Guns

I don’t know the answer to our ridiculous mass shootings record here in America, but I don’t think I’m the only one who’s uncomfortable with just how ingrained guns have become in American culture.

It really is a cultural thing for us at this point because if you even mention talking about gun control, people go nuts about their 2nd amendment rights being infringed and how we’ve currently got 75,000 gun control laws already on the books and those ones never seem to work … people who love guns are convinced that anything but guns must be the problem, and yet the rest of us who aren’t gun nuts – and even some who are – still beg to ask the question…

…why do we have to have all of these GUNS lying around the country?!

I mean, I thought the statistic of more guns than people that I read last night was pretty alarming, but then to compound that by considering that only 40% of Americans own guns … that means that here in the United States of America, roughly 140 million people own roughly 350 million guns.

I’d love to dig even deeper into that statistic because I think it would be real telling to pull out how many of those 140 million own only one gun vs. how many of them own lots and lots of guns because just like the extremists that we observe in politics and religion and everywhere else, I’ve got a feeling there are probably a few backwoods militias jacking those numbers up quite a bit to get to the full 350 million guns owned.

And I guess the reason I say that I don’t even know the answer anymore is because although I don’t want to ban guns entirely, it frankly makes me very uncomfortable that we have almost half our population that’s this emphatic about owning these tools whose primary motive is for killing. We don’t see knife enthusiasm to this extent, and cars at least have a primary focus of transportation despite being responsible for a lot of deaths as well.

What is it about guns that so many Americans seem to fetishize to the point where we can’t even talk about them after shootings have become literally a daily headline in our nation???

I read a rather scary notion earlier today where somebody roughly said that “the war on gun control was lost after Sandy Hook” because when we weren’t able to make a dent even after a classroom of school kids got murdered in cold blood, it was already clear that America at large simply wasn’t interested in talking about its gun problem because if you ask the people carrying the guns, they’re all convinced that we don’t have one … or that it would somehow be solved if we were all carrying even more guns.

And that makes me sad because even if it was the right answer, you’ll never pull 350 million guns back off the streets of America – Donald Trump has a better chance of rounding up all of the illegal immigrants and showing them the door … all by himself.

Are the people who are pro-gun simply too in love with their weapons for America to ever shake its mass shooting stats?

It’s one of those questions that I’m not sure if we’ll ever answer until the whole thing just implodes, and yet, just under three years ago you could argue that it already did implode when 20 first graders lost their lives at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 2012.

Since that tragedy at Sandy Hook, over 1,300 more people have been killed in over 1,000 individual shootings in the United States in the last 3 years.

That’s almost as many American soldiers who died during the war in Afghanistan, except these all happened on U.S. soil.

If another country had been responsible for so many American lives lost within our own borders, we’d have declared war three years ago, but because it’s in our own fault, and it’s about guns, instead we do nothing.

2015 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 3 – A Family Truckster Realization

So I noticed something interesting late this evening while I was watching National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation whilst buried under a mountain of kleenex. I’d never really thought much about it before because it’s really only featured in the opening scene, but the Family Truckster – the iconic mode of transport that takes the family to Wally World in the first Vacation movie – isn’t actually the same car as the one in the first movie!

Now maybe this is completely intentional, but because I’ve got plenty of cough syrup coursing through my veins *I* thought it was an interesting, fun little fact. And granted, the movies themselves were released 6 years apart, so it could be argued that of course it’s a new car, although it seems like my own family growing up milked our family Oldsmobile for far longer than that.

PLUS!!!

The Truckster that made its cameo in this year’s Vacation sequel in fact was the original car, or at least one that looked a lot like it, so … that!

Anyways, here’s the original…

wagon-queen-family-truckster-national-lampoons-vacation

And here’s the version from Christmas Vacation, which appears to just be some sort of Ford Taurus painted to resemble the unmatchable Family Truckster…

1989-Ford-Taurus-Wagon6

I tell you, it really broke the continuity for me to see all of those sleek and sexy curves of the Taurus in place of the blocky, ton of bricks-exterior that the original Truckster was known for. Ok, so not really, but cough syrup will do strange things to a man, so frankly you’re lucky your even getting advent blog posts at all right now!

