Religious Freedom and Indiana…

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So I’ve been pretty engaged about this one over the last couple of days.

I’ve run two different humor pieces about it on Just Laugh:

I was proud to see that fellow humorist and writer friend Erik Deckers took a personal stand and backed down from a writing gig that he had held for the last six years promoting tourism around Indiana, as well as some companies like SalesForce.com and organizations like GenCon that are willing to move their financial influences elsewhere in response to the new law.

I’m also currently in a heated and increasingly bizarre argument with one of my uncles on Facebook that seems to imply that he himself personally gets inundated with lots and lots of gay sex because he’s quite adamant that “he doesn’t care – just keep it out of his face” … so there’s that! 😕

And I know that there’s a lot of confusion and misinformation floating around, particularly many that claim that the same laws exist already in another 19 states and was also introduced federally by Bill Clinton in 1993 … except that neither of these is actually true when you consider the political makeup and other laws on the books in those other scenarios. It gets ugly and complicated and much more than anyone could fit into a single soundbite when we factor in protected discrimination classes and rights of persons vs businesses and even simply the starkly different landscape that existed some 20 years ago when Bill Clinton was president.

At the end of the day, the spirit is still undeniably ugly and it continuously shocks me that we’re still having to fight and debate over something as clear cut as discrimination like this over and over again. It’s like the right attempting to defend religion doesn’t even acknowledge that another side exists – that for the baker to deny a cake to a gay couple also means that on the other side of the counter was a couple discriminated against due to their sexual preference.

As the old saying goes, I can explain it for you, but I can’t understand it for you.

The tricky part is, I’m sure there are some religious minorities that aren’t feeling the protection that they deserve for their beliefs as well, but we have to be honest here when we’re talking about this bill because with so many supporters of the new law being quite specifically anti-gay marriage, it should be a surprise to no one that the intent of this bill – as much as Gov. Pence wants to shake his head no – is directly in response to all of the progress that has been made with gay marriage across the landscape in recent years.

It’s funny because I watched the ABC News interview with George Stephanopoulus in which he was asked no less than five times and wouldn’t answer the specific question, “If a florist in Indiana refuses to serve a gay couple, is that now legal in Indiana?” and his awkward defiance makes it clear as day what his opinion on this is, even if he dares not to speak the words into a microphone.

With all sincerity, I hope that this one burns on and continues to spark the debate because we’ve still got a long ways to go. People need to learn that their freedom of religion doesn’t give them the right to discriminate against others and that these types of practices are not what our founding fathers intended when these United States were formed. The USA isn’t a country where you should be judged walking into a store and we’ve supported that missive many times before. There’s no logical reason why the same shouldn’t extend to gay men and women just the same, and the fact that the religious right is now playing the victim card that they’re somehow being marginalized by the minority speaks volumes to which way the war is trending.

Like I’ve said a thousand times before, I think one day equal rights for gay people will just be another ugly scar in history that we reflect on and look past – I just wish for everyone who’s affected by it more than I am that it would all happen sooner rather than later because if we’re not fair and equal with how we treat one another, what’s the sense of all the rest that we strive for as Americans, really???

This birthday was brought to you by the letter C and the number 1!

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I figured I’ve shared these just about everywhere else, so why not throw ’em up on the trusty, old blog, too?!

In a word, Christopher’s 1st birthday party came together spectacularly awesome. She’ll tell you that we did a lot of it together, but Sara was really the driving force behind a lot of the colorful fun seen here below, from the rainbow-assorted sugar cookies to Ernie’s Rubber Duckie Punch to all of the other sweet Sesame Street ideas that she collected on Pinterest and got a “Sure!” from me about in a typical man’s reply. 😉

It’s hard to believe that this little guy has already been around for an entire year – in that time he’s gone from an extremely expensive little science project to this almost Muppet-like, silly personality that giggles and laughs at just about everything and is due to start tearing into anything not bolted down around our house pretty much any day now!

