If you are reading this, congratulations. You are one of a handful who make their way to this site and partake of the writings offered.
It occurs to me, based on recent personal interactions and other feedback from recent days and weeks, that few have bothered to read the initial post from September 2020 explaining what this is all about.
For that, and some other reasons, allow me to repeat myself.
The blog was birthed as an egocentric exercise. I write because I want to be on the record regarding our declining society, politics and sports. I used to write for newspapers, even doing some freelance work after my retirement. But that grew tiresome for many reasons.
And so, following the lead of my brother the serial blogger, a guy who apparently has found his life’s work chronicling college women’s softball, I leaned on him to set up my blog.
The ground rules were simple, beginning with no provision being made for you to comment here on what I write. If you want to do so publicly, spend the money and set up your own blog. Rip me or praise me on social media.
But you are going to have to provide your own soap box.
Otherwise, read or don’t read; visit or don’t visit.
Allow me to repeat that: I don’t care about the numbers. I’m not trying to sell ads. I am not trying to charge fees to view. I refer you again to paragraph four in this piece.
The local rag has some regular “columnists” who write frequently but poorly and are paid nothing for their efforts. Chock it up to vanity.
I’m long past that. When I did freelance work, I expected to be paid. Seeing my name in print has lost its appeal. When I wrote for the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review and its affiliated publications, at the high point in combined circulation (and multiplying by the standard 2.5 average household size) I had a potential audience of at least quarter million readers.
This blog has viewership that could be counted on fingers – maybe adding toes, or fingers and toes of some close friends on a high-volume day — and I am OK with that.
I don’t promote the blog’s web address via ads, posts on social media or other venues. I have told close friends and associates about the blog. Yet I continue to have people come up to me or my wife and say they miss my writing in the newspaper.
For the umpteenth time, it’s easy to find the blog since it’s my name with a dot-com stuck on the end. Hi, Ron, if you finally have found me. Hi, Barb, if you bothered to look. Hi, the rest of you.
Welcome.
The blogging experience has led me to the conclusion that someone looking to cobble up their own witness protection program should just start a blog bearing their name.
Think of it as hiding in plain sight.
As for me specifically, the use of the potentially confusing suffix – samrossjr. — owes to the fact that both sides of the family were not exactly creative in the naming process.
I was named after my father, but never really considered naming my son Sam Ross III, for reasons including the fact we don’t have nearly enough family wealth for such pretense. My brother was named after our paternal grandfather and never really got over it.
Meanwhile, my mother’s side of the family had four guys named Joe Gorden, sprinkled across three generations. But two of those Joes, both cousins of mine, were in the same generation, adding to the confusion.
Bringing home this post/rant, please remember a few things:
There is no facility for you to comment here and there isn’t going to be.
If you really, truly miss my writing (and statements to that effect aren’t merely a variation of the “let’s do lunch” throwaway line) here is a free smorgasbord, if you can find it. Of course, posting the invitation here is the digital equivalent of putting Braille instructions on drive-through ATMs.
Finally, if someone really was missing me and was only mildly computer savvy, they might call up Google, put Sam Ross Jr. between opening and closing quotation marks, and one of search items returned would be a reference to this blog.
Admittedly it was the fifth such item in the search I just performed as an experiment, following a couple of links to freelance columns I’d written, a proclamation that Sam Ross Jr. is on Facebook (not me), and a reference to my past newspaper columns as compiled on muckrack.com.
That is all, for now.
Sam Ross Jr's site 