Holiday ro-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ad, holiday ro-o-o-o-o-o-ad… 

2015 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 2 – Scott’s Top 5 Christmas Movies

Not to be confused with Scott’s Top 5 Christmas Specials which we’ll be covering a little later on this month, this is a list that changes quite frequently … in fact, I’ll probably have changed my mind by the time I’m finished writing this … but for the time being, these are the holiday movies that I’m banking on for this holiday season because, well, bleh I’m sick and there’s a good chance I’ll probably be watching every single one of them over the next couple of days… 😛

  1. National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation – Clark W. Griswold is America’s everyman and if there’s a person who can’t relate to Chevy Chase’s iconic character who just wants the perfect Christmas, well chances are that’s because they’re really one of the obnoxious relatives making it tougher for the rest of us…
  2. A Christmas Story – I honestly used to kind of hate this movie, admittedly before I ever really sat down and watched it, but now much like Christmas Vacation, I can recognize it as the true timeless classic that it really is.
  3. A Muppet Family Christmas – Quite possibly the best Muppet movie ever, this snowed-in treasure has a great sing-a-long soundtrack, includes just about every character from the Muppet universe, and even features a swell cameo from Jim Henson himself doing the dishes with Sprocket at the end!
  4. Die Hard – Seriously, the only thing this jolly, old holiday tale is missing is John McClane running around Nakatomi Plaza wearing a Santa hat while he’s mowing down terrorists the American way. It’s got Christmas music, the phrase “ho ho ho” is prominently featured – what more could an elf need?!
  5. Home Alone – This was pretty much the perfect kids movie because it first came out when I was 10 years old myself. And that Christmas I dreamed of stopping burglars with my Micro-Machines and throwing paint cans off the banister at intruders, all because my stupid uncle ate the cheese pizza that Dad bought especially for me. Christmas.

xmas2015-achristmasstory xmas2015-christmasvacation xmas2015-diehard xmas2015-homealone xmas2015-muppetfamily

2015 Holiday Advent Blog – Day 1 – Family Photos!

xmas1

It’s that time again!

If you’re anything like me, 2015 just sort of flew by entirely too fast and you’re probably expecting the month of December to do the same. Luckily we ended up starting a bit early by actually getting our holiday photos done the week before Thanksgiving … a feat that required me putting the Christmas tree up at 3:00am the night before, but was ultimately worth it from a time management perspective. 😉

Anywho, here are some of my favorites…

Props to Sweet Cheek Photography for the great memories! It’s kind of crazy to compare these to the ones we had taken at Christmastime only a year ago to see how big Christopher has grown in the last year – little guy will be making the ladies swoon on the playground in no time… 😀

movie thoughts … The Peanuts Movie

peanutsTonight we took Christopher to see his second movie in the theater, and overall I think he really liked it.

For what it’s worth, I really liked it, too!

Unlike a certain unnamed lasagna-loving cat’s recent movies that were pretty much awful, The Peanuts Movie did a great job of keeping the spirit of the characters that we’ve come to know and love from the likes of A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown while also introducing a new style as the first look at the Peanuts gang via CGI.

I loved a number of the callbacks throughout the film, though I think the scenes featuring Snoopy vs. the Red Baron where we’d periodically see his surroundings in real life amid the fantasy were my favorite.

Sara noted that Christopher himself seemed to take a particular liking to Woodstock and his own little antics, so that was kind of neat!

A lot of times I have a hard time getting into non-Disney animated movies just because Disney and Pixar have done such a great job of setting the bar so high, but they really did a good job with this one from start to finish and now in hindsight, I think I can say that the scads of Peanuts merchandise that I was inundated with while Christmas shopping over the weekend is well warranted indeed. 😉

Super cute movie, very much true to the spirit of the late Charles Schulz, and a great way to introduce a new generation to an old favorite.

Loved the end credits, too … the football almost had me tearing up as I was grinning ear to ear!!!

Dream Journal : Escaping a War Zone

It started with a plane crash that should’ve killed me, but didn’t.

I was on a work trip when the passenger jet that we were flying basically started falling apart, and the next thing I knew we were looking out the side of the plane that was no longer plane as the ground around us was rapidly approaching.

