COLUMN: Disco Balls

I'm not much of an activist. The one time I tried to write a funny column opposing urban chicken coops, poultry enthusiasts stormed our lobby demanding my head on a platter, sunny side up. I learned my lesson.

I might be too chicken for activism, but our next generation isn't. Today I learned of an underground movement for change, started right here in the Quad Cities at Washington Jr. High School. It's definitely an important cause we can all get behind.

Almost a year to the day after we all painfully added the word "derecho" to our vocabularies, another freak windstorm assaulted our area on Wednesday morning. While it wasn't bad enough to do terrible damage, it DID down some trees, blow up a couple transformers, and temporarily knock out power to a goodly portion of Rock Island.

Brandy VanDeWalle is a good friend of mine and the owner of Skeleton Key Art & Antiques, an amazing shop you could easily get lost in for days, which you probably shouldn't because it's a former funeral home and I'm pretty sure it's haunted even though she assures me it's not.

When Washington Jr. High lost power on Wednesday, Brandy's 13-year-old son Alex knew precisely what to do. He sprang into action, launched a petition drive, and gathered the signatures of his classmates. The students have spoken. They demand change, and they demand change NOW. Brandy shared Alex's petition with me, and I couldn't agree more.

It reads, and I quote:

"PETITION TO INSTALL GENERATOR-POWERED DISCO BALLS IN THE SCHOOL HALLWAYS FOR THE NEXT BLACKOUT." To date, this important movement has garnered an impressive 19 signatures. We have a movement on our hands, people.

This is a cause I fully endorse. I have lived through many a crisis in my lifetime, and I can safely tell you not one of them wouldn't have been bettered in some way by emergency disco balls. The power goes out? BAM. Disco balls light the way. A global pandemic keeps us house-bound? BAM. There's no vaccine for disco. Your best friend ditches you? BAM. You can leave your friends behind, because your friends don't dance and if they don't dance, well, they're no friends of mine. 

I needed insight, so I met with Alex about his urgent plea for disco-fueled change.

SB: So... why disco?

AVdW: Many people believe disco died in the 70s, but the heart and soul lives on in the disco ball. Disco didn't die, it evolved. Also, blackout raves seem fun.

SB: You realize disco music is about the same age as your mom. In fact, I can attest to personally witnessing your mother having danced to disco on multiple occasions. Do you often jam out to a funky disco beat?

AVdW: I'm going to have to get back to you on those funky disco beats, but I do enjoy older music. Also, sorry about my mom. Sounds like she's embarassed both of us in public.

SB: Can I tell by the way you use your walk that you're a woman's man with no time to talk?

AVdW: Mom had to explain that to me, but I'd like to think so, yes.

SB: Disco balls are often employed during slow jams to smooch with your sweetie. Be honest, is this your end goal?

AVdW: Maybe, but I won't tell.

SB: How would school be improved by the implementation of emergency blackout hallway disco balls?

AVdW: On a day like today, it could be used as entertainment for students and faculty. Also, if there were an intruder, it would distract them until authorities arrive. It's multi-functional, people.

SB: I couldn't help but notice someone named Ava signed your petition with a signature eight times larger than everyone else. Be honest, is she eight times cooler than you?

AVdW: Yep, she put her John Hancock in the smack dab middle. She wears glorious eyeliner and helped us get teachers to sign the petition.

SB: Do you see a future career in political disco activism?

AVdW: There's potential, but I'm keeping my options open. I'm thinking of taking this all the way to Washington. Disco is the next political party. Come on, Gen Z, back me on this!

In these trying times, it's good to know that tomorrow's leaders already have a sense of urgent priorities. At the next election, I'm taking a stand. I'm voting with the Disco Party. And Alex, if you decide to throw a rally in support of your movement, I'm available to DJ on the cheap. I promise I won't let your mom dance... much. 

COLUMN: Pity Party

Somebody better alert the Guinness people. I may have just set a record for The World's Shortest Pity Party. 

I've got no right to complain about my life. I have a great job, a wonderful family, a roof over my head, and an ever-growing army of cats to carry out my evil bidding. I've amassed some of the greatest friends a fella could ever have -- and one of the oldest and dearest of those friends recently paid me a visit.

I've known Chad since junior high. I was a super nerd in those days, and we met in the nerdiest of ways: computer club. Chad was, and still is, the smartest human I've ever known.

