload of us took a study break and hit the open road. We were somewhere on the outskirts of Orion when we stumbled upon a REALLY weird building. All I remember were floodlights, barbed wire, and a clear sense of foreboding evil. The building didn't have a sign, but it didn't need one. I'd seen enough episodes of The X-Files in my day and this was CLEARLY where the government kept the bodies of crash-landed aliens. Re-finding that building was a top priority in my book. When we did, it was a bit of a letdown. In crisp summer daylight, it was a lot less evil and a lot more boring industrial complex of some variety or another. I still don't know what the heck's in that building, but it ain't Marvin the Martian. Boo.

But last weekend, we set out on an aimFUL drive to re-find quite possibly The Weirdest Thing We've Ever Seen In Illinois. It had been a rather boring afternoon of sleepy farm towns and cornfields a decade ago when we first laid eyes on it. Out of the rural blue, for about a square mile, all signs of human life dropped off the landscape, to be replaced with the ruins of bunkers, like some kind of weird abandoned Illinois militia base or something. The buildings were identical and resembled the domed habitat of Luke Skywalker on Tattooine at the beginning of Star Wars (wow, I'm a nerd.) All looked abandoned and overgrown with trees and weeds. All looked creepy as all get out. If the Blair Witch had a summer home, it was this place. We didn't get out of the car because it looked like private property and entirely uninviting and entirely unsafe, but to discover this place in the middle of rural Illinois was entirely cool.

Just one problem -- we have NO idea where we were that day, other than "the country." It was Illinois, it was east of the Quad Cities and west of Chicago, and I THINK north of Peoria. Beyond that, it could be anywhere. Still, we thought we'd give it a shot. All day long, we zig-zagged and criss-crossed around every country road in central Illinois until my iPod battery was shot and my back was crying out in pain... no luck. The place has simply vanished. Many theories abound:

* Like Season 8 of "Dallas," it was all a dream. But I couldn't dream up a place this creepy. It exists -- somewhere.

* THIS was where the government kept the alien bodies, but now we know, and now They know we know, so They moved it. My guess is to Alabama, where creepy militia bunkers are a way of life.

* It, like the rest of anything remotely interesting about central Illinois, has been mowed down and turned into a wind farm. I like the idea of wind power, but once you get past the excitement of seeing those futuristic white windmills, you start to realize how bad they wreck the landscape.

* They're not bunkers, they're all just various assorted boyhood homes of Ronald Reagan that we've yet to tour.

Someday, I WILL find those weird little buildings again and get to the bottom of it. Until then, it's just the excuse I need to waste gas and be an awful bio-consumer.

UPDATE: that someday is NOW. I never thought to check the internet, because I didn't expect Google to have much to say on a search for "WEIRD BUNKER THINGS IN ILLINOIS THAT LOOK LIKE LUKE SKYWALKER'S HOUSE." BUT when I searched for "ABANDONED MILITARY BASES IN ILLINOIS," it didn't take long to stumble upon the Green River Ordnance Plant. In business from 1942-1945, the plant made a variety of weapons (mostly bazooka shells) for our boys fighting in WWII. After the war, it closed down but was never torn down. Today, the remains are privately owned and some of the bunkers are used to store explosives to this day. DEFINITELY don't consider this an endorsement to go trespassing, because the Illinois EPA says that chemical and explosive hazards are still present, up to and including traces of cyanide and astesbos. That said, if you find yourself on U.S. 30 between Dixon and Amboy, it's worth a roadside look-see (note: We were 2 miles from there this weekend. Guess we zigged when we shoulda zagged.)

So, mystery solved. Which means I need a new excuse to continue my shameful passion for aimless driving. Wait, I'm pretty sure I saw a water tower painted to look like an ice cream cone somewhere...