RonRoss's blog

Isn’t everyone’s favorite Christmas carol “Silent Night”? When we sing it we always use that soft breathy voice that indicates we understand and enjoy the beauty of silence. A few seconds after the “Amen” we’re back to the reality of the noisy world we live in.

Look, no listen to all the noise we hear every day.

-    We get up in the morning and immediately turn on the TV or radio.

-    Even the shortest journey in our car is accompanied with the noise of a high-end automotive sound system.

Your life, like mine, is a series of interwoven relationships. Some are (were) wonderful, life-giving experiences and some are (were) absolutely horrible, but all worked together to make us who we are today.

My granddaughter has a guinea pig. Recently I spent several minutes looking at and talking with her about the little creature. He has a very soft furry coat, a cute little nose, and he doesn’t mind if you hold him. He has quite a lovely cage with a variety of things to play with. He even has a little house he can go into when the stresses of life become so great he needs a place of escape.

“What does he do all day?” I asked her.

“I don’t think he does anything. He mostly just eats and sleeps.”

“Sounds like a pretty good life to me!” I said.

This is the last of a series of columns originally titled “Prepare for the Boom.”  When I began the series almost a year ago I was anticipating an economic boom that I thought would naturally follow the bust of the last few years. I posited that those who were the best prepared for the break upward would receive the greatest benefits from the boom. That’s why each week I wrote about things you and I need to do to be ready when the bust turns into boom.

“I’m divorcing my second wife,” a friend told me recently. Before I could even respond, he said sorrowfully, “You know what Dr. Ross? I should never have divorced my first one.”

In the area of bad decisions, my friend is not alone. Several years ago my wife and I were living in a city we didn’t like, doing a job we despised, in the company of people we didn’t enjoy. Many times during the three long years we were there my wife would whimper, “How did we ever end up here?”

An iPhone or a Smartphone can be a wonderful thing. You can do…well, darn near anything with it…including record for posterity any event within eye-range or should I say, I-range.

Unless you want to become famous (or infamous), don’t lose your temper at the check-out stand or yell at your kid in the WalMart parking lot. If you do, soon 145,329 (more or less) people could view it on the Internet because some guy caught it on his Smartphone, uploaded it to YouTube, then tweeted and Facebooked it even before you got to your car.

Besides mowing lawns and shoveling snow, my very first job as a lad was an Omaha World-Herald newspaper route. I delivered the paper every day to about 40 customers in the south end of Council Bluffs, Iowa. That’s why the headline that Warren Buffett has purchased the OWH attracted my attention.

The price, reportedly, is $150 million plus the assumption of $50 million of debt. Two-hundred-thousand bucks for a business that Buffett once told his shareholders has a “potential for unending losses.”

A Montana Blogger was sued for defamation by an attorney and an Oregon federal judge ruled that she was not a journalist and therefore not protected by the same laws afforded to mainstream reporters, according to a story by the AP published this week. http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/stories/U/US_BLOGGER_DEFAMATION_SUIT?SITE=AP&SECTION=HOME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2011-12-07-20-39-18

Every movement in history experiences challenges that cause it to morph from the purpose and design of its founders, usually in an effort to stay alive.

When a citizen journalist trainer in Malaysia inquired about presenting a copy of our book, “Handbook for Citizen Journalists,” to each person attending their training session, my co-author and I wanted to make it happen.