I have no idea how I survived, but a lot of people actually did. We were all sitting around the wreckage of this jumbo jet trying to make sense of it when I noticed that my phone was still intact and I was receiving frantic messages from a co-worker about what had happened. The news was talking about a plane being shot down over Afghanistan and how there were no survivors, even though it had literally just happened … after piecing a few things together quickly on the phone, I told her that they couldn’t tell anyone that we’d survived and turned my phone to silent before we started to run…

The group was already much smaller as we found ourselves hiding in the middle of a war torn city, suddenly painfully aware that we’d crashed in pretty much the worst possible place ever as we saw men carrying machine guns walking the streets nearby, though so far it didn’t seem that they were aware of our presence … yet. At the moment at least we were more or less invisible amid this chaos, whereas we knew that if they realized there were survivors we would quickly become the hunted.

Sneaking from building to building without much direction, it didn’t take long for one of our members to slip up and attract the attention that put us running for our lives, our numbers quickly dwindling as the gunfire gradually picked off our stragglers who we didn’t even have time to look back and acknowledge as we fled. Eventually I ended up alone, darting between houses in an almost suburban setting as I felt the chase somewhat slowing behind me until I was able to hide in a farmer’s field while I could overhear the soldiers wandering around nearby, but thankfully without a clue that one of their prospects was laying among the tall crops so close nearby.

It was in that field that I stayed for nearly a week, slowly inching my way further from the man’s house whenever the quiet encouraged me to move forward, sustaining myself on whatever I could find nearby on the ground that was mostly disgusting – a few of the crops that surrounded me, but also some bugs and even dirt. I hadn’t used my phone in days after turning it off upon overhearing one soldier commenting that they’d been tracking us via GPS, and I knew it just wasn’t worth the risk when already they were so close on the roads that bordered the fields that kept me hidden.

I finally had to make haste once again when it was the farmer itself who caught sight of me during his daily chores and quickly alerted the nearby soldiers – only a couple this time – who pursued me on foot as I proceeded to steal his car in return and take off back into the city that I’d just spent so much time trying to escape.

I had no idea what I was doing or where I was going – all I knew was that I had to get away.

movie thoughts … Ant-Man

antmanI didn’t really think I was going to like this one, but I suppose it wasn’t too bad.

It definitely felt like a second-rate Marvel movie, though – don’t get me wrong there…

I don’t know – I guess I have sort of mixed feelings about Ant-Man because on one hand, I do enjoy Paul Rudd even though it was odd to see him in not a straight-up comedy, but the character itself to me still feels kind of silly … even though I watched him do some awesome things there on the screen. Maybe I don’t get the switching back from big to small thing in rapid succession like he would do in the battles … I feel like I’m a little lost with his strength because sure, ants are strong, but it’s still relative and when he’s the size of an ant, isn’t 50x his strength still super small as well???

Maybe he’s switching back to normal size just long enough to punch and then going back, although I thought the suit just allowed him to change size, not give him added strength.

The other Marvel superheroes don’t make me have to think this much when I’m watching their movies!

Anyways, there were plenty of segments that were predictable, like when he has to go sub-atomic at the end, and for some reason looking at Evangeline Lilly made it feel like she was obviously wearing a wig for her character, which made it a little odd. Michael Douglas is always fun to see and this seemed like more of a unique role for him than the presidential characters that he’s somewhat iconic for playing.

I think my biggest disappointment was honestly in the tie-ins to the other Marvel movies because at the very beginning they did a good job of including Agent Carter and Howard Stark, then later making references to calling in The Avengers … I was expecting some decent cameos eventually, but instead the most we got was the Falcon, which was a neat little solo scene for him, but it would’ve been nice to see one or more of the tier one heroes even for just a quick appearance.

If anything, between this, the scene at the end of Avengers 2, and knowing the general theme of Captain America: Civil War, it makes me a little nervous that we’re going to see the collective group split into multiple teams of superheroes that don’t really pack the same punch as the original group and mostly serve to allow Marvel to kick out twice as many movies with this growing array of characters in the MCU.

But we’ll see. Ant-Man was more or less enjoyable, though I wouldn’t be eager to watch it over and over again like I have some of the classics.

IVF Round #2 – All Aboard the Stress Express

I was actually going to write about this a week ago. I didn’t really write publicly about our first go at IVF during the process itself because it was a stress-filled rollercoaster and I just didn’t feel like airing it at the time. I thought this time would be different, but then we got into the mix of it and it turned out to be just as stressful as before though admittedly in different ways than before…

So this is our second time doing IVF – our first resulted in Christopher after two cycles.

Contrary to the beliefs of many armchair fertility doctors, no, everything didn’t just loosen right up after that first baby and make things smooth as silk for baby #2.

