John Ratcliff's Weblog

A gentle bump. Yesterday we went to my Mom and Dad's farm out in the country near Herman to celebrate Christmas. Originally we had intended to go down on Christmas Eve as part of our annual tradition, but a huge snowstorm put a stop to that. Yesterday we continued one of our annual traditions which was "The hunting of the rabbit." I grew up mostly on farms, and hunting and guns were a big part of my childhood. My brother passed away a few years ago I and I keep all of his guns at our house. Every year at Christmas or Thanksgiving I take Charlie, Matt's Son, my newphew, out hunting. It's really the only opportunity we have anymore. My father's old farmhouse sits on 15 acres with some forest, open fields, and a small pond. For about four years now we have tramped through the woods and underbrush and have sometimes scared up a rabbit, but it has always dashed off before anyone could get off a shot. This year Charlie was able to raise his 20 gauge shotgun, take ai...

And, now for something completely different. I was posting a mesage on a forum I frequent and I came to the realization that it succinctly verablized my thoughts on the difficult subject of 'scientfic investigation' of the paranormal. So, even though it probably is completely inappropriate for my blog site, I am including it here, because it's the only thing I have written for days on end. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are a lot of different flavors of science. From hard to soft. The methodology tries to be the same, but the soft sciences rely heavily on statistics and don't leave us with the same sense of conviction we get from a knock in the head. The hardest of sciences would be Newtonian physics, simply because every person experiences it, knows it intuitively, and almost everyone finds it relatively easy to understand intellectually. We can measure it, observe it, and test it. And we can reprodu...

Last night we had our showing of "It's a Wonderful Life". During the day Terry and I, well Terry mostly, made a huge movie screen that we hung from the ceiling. We took a good quality white sheet and a large painters canvas dropcloth and sewed them together to reduce light leakage. We then hung the screen from hooks in the ceiling. Kind of a lo-tech way to get a room sized movie screen. A real fancy movie screen that size, one that you could pull down from the ceiling, would cost a couple of hundred dollars or more. This one only cost us $30. It's easy to put up, but having to iron the screen before a showing is a pain in the arse. Our friends Diane and Lenny Brown cooked us dinner. Chicken and Pork Kabobs served with sauteed mushrooms, snow peas, and peppers. It was absolutely delicious. Their 3 year old son Cole, who shares the same birthday as me, had the time of his life sitting in a beanbag chair watching cartoons. He especially liked "The Cat ...

Only a very small post to make note that today I am celebrating the one month anniversary of starting a blog site. This is very important to me for two reasons. First, because I made a promise to myself that I would establish a blog and maintain it in memory and tribute to Suz Dodd. In the short time I have had this blog site I have reconnected with old friends, inspired some to update their own blogs, and have had some fun with it. The second reason I am celebrating, is that I am proud that I have been able to maintain a fairly personal blog site for this long and have not mentioned work once. I don't think anyone reading this site would necessarily know what I do for a living, where I work, or what my work situation is like. I am very proud of that fact. I am working very hard to draw a clear distinction between my responsiblities with whatever form of employment I might have and my personal life. I heard a line in a movie once that made a real impression on me. A son w...

Alex and I went to see the midnight showing of "The Two Towers" last night at the Esquire theatre. We arrived at 10:30 to a huge crowd that was already seated. A great number of people in the audience wore costumes, including one very elaborate Gollum custome. There was a man all painted up and in tights, he was quite freaky looking. An excellent Gandalf was there as well as many elves and lots of hooded and cloaked individuals. There were almost 15 minutes of commercials and previews before the film itself actually started. Something I could have done without. The movie was very good, especially the Gollum character which was an absolutely delicious scene stealing performance. The Frodo and Sam story line was the most interesting from a narrative standpoint. The rest, like the book, just jumped all over the place very rapidly. I didn't like it as much as the first one, I believe, simply because the magic of it all being 'new' had worn off. There were s...

Featured Handsome Couple of the Day: Look at the twinkle in Eric's eye! The ugly face of jealousy. Look at the expression on these women's faces as my wife makes inappropriate advances on their husbands.