Happy Birthday, little dude! I, for one, would be more than happy to tell you how to get to Sesame Street. 😀

a Christian “alternative” to health insurance…

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I stumbled upon this the other day and on the surface it seems kind of interesting – it’s essentially a group of Christians getting together to help each other pay their medical bills. Nothing wrong with that, right?!

Well…

Much like any insurance program, it starts to raise some eyebrows when you begin to peel back the layers and really try to understand what it covers, and more importantly, what it doesn’t. Right off the bat, they make it very clear that this is a faith-based program and that those who aren’t dedicated to the lifestyle need not apply. In fact, they actually have a list of rules:

  • You must take a statement of faith and be active in your religious worship.
  • You’re not allowed to smoke tobacco, or use illegal drugs, or abuse legal drugs.
  • You’re not allowed to “have sex outside of traditional Christian marriage.”

That said, if you think it’s a little strange for your insurance company (although they state that they’re not actually one) to dictate your sex life, it gets worse when you dive into what is actually covered, and even more so how the whole plan actually works.

First off, things that it doesn’t cover…

  • abortions (no surprise there)
  • alcohol and drug-related injures and illnesses
  • STDs
  • “illegal acts”
  • attempted suicide
  • maternity expenses for children conceived out of wedlock (except for rape)
  • mental health / psychiatry
  • fertility/infertility care (wouldn’t be a surprise except that they lump “birth control procedures and supplies” in here as well)
  • hearing aids (what?)
  • routine and preventative care (despite being known to play a considerable factor in whether you need additional healthcare, their theory is that these are known costs and you should budget for them throughout the year)

And that’s really a summarization of some of the more oddball stuff – the full list can be found here.

So anyways, the way this whole program works is that much like regular insurance, you have a deductible and co-pays, so when you go to the doctor before you hit your deductible, you pay a co-pay and then they send a bill to these people, who typically knock off a discounted rate and then you have to pay the balance until your deductible is met.

You also pay a monthly premium just like regular insurance, which goes into a pool to help pay for the claims of other members. So far, so good.

But where the whole thing starts to get a little creepy is that the whole process of getting your bills paid by the pool is known as sharing, and as a result, as money from other members is matched up with your bills, the service tells those people specifically who their money is going to … so that they can pray for you. 😯

Now admittedly the whole prayer thing is a bit of a weird concept to me as a non-believer myself, but the reason I pick on this particular element is because it screams to me as being so incredibly self-serving and hypocritical when we look back at the rest of the program because although it’s a noble offer to come together as a community to help everyone take care of each other’s medical bills, you only have to skim those bulleted lists that I showed you earlier to see that it isn’t exactly everyone in as much as it’s everyone who thinks, acts, and lives their lives exactly the way that we do.

And this aligns with a lot of the complaints that I hear from the right about paying taxes these days because there are always certain things that they don’t want their money going towards, whether it’s abortions or welfare or the EPA or whatever, and so in this particularly pick and choosey world of healthcare, these Christians have taken it upon themselves to create exactly that sunshine world for themselves.

Frankly as a non-believer looking in from the outside, it’s not a very appealing “community” to me because when I read through all of these rules and exclusions, what I’m hearing is, “We’ll help you as long as you behave, but as soon as you fuck up – when you need our help the most – you’re on your own!”

What kind of sense does it make that a Christian going through issues with depression or thoughts of suicide can’t turn to his Brothers in Christ for help paying for treatment from a qualified professional?

What about people who don’t live perfect lives in God’s name and have sex prior to marriage that results in pregnancy? Should they just have to carry the burden themselves because they were breaking the rules and having sex outside of marriage?

How about someone who has a drinking problem, gets in a car accident and splits his head open, and gets whisked away in an ambulance? Are those bills simply his problem for having a drinking problem in the first place???

Some Christians absolutely think YES, as I found in reading through a large thread of comments reviewing the program where these scenarios were questioned and then countered back as “tough love” in hopes that the punishment of having to pay all of their own medical bills may be a deterrent from future sins … and that kind of thing is where I start to get real cynical when it comes to religion because as far as I’m concerned, you’re not really the community that you say you are if you’re not willing to accept each other’s flaws and work together for the betterment of the entire community.