Not to nitpick your credentials or anything, but ovulation or a lack thereof doesn’t work that way.

😛

Anyways, last Saturday morning we went in to harvest eggs out of my wife, as you do, and things seemed to be going smoothly right up until they weren’t. It’s scary how much of a numbers game this really is because we rapidly went from 23 eggs total to 18 eggs harvested to only 12 of those eggs actually being mature, and that was before my little guys jumped into the game, too!

…which apparently came with their own set of issues that I don’t really want to get into, but I will say that we almost couldn’t fertilize any to a day later finding that all twelve eggs had fertilized successfully, so again … rollercoaster much?!

And yet here we are a week later, and now we’re down to THREE viable, growing embyros at day 5. 😯

Honestly, this is almost exactly what happened last time, which is a little frustrating because we’re obviously hoping for more to help control costs. But it is what it is, as much as I’m so sick of hearing the phrase, “It only takes one!” because out of millions of sperm and dozens of eggs, we’re already at a disadvantage numbers-wise!

So now we’re kind of in a holding pattern until next year – our three contestants will be frozen as they are today and a cellular-sized chunk of each sent off for genetic testing to identify the best of the best, but they won’t go back inside until after the new year … sort of a different strategy with this go around. Basically all I have left to do is write a $2,000 check for the genetic testing and then we’re on break until after the holidays… 😕

A bit anti-climatic, I know – welcome to my world.

In other related news, though, I’m somewhat considering writing an actual book about the process with Sara because she approached me with some interest earlier in the year and I’m coming around on the idea that we might be able to have a little fun with it and help some other people cope with the horrible process to boot. When we were going through our last cycle to have Christopher, writing about it was honestly the furthest thing from my mind because it was so stressful and topsy-turvy, but even though this cycle is still somewhat crazy I think having another already under our belts does make it a bit easier.

Really, it’s such a rough, unrelatable process for anyone who hasn’t or isn’t going through it, if I can write a few jokey thingys to help lighten the mood for others based on our own experiences, then that might help bring some positive to the process … besides my child/children that came/are coming out of it, mind you!

So look for that … I don’t really know when. I’d like to start working on it next year, but I’ve go so much lined up it’s hard to say at this point. I guess like the other thing, we’ll see. 😐

How do I want to make my impact???

I guess you could say that I’ve kind of been having a mini crisis of faith over the last couple of weeks where I’ve found myself second-guessing what I want to do with life from the perspective of being a writer.

I wrote about it a little here last week, but in light of the attacks in Paris that literally happened a day later and the tremendous backlash that’s surged since regarding the refugees from Syria, I’ve had a lot of time to think about it and last night I believe I finally came to my answer…

Politics and reporting the news are important, and I can certainly see plenty of room for improvement, however that said I don’t know if it’s the right fit for me, I don’t think that it necessarily plays to my strengths, and most importantly, I think it would drive me absolutely insane trying to keep up with it after a while!

I had an idea that I was briefly entertaining last night about a new project that would essentially serve as a Snopes or a Politifact, but exclusively stick to factually correcting details shared around social media. On the surface it seemed like a worthwhile idea and it’s no doubt something that’s sorely needed … but the more I stewed about it, I came to the conclusion that it would end up being an extraordinarily negative pool to wade through because it would basically consist of purposely seeking out the most popular misinformed posts on Facebook and then doing the research to correct them.

A noble cause, no doubt … but is that really how I want to spend the limited amount of time that I have to dedicate to my craft???

Not really.

And so that brought me back to humor and sort of shined a new light on the art form that I think I’ve somewhat taken for granted. Simply put, the intent of humor first and foremost is to make people laugh. It can certainly also serve to educate or enlighten or even ridicule its subject matter in the process, but all of those things are secondary to entertainment.

It’s an argument that I remember Jon Stewart making time and time again about The Daily Show when various news programs would compare themselves to his program and he’d have to insist, “You think that we’re the same, but we’re not. The lead-in to my show is literally puppets making crank phone calls!”

A lot of pundits gave Stewart crap about not being on the same playing field as they were – primarily because his job mostly consisted of lobbing fireballs at them for 30 minutes every single night – but that’s kind of the beauty of being a humorist. You can write hard-hitting, political humor that serves to cut through the bullshit and highlight the ridiculousness that our politicians spout on a daily basis, but you can also write about other things, too.