The Ratcliff annual Christmas party and gift exchange this Saturday was a huge success. Everyone seemed to enjoy playing the game, and the gifts were all interesting and inventive. We would like to thank all of our friends for sharing this part of their holiday season as they have done so for years in the past. When I find some free time I will post a more detailed description of our evening of fun. However, in the short term, we put our new digital camera to good use and have about 50 pictures from the party located in the 'photo-album' section of our site. Simply click on 'photo-albums' on the sidebar menu and try to find your picture. If you would like a full resolution copy of any of these photographs, just email me and I will forward it to you so you can have a hard copy for yourself. Again, thanks all so much for such a wonderful evening. And, don't forget, if you haven't already jetted off to various parts of the world, we will be showing ...

Today's Topic: Image of the day. I want to know how to embed images in my website. Let's see if this works. Cool, it worked. HTML is fun!

Today's Topic : Site Statistics I guess it shows what I know about the internet, meaning, not very much. When I set up this web site a couple of weeks ago I put a hit counter on it. Who doesn't have a hit counter, they are great. Now, as I mentioned before, I signed up for this web service called bravenet that lets you enhance your web site with various doo-dads like polls, forums, chat rooms, etc. So, I added the counter and didn't think too much about it. However, the next time I was at my bravenet page I noticed it had an option to 'view stats'. Well, I sure got a suprise when I did that. It showed me the domain name of every person who had visited my site and what URL they clicked on to get here! What an amazing feature! Since I found this little gem, I have been fascinated by what people type into search engines to end up at my blog page. In fact, my blog page was registered with google and yahoo search engines within about 2 days of it's c...

Short post today, just to bump the previous topic if nothing else. My copy of " It's A Wonderful Life " showed up today. I was able to watch the first reel when I went home at lunch. I am absolutely thrilled with my copy. Especially for the price. My annual Christmas party is this Saturday. We chose this weekend because next weekend is too close to Christmas itself to throw a party. However, if people are free the next Saturday (December 21), we will be showing "It's A Wonderful Life". We will also show a couple of Christmas cartoons for the kids before the feature. These will include "Woody Woodpecker Plays Santa" and "Mickey's Christmas Carol". That's all I had to say today, see you Saturday.

Topic Today: DLP projection technology I purchased a re-manufactured InFocus DLP-350 off of ebay. That makes me either the bravest, or most stupid, person you know. So far, I haven't gotten burned. I'm satisfied with the projector but, to be completely honest, now that I own it I would never recommend it to anybody else. I would recommend DLP, but learn from my advice, and research it better than I did. First of all, yes, DLP blows away LCD. The technology behind it, is simply amazing! Here's the URL for a website that discusses the technology: What makes DLP so amazing is that it's a *MECHANICAL* TV! Some scientist invented a micro-mirror, something like 1/10th the size of a human hair. It is mounted on a small pivot and when current is run through it, the mirror turns towards or away from incoming light. If the mirror is away from the light, then the pixel is 'black' and if the mirror is towards the light, then the pixel is 'wh...

Well, last evening was the dinner/dance fund raiser. It was very pleasant. All of the negative things I had posted in my review of the standard 'dinner/dance' really didn't happen. The women, however, were dressed to kill. Just as advertised. Some men here in Lake St. Louis sure have some lovely wives! As usual, for some reason, I am blessed with incredible luck at these fund raising events. I only bought $20 worth of tickets, and the first ticket pulled out of the evening was mine, and it was for the largest prize they had. A basket full of assorted Christmas goodies! No one got sloppy drunk and we had a very pleasant evening discussing entertainment systems and other common interests. I found out a *lot* of people are getting really excited about my Christmas party this year. It's quite a bit to have to live up to these expectations. I feel like each year I have to do something bigger and better than the last. Hopefully everyone will have a good time, I...

Today's Topic : Fund Raisers : Please answer the poll. Yesterday no one expressed an opinion on the subject of the mysterious alien abduction but me. Since I was the only one who voted, then I must be correct. The correct answer was, "Likely whisked through an interdimensional portal." Sheesh people, get with the program. Answer today's poll and you will feel like you are part of a holistically integrated web experience, connecting with a personality gestalt in a deeply personal way. This morning's blog is on a subject that has become fascinating to me over the last few years. You remember when we were young and went bar hopping in an attempt to pick up dates, or just listen to the latest hot band? Ok, maybe, you don't remember doing that, but you know that's what young people often do. Now, we are nothing short of middle aged. Hanging out with kids who are in their 20's is not a very appealing exercise. So, other than sitting at hom...