I wish I had cool nerd stories to share, but we weren't cool nerds. We didn't start a fraternity or seek any revenge, and we never built a robot girlfriend who taught us life lessons (but if anyone ever COULD, it's probably Chad.)

About the wildest we got were slumber parties where we'd chug Jolt Cola and play video games 'til sunup. We were THOSE kinda nerds. 

In high school, Chad moved away to some Fancy Academy for Super Smart Kids, but we've stayed in touch over the years and try to get together whenever he visits home. These days, he gets paid to teach computers how to think. When the day comes that robots become sentient and try to enslave humanity, it'll probably be Chad's fault. Whenever we hang out, I reckon there's always a decent chance that a time-travelling Arnold Schwarzenegger's going to bust through the door any second to either kill him or save him. 

It was fun having him in town, and I'd like to tell you we spent the day as mature adults reminiscing over a lovely dinner or something. I certainly don't want to tell you that two 50-year-old men wasted an entire Saturday eating frozen pizza and playing Nintendo until 3 a.m.

At one point, though, we set the Nintendo down long enough to head out and replenish our junk food cache. That's when I took Chad on a little detour.

"I need to sidetrack for a second," I explained. "It's Record Store Day."

That's a real thing. International Record Store Day is my favorite holiday of the year. On that day, music companies issue small quantities of limited-edition records to select independent shops around the globe. Most are already collector's items before they even go on sale. Music nerds start lining up at the crack of dawn to be first through the door. I call it Vinyl Christmas

There were a couple pieces I wanted to procure, so I dragged Chad over to Co-Op Records real quick.

On the way there, that's when it hit me. There I was, fifty years old, still a nerd, still hanging with my nerdy friend, wasting an entire day playing Nintendo and then driving around talking about the Nintendo we'd just played.

The ugly thoughts came fast and furious. My mouth was somehow still talking about video games, but my brain was having a pity party. YOU'RE PATHETIC. NOBODY LIKES YOU. YOU'RE STILL A NERD. GROW UP. NO WONDER YOU WERE PICKED LAST FOR GYM CLASS, YOU RIDICULOUS MAN.

By the time we got to the store, I was internally questioning my life choices while still mindlessly talking about Zelda and Mario. Then I walked through the door.

At some point in my life, my nerd focus shifted from gaming to music, and record stores shall always be my happy place. If there's a heaven, mine will be lined with crates of vinyl and a limitless number of people with whom to argue the merits of Weezer and My Bloody Valentine for hours on end.

That afternoon, Co-Op Records was packed with masked shoppers. And I swear to you, I took two steps in and a majority of them turned and gleefully yelled out, "SHANE!" 

They had no idea, but my fellow music nerds saved me from an existential crisis that day. I might be a nerd. I might even be pathetic. But I have my people, I have my friends, and I have my happy place. I'm not ever getting a seat at the cool kids table, but I don't think I want one. Honestly, it looks like hard work.

I'd rather be a life-long nerd with my life-long nerd friends. We have crazy fun, we know the meaning of real friendship, and I'll guarantee we have much better taste in music. Next time I have a pity party, it's gonna have loads of video games and a great soundtrack.         

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.

COLUMN: MDWAP

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

I almost just wrecked my car.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COLUMN: Pickle Wrap

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

    

COLUMN: Instant Pot Cult

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COLUMN: E.T. Phone Home

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

COLUMN: ASMR

My name's Shane, and I'm a media-holic.

God forbid I spend even a single moment alone with my own thoughts. I guess it's just comforting to know that the world continues to spin even when I'm in my own private Idaho. There's nary a second of the day that I'm not plugged into multiple media sources. 

You think I'm kidding? I often bring speakers into my bathroom so I can listen to podcasts while I'm in the shower. As I'm typing this now, I also have a second window pulled up on my laptop where I'm watching tornado chasers livestream from Kansas. Over my right shoulder, someone just missed the answer to Final Jeopardy. Over my left shoulder, Alexa awaits my every command. My police scanner is on. Downstairs, music is playing from a stereo no-one's listening to, while my bedroom TV is playing a looped film of some random guy's birdfeeder in case the cats need their own media fix. I may have a problem.

I'm even media-obsessed when I'm unconscious. Yep, I'm one of those weirdos who can't sleep unless there's a TV on in the background. The problem is, I can't find the right thing to watch -- or, more specifically, NOT watch and sleep through.

For years, I just tuned in overnight to one of the local networks with the sound nearly muted. After years of sleeping my way through Agribusiness Today, you'd think I'd be subconsciously well-versed on soybean futures by now. 