I mean, a lot of our problems would be easier to solve if we could cherry-pick how we addressed them – fix education by only focusing on the wealthy school districts, fix the budget by only paying for the things that we personally think are important – but the reality is that as much as you don’t want to bother yourself with all of that other stuff around you, it still exists and ultimately it doesn’t do our community as a whole a lot of good if subsets of us huddle up into smaller groups and say, “We’ll look out for each other, but you guys are on your own.”

How is it even Christian to live your lives by a book that says nobody’s perfect except for Jesus, but you should all strive to do better, and then you create this program that specifically excludes parts of your own people who don’t fall in line explicitly with those tenets?

I won’t even address excluding me because I don’t believe in your religion, but the fact that you have other Christians who need real help with these things, but you just turn your back on them and say, “Our program isn’t for everyone – we do what we can…” is insulting to your brothers among you who need your help but are left staring at your backs.

This quote from one of those commenters really stood out to me:

“We are a group of relatively healthy Christians with low monthly medical expenses who are willing to join together to HELP each other pay for extremely high medical expenses in the unusual event that we get sick or injured.”

So if you already have cancer, that’s too expensive and they won’t help you. If you’re an alcoholic in need of counseling, they won’t help you. If you deviate in your lifestyle in any noticeable way to the church, your “healthcare coverage” here could be at stake, too, and as much as we all complain about insurance companies being these heartless corporations seeking to profit off our backs, I really don’t see how this is much better.

And – there’s always the chance of other members voting to decide that the medical procedure that you need might suddenly be deemed immoral and thus not covered!

“One of the reasons I am interested in Medi-Share is because it doesn’t cover immoral procedures such as abortion, but circumcision is also immoral to me.”

Don’t get me wrong – the insurance industry itself has plenty of problems that contribute to the greater issues with overall healthcare in our country today, but I think we all need to work together to address those issues rather than breaking off into smaller groups to say, “We’re good – the rest of you can fend for yourselves, you damn heathens…” In a way it kind of reminds me of Texas constantly wanting to secede from the union, or more recently the pediatrician who refused to care for a gay couple’s baby – we need to stop segregating ourselves and actually come together to collectively solve the problems that we face.

Patting yourselves on the back when you think you’re doing something righteous that’s really exclusionary and judgmental isn’t helping, either.

Florida Living Done Right

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gulf

The last couple of days were great, reflective in a way, and yet also a strange reminder of how sometimes I don’t feel as though I’m “living in Florida right.”

Yesterday we spent the afternoon out and about – went to have lunch at a restaurant by the water over where my Dad is staying, and then sat outside and talked a while longer before heading down to Clearwater Beach in an attempt to catch the sunset. We didn’t make it, but we walked with Christopher along the beach anyways, then poked around some of the gift shops and strolled down Pier 60 out into the water a ways.

I love looking down the coastline and seeing it all lit up from the various hotels and festivities, with the sound of the waves rolling up onto the shore around us.

One of the hotels looked like it even had a giant TV that it was projecting onto the side of one of its walls on the top – very cool!

Two days prior to that, while we were out getting Christopher is first haircut we stopped at a new seafood place by our house and had a great lunch just enjoying the atmosphere, showing Christopher all of the giant fish that were mounted up on the walls, and even giving him his first taste of conch fritters! 🙂

And I guess I classify some of this as strange simply because between all of the waves and the delicious crab and the random Corona (which I haven’t had in ages), it all seemed to come together in a way that made me yearn for that part of Florida that we probably don’t step out to enjoy nearly as often as we should. It was great to hear the island music playing in the distance and see people running around in swim suits everywhere and breathe the air coming in off the gulf.

