Josh Barsch founded StraightForward Media in 2001 after a brief career in print journalism. He now lives in the sticks of western South Dakota with his wife Christina, daughter Mia, son Ezra, two dogs Velvet & Holly, and cat Chanceux, all of whom he loves dearly. And four nameless hermit crabs, for whom he feels nothing.
A Soldier Tribute from a Cookie-Eating Fatso
By Josh Barsch
It’s the evening of July 4th, and I just stepped out onto my back porch and watched a fireworks display at the baseball stadium a few blocks away. The lights and booms don’t do much for me anymore, but as I get older, I am doing my best to be a good citizen and try to put my brain on what exactly this all means. Especially when we’re at war.
I am a fat, lazy American (those snickerdoodles I was stuffing down my hole while watching the fireworks weren’t helping any). I am 1,000 miles away from my children, voluntarily, on a mini-vacation with my wife, setting up a second home where we hope to spend vacations over the next few years. I’ve bought more consumer-crap creature comforts over the last three days than most people buy in a year. And to top it all off, I work in advertising, where I spend my professional life convincing to buy stuff they don’t really need, and half the time probably don’t even really want.
At the same time, I recognize that there are over 100,000 men and women in uniform serving in war zones overseas who would give just about anything to be …
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Your Old Man, the Crybaby
By Josh Barsch
Dear Mia & Ezra,
I’ve got a little problem. Every time I sit down to write about you guys in anything approaching a sincere and serious tone, I tend to well up with tears really, really fast. I’m not always sure whether they’re sad tears, happy tears or proud tears — but they’re definitely the face-wetting kind.
This is not a good trait for a writer to have — especially one who likes writing about his kids. Not to mention, at some point in the future, I’ll be called upon to stand up in public and say emotional things about you — your graduations, weddings, etc. And if I can’t get through a simple written piece without blubbering like Tammy Faye Bakker, then you’re really going to embarrassed the first time someone hands me a live microphone, that’s for sure.
I’m usually not one for the waterworks; I’ve weathered a lot of stress and strain during my life and I’ve taken most of it pretty stonefaced. I also like being the boss, and I never want to break down in front of the people I’m trying to lead. I crack, then they crack, and then it’s chaos. So I end up swallowing a …
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Weekend without the family: Home Alone vs. Shawshank Redemption
By Josh Barsch
I am a father of two small children, and next to winning the lottery and winning a date with Jessica Alba, the greatest thing that can happen to a father of two small children is to be alone for a weekend. My wife and kids were away in California this weekend visiting the grandparents, and I stayed behind.
(I’ll pause here while all toddler moms and dads reading this take 60 seconds to fantasize about how incredibly phenomenal and awesome it would be to have three, almost four, entire days to yourself. OK, wake up, back to reality.)
Everyone I told about my big upcoming solo weekend got that McAuley Culkin look on their faces when they heard I’d be “Home Alone.” Usually they said things like, “Uh-oh!” or “Look out!” or other things that people say leading up to impending and unavoidable disasters. They were having that same vision of single, freewheeling, 20-something wildness that most guys have when 99% of their responsibilities jump on a plane and fly 1,500 miles away.
The possibilities were endless. Stay out all night? Party? Gamble? Cause trouble? Go to jail? Break out of jail? Break some guys I don’t even know out of jail? Nothing’s …
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For Students: Frequently Asked Scholarship Questions
By Josh Barsch
Hola, students. As a major private-scholarship provider for more than five years now, we get a lot of questions that come in every day about our programs. There are tons of them, but over five years, we’ve heard just about every concern that you guys have (By the way, you’ve also helped us find and fix the occasional technical bug, the occasional typo, etc., which we appreciate very much.).
To that end, I’d like to post some of our most frequently asked questions about our scholarship programs here. Please bookmark this page — I’ll be updating it frequently in the future, as more questions come in. For now, though, feel free to sift through what I’ve got here. If you have a question that needs to be answered and you don’t see it here, feel free to post it in a comment, and then I’ll edit the blog post later with the answer you need.
Thanks!
Josh
How many words does the essay need to be?
There isn’t a minimum or maximum number of words that your essay needs to be. I had a journalism professor when I was at Southeast Missouri State University who told me that my stories should be “as long as …
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Shit, my goddamned toddler is cursing!
By Josh Barsch
I got a text message from our babysitter, Sheena, while I was eating my microwave pizza for lunch at work Thursday. It said:
“Mia said the ’s’ word …ha ha.”
Mia is 3, and she won’t be four for another few months. In most families, this would be a cause for concern. In my family, we call her a “late bloomer.”
This is where I suppose I’m obligated to bring up the story of my own dirty mouth, and how I myself burst into the world of adult language. It was back in North Dakota in 1976, and to hear my dad tell it, I’d quietly snuck up on him while he was hammering a nail into something. Probably something wooden. Anyway, as I drew nearer, he missed the hammer and hit his thumb, and that’s when he yelled out “you BASTARD!” as many of us do when crush our own digits with blunt metal objects. I’m not sure if Dad was talking to himself or the tool, really, but on that day, one of them was a bastard, and the two-year-old version of me thought that was hilarious.