Lately, though, I've been experimenting with some new overnight options. The results have been decidedly mixed.

Do you guys know what ASMR is? It stands for Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, although I'm pretty sure it really stands for Absolutely Stupid Mindboggling Ridiculousness. Its a new fad that's crept up from the oddest corners of the internet over the past few years, and it might be my favorite thing ever.

ASMR is a recognized form of paresthesia -- a tingling sensation that some people claim to experience when watching or listening to certain triggers. (I'm not one of them.) Most people who experience ASMR describe it a pleasant euphoric experience. I'm guessing it's sort of like fingers on a chalkboard, but in a GOOD way?

There are self-styled ASMR gurus online who claim their videos can can induce the phenomenon. Trust me, it's must-watch TV at its finest.

Traditional ASMR triggers are said to include: soft or whispering voices, repetitive noises, watching someone perform mundane tasks, tapping, clicking, breathing, and close-up hand movements. I've yet to have an ASMR video give me tingles, but they've definitely induced laughter.

If you've ever wanted to watch a 48-minute video of a guy leaning over a microphone making squirrel noises with his mouth, ASMR videos are for you. If you get euphoric tingles from watching a girl click two Lego pieces together for 17 minutes, ASMR videos are for you. If you want to watch a complete stranger brush their teeth for twenty-four straight minutes, ASMR videos are for you.

Personally, I don't care HOW good those tingles might feel, NOTHING is worth the uncomfortably close-up video I just watched of a guy's mouth as he slowly and loudly ate an entire bag of Doritos. 

Some people find ASMR videos incredibly relaxing, so I thought I'd try some as background noise while going to bed. I typed "ASMR" into Youtube and hit play on the first video that came up. Naturally, it was titled "100% ASMR Ear Licking." What followed were 29 of the least relaxing, least euphoric, and most hysterical minutes of my life, as I couldn't stop watching this asinine video of a girl licking a microphone for a half hour straight.

Even the cats looked at me like, "Have you gone weird, my man?" 

ASMR trigger videos do NOT help me sleep. They DO help me feel gross, awkward and especially worrisome about future generations -- and frankly, I'm already skilled at those feelings without the need to watch 29 minutes of faux ear-lickery. 

I tried some other relaxation videos instead. Norway's public television is famed for their all-day marathon shows of trains, sheep shearing, and people quilting for entire afternoons. There's oodles of rain sound effect videos. There's even videos labelled "sci-fi ambience" that are apparently supposed to emulate the feel of being aboard a spaceship, but in reality just kinda sound like muffled vacuum cleaners.

I also noticed most of those videos have now changed their titles to add "ASMR," as if now ANYTHING that's boring and long can now claim to be an ASMR trigger. I should just film myself typing this column and upload it as "ASMR Typing Trigger" and see how many views it gets. You might think all of this is weird (I sure do,) but in ONE month, "ASMR 100% Ear Licking" has been viewed 637,003 times. When your video's been viewed by more people than live in Wyoming, it gets tougher and tougher to argue that it's weird.

All I know is nothing made me tingly OR tired. I tried watching a 12-hour video of a guy driving cross-country and I found myself Googling road signs he was passing so I could map his course. I tried the app where celebrities read boring stories to put you to sleep and I ended up getting WAY into the stories. I think tonight I'll try this radical new sleep trigger I've been reading about online - it's called "silence."  I guess you turn off all your electronics and just, like, lay there in the dark. It sounds SO weird. 

COLUMN: Bad Week

Citians of Quad and Islanders of Rock, I have always championed you.

But some of you are seriously trying my patience this week.

I came to the Quad Cities by way of Augustana College. A good chunk of Augie's student body hails from the Chicagoland area, including many of my college friends. Some of my friends really liked the Quad Cities, but most of them treated our area like some sort of backwoods prison camp they were forced to endure in order to get a decent education.

I know, right? It seems impossible that ANYONE could happily exist in a metropolitan area with only THREE major shopping malls and few if any daily traffic jams, but somehow, we unfortunate backwoods country folk manage to survive.  

I always had a different take on the Quad Cities. Growing up in Galesburg, when the cool kids at my school talked about going to "the city" for the weekend, they didn't mean Chicago. They meant HERE. The QC is fancy big-city livin' compared to Galesburg. I remember the first day I ventured to Rock Island on my own, I turned the wrong way down the 7th Ave. one-way. About 72 people honked at me and I nearly wet my pants. I questioned whether I could ever hack life in such a big city.  