It makes me sad that we live as far away from the actual coast as we do…

Of course the real trouble is, waterfront real estate is really expensive!!! Trust me – I spent far too much time this afternoon skimming over listings yet again, and even just empty lots that we could build on are few and far between. Yet as Sara and I talk about having more kids and expanding the family, I think we’re both starting to feel a little stir crazy in this house and it gets us thinking about our dream house that we eventually want to move into where we’ll (in theory) live out the rest of our days in relaxing luxury! 😉

Maybe that million-dollar beachfront estate is still a few years off, but in the meantime I don’t think it’s too far out of line to say that my life could use a little more of the following in it…

  • time spent at the beach
  • shrimp and crabs
  • Jimmy Buffett music
  • relaxation a la waves
  • seashells

*sigh*

movie thoughts … The Fault in Our Stars

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MV5BMjA4NzkxNzc5Ml5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwNzQ3OTMxMTE@._V1_SY317_CR0,0,214,317_AL_We all knew before sitting down for this movie that it was going to be a tear-jerker.

Because of that I knew that I wanted to be in the right mood for it, even though it started showing up on HBO a couple of weeks ago. Ironically, it’s kind of one of those things that you’ll probably never be really ready for on all levels – needless to say, it’s a movie that makes you do a lot of thinking as it refuses to pull any punches in a way that only a tragic love story is truly capable of…

I think I liked this movie because for 126 minutes it forces  you to confront the realities that someone with a terminal disease faces every day, and in a weird way I kind of admired its candor. There’s a scene in the second half where Hazel is fighting with her Mom and corrects her from saying, “If you die…” to “When I die…” that just leaves your jaw dropping with acceptance that could only truly be served with a firm clubbing to the head.

We all know that Hazel is going to die, but nobody more than she does.

Spoiler – She doesn’t even die in the course of the movie, but we know that it’s going to happen eventually because we’ve watched her suffering unfold in ways that make us all wish we could take some of that burden from her…

Death is a topic that still terrifies me to personally think and talk about, but that doesn’t prevent it from inching closer and closer to me and everyone I’ve ever cared about every single day. The only thing that we can do is make the best of the time we have while we’re here, and that’s why this movie and book were so beautiful because it’s a tale of young love and hardship and fully appreciating a matter of months when truth be told they really deserved a lifetime together to love and to hold each other.

But sometimes life doesn’t always happen that way, and it’s not fair, and it’s crushing even as you see it coming from a mile away. This story was a celebration of both love and of heartbreak, and it’s really of no surprise after watching it why John Green is such a brilliant guy.

“You don’t get to choose if you get hurt in this world…but you do have some say in who hurts you. I like my choices.”

Dabbling with Facebook Advertising…

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Now that I’ve started being a bit more public about Just Laugh’s return, the other big focus that I have right now besides just making good content is also in trying to rebuild an audience to enjoy said content, as well as also help to promote other humorists as well as eventually hopefully driving some ad sales so that I can pay a few other people to write funny stuff along with me.

Marketing is honestly something that I’ve never really been good at before, which explains why I still have stacks of humor books sitting on the shelves behind me! When I first started Just Laugh more than a decade ago, there really wasn’t much we could do for online marketing at the time. We submitted our site to Yahoo!, which was a surprisingly big deal when it got added (I actually got something in the mail!). We tried to build linking relationships with other sites, and when that didn’t work we manage to trick a few of them into linking to us via the Just Laugh Weenie Awards… 😉

But a lot has changed since then … a lot, and so as I’ve sat here contemplating new ways to build traffic when I don’t really have much to offer just yet in return, I stumbled across the advertising options on Facebook the other day and it turned out that they were just simple enough that I decided to give them a try!

I created a new campaign that’s just shooting for new Likes to Just Laugh’s Facebook page, though apparently you can advertise all sorts of stuff with them. In fact, for about an hour and a half I had an ad running specifically to promote this post, but soon after I killed it when I saw that it cost me $1.28 for a single click through to the article.

That said, so far I think I’m pretty happy with how the original ad campaign is going, though admittedly it’s a little weird to watch as the Likes slowly creep in as my ad budget decreases in unison. It kind of feels like I’m buying Likes, which I guess is technically true to an extent, although not really. It’s not like one of those scam sites where you pay a guy $50 for 10,000 Likes – most of which aren’t even real people. That’s one thing that I have to remind myself – that these are real people who are seeing an ad for Just Laugh, and because of that ad they’ve decided to Like the page because they’re into funny stuff!