“Bass Turd!” I sung out, triumphant, as if cars ran on bastard fuel and I’d …
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A Modest Online-Revenue Proposal For Newspapers
By Josh Barsch
Back in the VHS vs. Beta video-format wars of the 1980’s, my family put all its ill-fated chips on Beta. More recently, I went all in with an HD-DVD player instead of Blu-Ray, and about four seconds after I did, Toshiba threw in the towel and stopped supporting HD-DVDs. I also thought Ryan Leaf would make a better NFL quarterback than Peyton Manning, and argued with my childhood friends that Dominique Wilkins would accomplish more in the NBA than that Michael Jordan guy ever would.
In short, I have a long history of taking the road less traveled — the one that ends up dead-ending off a cliff. But one of the rare times when I came to a crossroads and actually made the right call was when I ditched my first love, newspapering, in favor of an Internet career. It was 1999 when I left the University of Missouri’s graduate program, master’s in hand, with a variety of prospects. Could’ve gone to a newspaper, magazine, TV station, even a radio station — but I chose the Web. For once in my life, it seems, I heard the train coming before it ran over me.
These choices and the evaluation of their …
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For Scholarship Applicants - “Page Two” Error
By Josh Barsch
I know there are lots of students on our site who are here to apply for scholarships, so I wanted to take a second to address a problem that some of you are having when you apply online here on the site. We know that some of you are having a problem getting to page 2 of the scholarship application (the one with the essays on it). It’s a very small percentage of you guys who are having this problem, but it’s still happening consistently, so I want to bring you up to speed on what . From what you guys are telling us, the problems takes shape in one of two ways:
1) You fill out the information on page 1, hit “submit,” and the second page just waits and waits and never loads; or
2) You fill out the information on page 1, hit “submit,” and the second page loads — but the rest of the form doesn’t appear.
Here’s the deal: First of all, don’t worry — you can still apply and have your essay considered along with everyone else’s. If you’re having either of the problems, you can email Robert, our scholarship coordinator, and tell him …
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Don’t forget to tip your airline pilot!
By Josh Barsch
So I’m out on the deck Sunday afternoon reading the paper while the dogs and kids frolic in the yard, and I notice that this week’s Parade magazine is the “What People Earn” issue. You know the one — the one with about 100 mugshots of regular folks and their jobs and salaries, with the occasional celebrity and her 8-figure salary tossed in every now and then, just to keep us awake. (Gisele the supermodel made $33 million this year. I wonder if she and Tom Brady split the electric bill right down the middle, or if she pays a heftier share because she makes more.)
This is the only time of year I read Parade, because I don’t really care what Hilary Swank’s favorite cheat-food is. I don’t want to know why Aretha Franklin chose “maple scone” for her bedroom paint color, and I already know that Marilyn vos Savant is so smart that she could stick an 8-ball under her armpit and squeeze out a unicorn’s paw (You know what? Screw you, Marilyn.).
But the “How Schlubs Like You Are Scraping Together Your Meager Existence” issue is one of my guilty pleasures, and if you’re reading this, it’s probably one …
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When I battle Satan, we will play Ms. Pac-Man
By Josh Barsch
I was in a Phoenix bar one time, and after several gallons of beer, I started wondering about what I would do if I ever had to battle the devil to win back my soul (That’s the thing about alcohol…if nothing else, it really gets you thinking outside the box). I’m a business owner, a husband, a father of two, a friend to many — simply put, I take care of a lot of people. So I try not to let anything catch me by surprise, and I admit, I cast a pretty wide net.
Anyway, I’m not sure how the real battles with the devil proceed, because all the ones I’ve ever seen have been on TV, and they’ve usually involved a rotund blues guitar virtuoso, string ties, top hats and at least one dusty crossroads in Mississippi. But I’m not very good at music, and Mississippi terrifies me.
On that particular night, I decided that (and I concur today), to preserve the high drama involved in these sorts of showdowns, the devil would probably let you choose the actitivity in which you’d like to compete with him to salvage your soul. I mean, he’s probably really good at everything, …
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Products I Like: ClicknKids (Click-N-Read Phonics)
By Josh Barsch
Throughout her childhood, I’ve been a little conflicted about when to begin teaching Mia to read. When I was a kid, I read very early — I was reading at 3 years old. My daughter is a very sharp kid, and I’ve always just assumed that she would read as early as I did. This is a pretty tall assumption, though; 3 years old is damned early for a kid to be reading, and I didn’t want to be overbearing and force her to read before she was ready, or to place expectations on her that were based on nothing more than what I did as a 3-year-old. Then again, if the kid was ready to roll, then I definitely didn’t want to hold her back. Decisions, decisions.
A couple months after turning 3, she started twice-a-week preschool, and after a few months of that, she knows all of the letters of the alphabet and what sounds they make. If you know all those, you’re pretty much ready to start learning to read, so I asked her if she was ready. She said yes, so we now have our hats in the ring.
Something occurred to me shortly thereafter: I didn’t really …
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