Growing up, my family seldom traveled to the Quad Cities, but I knew a lot about the area thanks to QC television channels. I came to college with a bucket list already in mind. I wanted to eat at the Choice Smorgasbord. I wanted to see Orby the Super Van Man. I wanted to visit the Showcase Cinemas in Milan, buy records at Co-Op, and rent videos from Time Travellers.

My friends may have thought life in the QC was tortuous, but I loved the place -- and I still do. After graduation, I planted roots. The Quad Cities was plenty big for me, and life here has treated me just fine. 

All this time, I've remained in Rock Island. Our town sometimes gets a bad rap, but I've always defended her. Rock Island's got amazing character. The hilltop area has great shops and eateries. The District has its highs and lows but will forever be my nightspot. Rozz Tox, Ragged, and Wake make the east end of downtown special. Broadway has some of the coolest homes in the Midwest. It's a town rich in culture and history. It's my home.

I love my neighborhood. My neighbor to the right barbecues every weekend and brings me ribs. My neighbor to the left doesn't speak a lick of English, but for years and without having ever been asked, he comes over in the middle of the night and rolls my trash to the curb. I like my neck of the woods.

But this week's been testing my allegiance to our town. A few days ago, I was playing with cats when my silent alarm system triggered. A quick glance at the cameras revealed someone trying to break into my garage in broad daylight. Based on the footage, I'm pretty sure it was the same kid who stole a package off my porch last week. This was deja vu, as last year someone tried a similar move and made off with my childhood bike. This time, I had a reinforced door, a spanky new security system, and a fast hand to 911.

My uninvited guest ran from the cops, but hopefully now realizes I'm not the easy mark he must've taken me for. Thanks to my security cams, we now have many stylish photos of him in action, so the cops have a good chance of tracking him down. But they may have bigger fish to fry.

It was three hours later when my world suddenly filled with sirens. A car chase in Davenport had made its way over the bridge and ended up careening through my neighborhood, as a speeding car followed by multiple cops barreled down my street at scary speeds. Thankfully, the cops cornered those idiots and caught most of them.

The next morning, it was a beautiful spring day that felt like a rebirth. Gentle rain on the sidewalk, birds chattering all around -- and, suddenly, rapid fire gunshots that had me heading for the basement. It was several blocks away, but still way too close for comfort. 

I just don't get it. I don't understand hating someone enough to draw guns at 9 a.m. on a Tuesday. I don't understand the thrill of stealing a car or breaking into someone's garage or ripping stuff off a stranger's porch without guilt or remorse. 

"We're living in a different world," a few people have told me, and sure, that may be true. Once upon a time, Elvis shaking his hips on TV was a global scandal. Today, Cardi B gives us graphic updates on the state of her nether-regions and we declare it an important moment of empowerment.

The world IS different. Change is inevitable, and if you don't think you should have to adapt, ask the Mayans or the Cahokia or any other stubborn lost civilization that refused to roll with the changes. But just because the world is different doesn't mean it has to be WORSE. I still believe most people are innately good. We've survived wars, depressions, derechos, divisive politics, and now a global pandemic. We're nothing if not resilient.

Is there an answer? Probably not an easy one, and I'm certainly no expert. But I'm not giving up on my community and neither should you. If you're a do-gooder, do a lot of it this week. If you're a do-badder, give it a rest. It's been a rough year, and we need to get back on track. I didn't just spend a lonely year indoors in order to NOW be too afraid to leave the house. Bad stuff's bound to happen now and again, but it shouldn't be the norm. We're better than this. The Quad Cities are better than this.

All I'm saying is give peace a chance. Be kind to your fellow man - or at the very least, leave their garages alone (FYI: it's EMPTY, people. Do I LOOK like the kind of guy who owns tools and sporting goods?) 

COLUMN: Porch Pirates

Stupidity, thy name is Shane.

Sometimes I can't help but marvel over my own idiocy. This was one of those weeks.

I work in media -- specifically, in this very company's advertising department. Over the years, I've had a front row seat to product pitches, exclusive offers, and countless ways to drive consumer interest. By now, I should be well and fully jaded when it comes to most marketing efforts. Surely I could never fall prey to a sales pitch, right?

Wrong. Advertising works, people.