If I were to take on that social media fact checker project that I described earlier, sure, there would be a potential to “make an impact” by providing facts to (hopefully) displace the BS, but what would the other part involve for that job? I fear that much like trying to be a hard-hitting journalist, it would be nothing but one ugly shouting match after another where even if you change minds with your latest battle, you’ve still got another ugly shouting match ahead of you and ten more lined up after that.

At least if I stick to entertainment writing, I can follow-up a critical, but also silly post about the Syrian refugees with a comic strip about the joys of unpacking cardboard boxes! What are my alternatives if I dedicate the bulk of my time to dispelling conservative politics or trying to make a dent in the status quo through serious debate??? Those ridiculous cat stuck in the tree or how did she wear it-stories that always make me groan when I see actual news sources taking a break with them?!

People can still take serious cues from humor, but it’s a lot more fun to read … not to mention to write, now that I think about it. So maybe I need to get back to writing humor and stop worrying about finding an unnatural way for me to move the needle.

This was a good talk. Thanks, Internet! 😉

A Verizon FiOS Upgrade Update … of Sorts

So here we are, 10 days after my rant about issues with getting my FiOS Internet speed upgrade.

The good news is, I’m officially running at the 150 Mbps that I originally wanted … sometimes.

The bad news is, I’m not super crazy about what I had to go through to get it.

Here’s a quick timeline…

  • 10/23 – Found upgrade options missing online; no luck with support via phone or Twitter.
  • 10/29 – Sent an e-mail pressing further, response back that it was a mgt. decision.
  • 11/12 – Sent an e-mail to Verizon’s head over FiOS, got a response from his office in a matter of hours
  • 11/13 – Spoke on phone with exec. customer support who overrode issue and scheduled my upgrade
  • 11/16 – Tech came out, did install

It turns out that the final version of the story that I was given is that Verizon ran out of equipment nationwide, so in the meantime they decided to limit this particular upgrade to new customers until they were able to get their hardware issue under control. I didn’t ask if it was related to next year’s sale to Frontier because I wouldn’t blow a lot of money on equipment if I was selling the business soon, but it frankly wouldn’t surprise me…

Anyways, the gentleman from the VP’s office was very polite and offered to honor my upgrade by first submitting an order to upgrade me to 300 Mbps to get my order through the system, then coming in afterwards to back it down to the 150 Mbps that I actually wanted. And I did get my router included, though there was a one-time $150 install fee which I was honestly fine with at this point.

The install itself went super smooth – better than most, in fact – because instead of running a new ethernet line through the attic from the ONT to my router, he was able to make use of an existing line that ran to a smart panel in my closet where the router now resides anyways, so all in all we were probably done in about two hours. Speed tests were a little bit of a pain just because only my server is currently hardwired and it doesn’t have Flash installed which 99% of the speed tests require, but we worked it out nonetheless…

speedtest300 speedtest150

It was definitely hard to say goodbye to that 300 Mbps, though in no way can I justify another $90 on top of what I’m paying already, plus in reality I did find that the places I normally download from couldn’t push more than about 200 Mbps at me at a given time anyways … which was kind of expected. So it’s certainly worth noting that as sexy as the prospect of gigabit ethernet is, it’s really only useful for multiple devices pulling at the same time at least for the time being.

Still, this effectively doubled the speed in which I can download movies and TV shows, so that’s cool!

Also, my ping time is roughly 1/4 of what I was used to seeing, so also cool.

That said, even in just a day I’ve noticed my speed wobbling a bit – sometimes I can get the full 150 Mbps, sometimes it clocks in less than the 75 Mbps that I had before … not sure if that’s just standard Internet congestion (though I didn’t see it much before) or if moving me over to GPON puts me on a busier node where I’m competing for bandwidth more than I did when I was on BPON. Will have to keep an eye on that…

Anywho, at the end of the day my only real complaint is simply that I had to jump through so many hoops to get where I am today. One typically shouldn’t have to complain to a VP in order to get their service upgraded, and better communication at any step in the chain would’ve at least calmed me down and made me a little more understanding. I guess the moral is if you’re not getting anywhere with customer service, just go straight to the top and try there instead … which is terrible advice, really, but it seemed to work here.

I made the link above to said VP’s reference clickable just in case anyone else has the same problem… 😉