It’s something that the stats Facebook makes available helps to reinforce, to the point where I couldn’t even imagine buying ads from something like TV or newspapers that are based on market surveys instead of the real data about its users that Facebook is unique to be able to offer to help tailor the experience for both the user and the advertiser!

For example, one of the things that I had to pick for my add was Interests, so instead of just giving typical demographic info like Males age 25-39 who live in the US, I can also tack on there who also like pages such as The Onion and CollegeHumor because those types are more likely to enjoy Just Laugh as well.

Anyways, I’m a very data-driven kind of guy, so it’s neat to be able to see statistics more or less on the fly that tell me things like…

  • My ad has been served to about 3,700 people, and of those impressions I’ve had a success rate of a little over 5%.
  • In the last two and a half days that’s translated to almost 200 new Likes for Just Laugh (I think we were only around 25 of my friends and family before that?).
  • 99% of my ad impressions were on mobile devices, and 100% of the new Likes received came from there as well.
  • Ads were split fairly evenly between men and women, however women were about 25% more likely to respond to the ad.
  • 75% of the new Likes came from people ages 25-34, with the remaining 25% being 35-44 (for true transparency’s sake, the age demo I picked was 25 – 38 … honestly just as a guess because I figured people around my age are more likely to enjoy my jokes!).

It’s definitely interesting to watch develop, to say the least, and the idea that maybe a few more eyeballs will be on my posts in the future is certainly encouraging. Of course, that’ll be the real test because at this point I have no real idea what a realistic conversion rate is for fans clicking through posts over to the actual website where I get to run ads of my own. At this point I’m not entirely sure how long I’m going to run them, or even how long I can afford to run them, though I’ve got some numbers in my head that aren’t too crazy to give myself some things to experiment with.

I really want to make Just Laugh BIG this time, and I know that most of that really rides on having a respectable volume of web traffic, so as long as I can reasonably fund it I’m ok with making some investments to try and help things along. In a way, it’s neat just that we have a system that even makes that possible here in 2015 – where I could tinker with some settings for 20 minutes, enter a credit card number, and another 10 minutes later random strangers were viewing my ads and clicking on them to boot!

Granted, the next chapter of our advertising lesson will be The True Value of a Facebook Fan where we’ll get to see if the $0.20/Like was a worthwhile investment for Just Laugh or not… 😛

P.S. Go Like Just Laugh on Facebook if you read this post and haven’t already … mainly because I don’t have to pay for those Likes if they happen organically!

Just Laugh … returns … again?

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justlaugh

So I’ve been very reluctant to announce anything and hereby completely jinx ever updating it again, but I recently sort of brought Just Laugh back from the dead again.

It’s one of those things that I’ve tried to do several times before and it’s just never stuck, to the point where this time I’ve actually been writing since around Thanksgiving but I kept a lot of the posts private on the test site I was building to make sure that I was actually serious about doing it this time before shaking things up again on the main site. I finally got the new site to the point where I pulled the trigger on 2/25.

Admittedly it’s a big change from what the site used to be before … hopefully that’ll contribute to actually making the difference this time. I ended up getting rid of the joke database (because I didn’t want to get sued) and the game downloads (because all of the developers are out of business now and none of them run on modern computers anyways), as well as a bunch of the other random stuff that never entirely fit anywhere. The new focus is entirely on original content, all of which I’m currently writing myself. It’s been tricky to stay on top of, but realistically it’s not a ton of work every day as long as I don’t let myself fall behind and occasionally do things in advance when the opportunity arises.

And for what it’s worth, I personally think that I’m writing some of the funniest stuff that I’ve written in a long time!

Eventually I’d love to bring some other people on with me again, both to explore some of the fun collaborative pieces that we used to do on Just Laugh in the past as well as to have more than one post a day, but for now I’m just trying to keep it slow and steady as I commit to writing on the schedule that I’ve already set for myself.