As regular readers know, I'm a music junkie. When I'm online, I'm usually talking about some band, listening to some band, or listening to someone else talk about some band. Therefore, it's no surprise that when Facebook's marketing algorithms look at my user profile, they immediately go, "Fish on the line. Serve this guy as many ads about music stuff as possible."

Every time I hop on social media, I'm bombarded with products for music geeks. Just today, I've seen ads for a tape dispenser shaped like a DJ turntable, an area rug that looks like a vinyl record, and custom lighting that pulses in rhythm to any music you play. If I bought every nerdy item pitched to me on Facebook, my house would be a tacky pulsating discotheque, but with cats.

Good thing, then, that I only buy SOME of it.

It started innocently enough. A few months ago, I got served an ad for a t-shirt company that made me chuckle. In the small ad, the company offered glimpses of two music t-shirts they were selling: one for Metallica, and one for The Carpenters. This is not exactly the kind of mash-up one normally sees in an ad. If you are a fan of both The Carpenters AND Metallica, you are officially VERY strange and we should probably be friends.

I HAD to check this company out, so I clicked the link. Immediately I was taken to a sketchy website that looked like it was thrown together in a hustle. Nothing fancy, just dozens and dozens of music-related t-shirts and click-buttons that said "BUY!" It was pure musical chaos. ABBA t-shirts next to Marilyn Manson t-shirts next to Garth Brooks, Megadeth, and Cher. They even had t-shirts from some of MY favorite bands. You know, those snooty indie bands that no one but record store clerks and that one irritating guy at your school listened to? I was that one irritating guy.

I knew this website was less than legit. There's no way some fly-by-night t-shirt company owned the rights to all these images. When I buy band merch, I like to make sure it goes to the band, not some seedy company somewhere in Cyber-third-world-istan. BUT it's not every day you run into someplace selling My Bloody Valentine t-shirts, either. And they even had them in Fat Newspaper Columnist size. It was too much to resist.

I ordered ONE shirt on a whim. I expected to be out $25 and have a cautionary tale to tell. Instead, my shirt arrived two weeks later, exactly as promised. The package came from China and had the oh-so-legit return address of "Joe Doe," but the t-shirt was there nonetheless, and it was shockingly decent quality.

I ordered another and it showed up, too. That's when I threw caution to the wind and placed an order for 6 of the coolest shirts they offered. Soon I would be the king of music-nerd fashion, even if it meant being a 50-year-old strutting around in a t-shirt better suited for a 20-something, except 20-somethings wouldn't know any of these bands. 

The days ticked by. No shirts. "It's okay," I thought, "maybe there's a traffic jam in China somewhere. Have faith." As it turned out, I should have had more faith in the sketchy company and less faith in Rock Island.

A quick review of my security camera revealed that the package had, in fact, arrived. It lasted on my porch for approximately thirty minutes before some kid sauntered up and stole it. My pirated t-shirts got plundered by a porch pirate, and a stupid one at that.

The money I lost on the shirts was almost worth the comedy captured on my security cam, as the dude took almost six minutes attempting to look casual while failing repeatedly to do a sly reach-around, as if he were just learning the length of his own arms in real time. Eventually he just gave up and showed his face to the camera while running off with the package. I just REALLY wanna see the look on his face when he opened it up to find weird obscure t-shirts of bands no one's ever heard of before.

I almost felt embarassed filing a police report over such a ridiculous purchase, but I did -- and the thief's picture is now being distributed to officers around town. The only thing more embarassing than wasting money on a bootleg My Bloody Valentine t-shirt would be getting arrested for stealing one, so good luck, kid.

The officer suggested I write the company to see if they carried insurance and could possibly re-ship. I did -- and prmptly received the following response: "Thanks you for contacting we! Much of happy to service of your shirts. The mail will be order delivery of very important! Please you for my patronage." I clearly can't say enough about Joe Doe's customer service -- mostly because I can't speak Joe Doe's language.

So, lesson learned. My days of ordering sketchy stuff from sketchy websites is done. Now, this OTHER website I just found that sells plaid flannel shirts in color combinations that match your favorite album covers? Well, that's just about the nerdiest thing I've ever seen -- and of course the shipment arrives tomorrow.

NO, WAIT, IT DOESN'T. THERE IS NOTHING TO SEE ON MY PORCH. KEEP WALKING, FRIEND.

COLUMN: Shoegaze Revival

I think I was twelve years old when I discovered the Beatles.

There was a kid at my school who was the absolute coolest. He was tall, good-looking, and had the uncanny ability to grow facial hair in 7th grade. All the girls swooned over him and all the boys wanted to be him. 

He was too cool to listen to the radio. All he ever played on his boombox was vintage classic rock, and you couldn't catch him anywhere without his faded denim jacket covered in Beatles pins. Suddenly, it seemed like our whole school became Beatles fans overnight. I was no exception -- except I wasn't cool. I was obnoxious.

I quickly procured all the Beatles albums. I went to the library and checked out all the Beatles books. I wore a pair of round Lennon specs. Within a week, I fancied myself an expert on the Fab Four, and every day when my parents would pick me up from school, I'd spend the drive home explaining the Beatles to them as if they hadn't lived through it.

"Did you know Ringo's real name is Richard?  Did you know if you abbreviate 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds,' it spells LSD? Did you know Paul is probably dead and they replaced him with a look-alike?" It's a wonder my parents didn't throw me out the car to be raised by raccoons (and raccoons that likely didn't care about George Harrison's middle name.) 

I just got a taste of what my parents had to endure.

Someone once said there's no music better than whatever you listened to in college, and that's absolute truth for me. But I'm honestly convinced that the best music of all time just happened to get released between 1988 and 1992.

My tastes in college were all over the board. I was learning to properly DJ, so I listened to a ton of dance music. But I also worked at the college radio station and developed an ear for esoteric, left-of-center indie rock -- especially the underappreciated bands that critics dubbed "shoegaze." It's still my favorite music to this day.

The dictionary defines shoegaze as "a subgenre of indie rock characterized by ethereal vocals, guitar distortion and effects, feedback, and overwhelming volume." Shoegaze originators like Ride, Slowdive, and My Bloody Valentine would famously spend months in the studio layering simple guitar chords with enough reverb and effects to punch holes through speakers. When I saw Slowdive play Chicago in '92, I remember having to grab the railing after every song, because when they'd stop playing, I'd be dizzy from the change in equilibrium. It's like if your favorite musician was, in fact, a jet engine.

It's definitely not the music for everyone. I don't know many people on the fence about shoegaze. You either really get it or you really DON'T. I read a review once that said shoegaze was like listening to a mermaid fall into a black hole. My mom told me it sounded like a vacuum cleaner. Even the term "shoegaze" was originally an insult hurled by a music critic, aghast that people were paying money to watch musicians stare stoically at a bank of effect pedals on the ground.

But shoegaze was MY music, and being a fan felt like membership into a secret club. You'd see the same people at shows. You'd nod respectfully at anyone you spotted wearing a Ride t-shirt. For once, I finally felt like the coolest kid in school, hip to something no one else understood.

That is, until this week -- when I saw an article on Vice entitled, "Gen Z are Resurrecting Shoegaze for their Bleak Post-COVID World." Unbeknownst to me, today's cool kids have rediscovered those esoteric little bands from my youth, and those hard-to-find albums are now in heavy rotation on Spotify.

I went to TikTok and it's eleventy times cringier than me trying to teach my parents about the Beatles. There's kids making viral dances to Slowdive songs. There's shoegaze make-up tutorials. Girls are posting videos where they burn incense and fondle crystals to "manifest a shoegaze boyfriend." There's blog articles entitled, "What your favorite shoegaze band says about you."

Worst of all, it seems like the overwhelming consensus among the new generation is that shoegaze is supposed to be the soundtrack to mopey depression, sadness, and pandemic isolation. I guess it's now supposed to be the music you listen to when you need a good cry. It was never that way for us back in the day. If anything, the layered guitar effects and sonic maelstrom of shoegaze made me feel happy, alive, and blissed out. Not once did I listen in order to mourn my own existence. That's why God invented goth music, you sillies. 

I'm not sure whether to be appalled by these new fans getting it all wrong, or if I should feel like a golden god for being a card-carrying member of the original shoegaze fanbase. Part of me wants to find these teenagers and lecture them on proper music appreciation. The other part wants them to think I'm a cool kid, too. 

Except I'm not a cool kid. I'm a 50-year-old dude who happens to like the same music as a bunch of pretentious trendy kids right now. Maybe some of them are telling their parents interesting facts about Slowdive as I speak. I think I'll just stay off TikTok and let the kids have their mopey shoegaze moment. Their misappreciation and misappropriation of my favorite music is appalling, but if it results in Slowdive going on another reunion tour, we all win (except the people who think they sound like a vacuum cleaner.)

I'll be the blissed-out 50-year-old sore thumb in the back row and I won't care one bit.