Of course, it doesn’t help that already I’ve found myself yearning desperately to re-start my humor column once again now that the main development is done for Just Laugh, but I’m really trying to take it slow so that I don’t do what I usually do and drop one thing for another just when things finally start going…

ONE. THING. AT. A. TIME. SCOTT!!! 😀

Brain Dump, 03/2015

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I haven’t done a post like this in a long time, but after revisiting some of my earliest blog posts I guess I’m feeling nostalgic for something a little different today… 😉

  • I feel like we still have a ridiculous amount to do for Christopher’s birthday party, and whenever I try to think about it I just get overwhelmed by the idea that he’s almost 1 year old already!!!
  • His favorite show by far is Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, but sometimes I also treat him to the occasional old episode of The Muppet Show and it delights me to no end how amused he gets by the puppets despite their being nearly 50 years old.
  • I bought new seeds the other day to try and resurrect my mini-garden out by the pool – cucumbers, tomatoes, and flowers. The pots are currently filled with weeds that are growing great, so maybe that’s a good omen that I’ll do better this time???
  • I really hated the movie Oblivion, yet it seems to be on TV all the time and I end up watching parts of it anyways.
  • I’ve probably been eating way too many peanut butter M&M’s lately.
  • My office is a complete disaster right now because I had to tear my closet apart looking for something and I never put all of the boxes back. I should really pause from writing this and take 10 minutes to put them all back.
  • There – that’s better!
  • Over the last several weeks I’ve found myself inundated with this strange urge to go hiking – not suburban sidewalk hiking, but actually out in the woods and stuff. It’s just that time and scheduling are limited, and I really need a new pair of shoes, and roughly 1,000,000 other excuses…
  • I’ve really been in the mood for plugging in the PS2 and playing a little bit of Grand Theft Auto, but I feel like I have way too much on my plate to justify it right now.
  • I think that the Series 13 set of Lego Minifigs that just came out is possibly my favorite yet, even though my wall display is almost completely full and I’m going to have to redo the entire lot to fit them in.
  • I need to set aside some time and do our taxes one of these days. We’ve finally got all of the paperwork and we should even be getting a refund … I just have little desire to wade through all of my business receipts for the last year to file for it!
  • I hate housework because it feels like such an insurmountable task to me. I look around and see just such a ridiculous amount of stuff to do between the garage to the kitchen to the general clutter – it’s frustrating when even an honest afternoon’s work barely puts a dent in it.
  • I really want to start writing my humor column again, but whenever I think about it, fifteen other things pop up that I should be doing instead.
  • I need a vacation! We’d really like to go on another cruise this year, and possibly go up to Michigan for a week this summer, but logistically with everything else that’s going on I’m not sure whether either of them are actually feasible.
  • I have a feeling that 2015 is going to go by really quick, and I desperately hope that I have some great things to show for it.

Reading is fundamental

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I’ve always felt kind of bad that I’m a writer who doesn’t really read nearly as much as he probably should.

I mean, I read articles and posts online, but I don’t think I could even tell you the last time I read an actual book from cover to cover.

At least not one that has more than 32 pages and isn’t mostly pictures! 😉

So I’m trying to change that a little bit here in 2015, first inspired by the post I wrote a couple of weeks ago about hiking the Appalachian Trail because it reminded me of A Walk in the Woods by the great humorist Bill Bryson. That was a fun book and I remember really enjoying it when it was first given to me, circa 2002-ish, so for $6 I picked up a quick copy for my Kindle and the last couple of nights I’ve been trying to get a chapter or two in during times when I’d normally be vegging out in front of the TV in the evenings or before bed.

I don’t really want to set any goals for myself with this new mission, per se, because I really just want it to be fun and relaxing the way reading should be in my mind, but it’d be neat to look back on this a year from now and see what all I managed to go through. I’ve been out of the game for so long, the list of stuff I’d like to read is admittedly pretty big if I really stop and jot them all down, but just as a quick glance for the sake of this post, here’s a few that I’m considering for when I’m done with A Walk in the Woods…

Once I get done with these, maybe I’ll start to solicit some suggestions, but this ought to keep me busy for a while! 🙂