COLUMN: Livin' La Vida Awful

Well, this is a first.

I've been writing this column every week for 17 years now, and I can safely say this is the first one composed on a cellphone. But that's how desperate I am to escape my present situation. As I painfully type this one thumb at a time, I'm getting work done on my car, and I'm currently being tortured by the devil's Muzak while sitting in the waiting area / infinite purgatory of the dealership. 

I should be feeling good. This is maturity at work right here. I'm adulting like heck. I have a burned-out tail light, something I've known for weeks and relegated to the lower mid-section of the "to-do" list like an irresponsible idiot. But last week, I drove home to Galesburg and made the mistake of letting my dad notice. If I didn't sort this out post-haste, I guarantee it would be the lead topic of every phone call home. Plus I'd rather not get rear-ended OR a ticket, so it's time for action. Specifically, the action of sitting here indefinitely while time crawls to a halt.

In all honesty, it's a lovely waiting area and a great dealership. Everyone's super nice, it's clean as a whistle, there's unlimited beverages, and their COVID mitigations are top-notch. There's just one big problem.

The overhead radio is presently tuned to one of the many kazillion satellite stations out there. If I had to reckon a guess, I'd say we're listening to the Middle-Aged White People Party Jams channel, or perhaps a channel whose theme is simply Shane's Least Favorite Songs of All Time Ever. If it's insipid, over-played, inescapable, and terrible, it's on this playlist. I've been here for a half hour and I'm ready to pull my ears clean off.

I'm fully self-aware that I'm an elitist music snob. Listening to me prattle on about music is likely ten times more tiresome than this playlist could ever be. If there's a band you love, odds are good that I (a) sincerely hate them, (b) secretly love them but still insist I hate them, or (c) am about to tell you how they're derivative of some far superior Scottish indie band from 1982 that precisely 17 people on Earth have ever heard of. Sometimes it takes great patience to be my friend.

But I don't think you have to be a snobby elitist to hate this channel. We all come from different walks of life. We all have different tastes, passions, and stories. But if there's one thing that unifies us as a people, it's the shared truth that none of us EVER need to hear "Livin' La Vida Loca" ever again. Ricky Martin himself probably doesn't want to hear that song ever again.

That's the kind of schlock this channel's been pushing down my earholes for some forty minutes now without rhyme or reason. Well, I guess there's rhyme, if you count "loca" and "mocha." 

But worse than their song selections is the way they're assembled. It makes absolutely no sense. They just played that Cher autotune song -- "Do you beeeLIEEEEEEVE in life after love??" -- followed immediately by Led Zeppelin's "Whole Lotta Love." Is there anyone on Earth who's a hardcore fan of both Cher and Led Zep? If so, you're downright weird. And should probably be my friend.

Fifteen minutes have passed. I can now say with some certainty that I have no idea who let the dogs out and I frankly don't care. Nor do I care that you've been through the desert on a horse with no name. I cannot see paradise by the dashboard lights and I do not want to come sail away. It is quite unnecessary to celebrate good times, come on. These songs already live in the deepest, darkest earworm-riddled corners of our brains for all time, there's absolutely no reason to bring them out for a refresher. If "Mmm Bop" comes on, I swear I'm walking home.

WHOA. I just discovered what this channel is. It's the satellite channel "Road Trip Radio: Music To Drive To." If this was my required road trip soundtrack, I'd be a MUCH bigger homebody.

Now it's Icona Pop's "I Love It," which is actually a bop, but I'm trying to sort out why "Road Trip Radio" would feature a song whose main lyrics repeat, "I crashed my car into the bridge, I watched, I let it burn." This does NOT bode well for your roadtrip safety, people.

Perhaps this is all just a genius sales technique. I'm half-tempted to buy a new car just so I can get out of earshot. "Sure, give me the keys, I'll sign on the X, just don't make me listen to 'Love Shack,' I'm begging you." 

We have warped ahead 30 minutes. I'm home. Just as the gentle strains of "Eye of the Tiger" were kicking up, my car was done. All in all, a good experience -- as soon as I remembered I had my noise-cancelling earbuds in my pocket. I can definitely tell you what channel I did NOT listen to on the road trip home. If you were annoyed just now by the car zooming past with two shiny tail lights blaring some Scottish indie band from 1982 that only 17 people on Earth have ever heard of, my deepest apologies. And my work here is done, because you're now #18, congrats.  

COLUMN: Galesburg

They say "you can't go home again." I've clearly been proving them wrong.

I've spent a good chunk of this past week in my hometown of Galesburg. My mom took it upon herself to book an unexpected two-week stay at the fabulous bed & breakfast resort known as OSF St. Mary's Medical Center, so I've been doing a fair share of commutes lately.

Don't worry, she's home now and doing much better -- and it wasn't anything COVID-related -- but it definitely wasn't the most fun couple of weeks a person could have.

When I say Galesburg's my hometown, I'm kind of lying. Technically speaking, I don't have a hometown. I grew up in the country, about five miles northeast of the 'Burg. When I go home for a visit, I don't even need to go into town -- I usually just head straight into the sticks.

But between hospital visits and food runs, I've been spending quality time within the city limits of the town I used to run amok in -- and things ARE mighty different. 

Back in my day, the area around St. Mary's was truly the edge of town. The hospital was effectively in the country. But a few years back, they built a fancy new Wal-Mart in that corridor, which means the former edge of town is now bustling with fast-food joints and strip malls. Honestly, for once I'm a little jealous of my parent's locale -- they've got a Buffalo Wild Wings and a McAlister's and a Burger King and a Pizza Ranch all within five minutes of my once-isolated childhood home.

Of course, I'm not especially jealous of my mom right now, because the only haute cuisine she's been enjoying is water and Jello. When I asked what flavor it was, I was told "green." Seeing as how it's fairly impolite to sneak food into the hospital room of someone who can't eat, I was resorting to scarfing down burgers in the hospital parking lot, trying not make a spectacle of myself as the staff went about their shift changes.

It must have worked, because the first time I visited, I didn't even discover until later that I wasn't supposed to have made it through the door. I just walked in, nodded at the attendant, and went straight to the elevator up to my mom's room. I didn't even realize that COVID-19 protocols were still in play, and every patient was only allowed ONE support person (in this case, my dad.) They were supposed to have cross-checked me against a list of approved visitors. They were supposed to have checked my temperature and issued me hand sanitizer.

I didn't know any of this. I just strolled on in and nobody stopped me. Only later, when a surprised nurse walked in and gave me the third degree, did I realize I was in breach of protocol. Clearly this can only mean one thing: I must resemble a neurosurgeon. The attendant must have noticed my confidence, poise, and profound level of maturity and naturally assumed I was an important doctor here to do important doctorish things. I'm sure its nearly impossible to tell the difference between a cardiac surgeon and a chubby newspaper columnist wearing a t-shirt that says "your favorite band sucks."

I was summarily and justifiably booted from the premises. Given my hermitic ways, I'm pretty sure I was in more danger of catching COVID-19 from them than they were from me, but rules are rules and safety first. Thankfully, a couple days later they eased back the protocols. Mom was allowed two designated visitors and I made the list (sorry, Aunt Merry, you missed the cut.)

Once upon a time, a simple roadtrip home wasn't a big deal. I love any excuse to go for a drive. Once I left the house on a food run and ended up in northern Wisconsin. Roadtrips are my jam. But the older I get, the longer that stretch of highway gets. Instead of just hopping in the car, I'm running through checklists in my mind like a mature person (gross.) Do I have water? Check. Mask? Check. Advil? Check. Imodium? Can't be too cautious. Anything could happen on the mean streets of the Illinois interstate system.

Advil turned out to be a good idea. I fell on the ice two winters ago in a comically ridiculous way, and I'm pretty sure my butt's still broken. Get me in a car for longer than a half hour and there's a good chance my tailbone will start screaming. I should probably see somebody about that, lest I become a crochety old man whose butt predicts the weather ("Uh oh, my coccyx is flaring up. Hard rain's a-comin'!") 

Driving down Henderson Street in Galesburg always reminds me of high school weekends, when the required social activity was cruising the strip from the McDonalds on Henderson to the McDonalds on Main over and over again. Do teenagers even do that any more? Have I reached the age where I just sit around and start stories with, "Back in MY day..."? Apparently so, since I already started a sentence with those very words a few paragraphs above.

Change is inevitable. My mom liked to amuse me with stories about life before television. Our generation's children are equally blown away by our tales of life before cellphones. THEIR children will probably be saying things like "do you remember the olden days when cars used to roll around on WHEELS?" But whether we have to walk, drive, fly, or teleport, family will always be family, and I'm lucky to have one that will always welcome me.

It might not look the same, but you can DEFINITELY go home again.