Woohoo!! I just won this copy of "It's A Wonderful Life" from Paul Iverster (the guy with the cool outdoor theatre .) I smell a new annual tradition coming on!

I added more blog links to my sidebar today. I have been accused, on another site , of having an entertaining blog. I resent that accusation and will now begin to bore you as much as possible. Look, see, you are bored already. I will include more trivia, like, the favorite manpurse (or murse) according to our intrepid readers is..drum roll please...a briefcase. As of today I have switched over to using a conventional man purse, a satchel like affair slung over the shoulder with enough pockets in it to lose more than just a few personal items for a very long time. My daughter is having a band concert this evening, so my goal is to vacate the office at a reasonable time and listen to her play. My daughter, Lauren, is extremely gifted not only as a musician but also as an artist as well. She plays a number of instruments, including the piano and the coronet. Next year she hopes to play the french horn. My son Johnny plays the baritone in the high school marching band. Meanwhi...

Today I offer this interesting tale. You know those stories people tell about being 'abducted by aliens'? How they are 'lifted through walls', and the experience is almost interdimensional in nature? Maybe you don't know. Maybe you don't follow modern day folklore. Well, from my perspective, life is a lot more interesting if you expose yourself to the bizarre, strange, and weird belief systems held by various cultures around the world. And I'm not just talking about the alien abductees here either. What we choose to consider 'strange', or not, is quite specific to our own culture and individual personal reality labryinth. What is 'strange' to us, is often normal to people from a different society, or even your next door neighbor who goes to that 'weird' church. All that said, I've been following the alien abduction phenomenon for years and years. In addition to it being fascinating modern folklore, it is interesting to...

I wanted to make a brief blog post on the subject of the Man Purse. Over the last year I finally reached the point where I absolutely *had* to have a purse. No way around it. The reasons for needing a man purse are clear. With PDAs, cell phones, and MP3 players, we have too many devices to fit comfortably in our pockets. It is very convenient to have these items handy wherever we go, and we need a way to carry them. Now, the Man Purse is somewhat controversial. I am interested in your opinions on the subject. Please take a look at today's Poll. (BTW, the last poll, the 'favorite classic movie' turned out to be "The Wizard of Oz"). For myself, I use a small fanny pack with St. Louis Cardinals logo on it. I figure using a sports themed purse is very manly indeed. I sling the fanny pack over my shoulder and probably look goofy as heck. All of the items listed below are not necessarily necessary. However, I find it so convenient to have them on hand, and...

I have a few things to cover today. First I'm going to try to get back to a regular blog schedule, but I also want to reserve a section for some of my 16mm stuff. I will probably just leave some links on the sidebar for that. First, in 16mm news, my copy of "The Cat Came Back" showed up over the weekend and it is just nearly perfect. What a fantastic short to show to children and adults alike. I also received two "Paddington Bear" films, each 20 minutes long and only $5.50! I bought them to show younger children. though, I have to admit, I found it somewhat amusing myself in a whacked out sort of way. Also, it looks like I will be doing a 'movie night' at the Greentree Elementry School where my son attends. I would like to show "The Court Jester" but my wife thinks nobody will come because they don't know what it is. It will most likely be "101 Dalmations" or "Pinnochio" instead. Yesterday I posted a message ...

Well, I had a lot of fun setting up my website. I found a webhosting service that lets you add all kinds of doo-dads to your site. Currently, if you go to some of the sidebar links, it will cause pop-ups to occur. However, I just paid for the premium service and in a day or two that should stop. Of all the services offered, the ones I like the most are the mailing list and polls. I'm looking forward to getting a movie mailing list of my friends together so I can email them when a new showing is coming up. I like the polls because I can put up a new poll before a movie showing to let people vote on what they want to watch, and I can put up another poll afterwards so people can let me know what they thought about it. It sounds like it's going to be fun. Once my website settles into shape I hope to get on a more normal posting schedule. I had a few folks drop by from one of the 16mm film forums today so, hopefully, this will be a great opportunity to meet some other c...

I transferred all of my favorite weblinks to my blog template today. I will update them from time to time. I added them for my own reference purposes as much as for anyone else. In my last blog post I said I would talk about 'favorite' films. Well, that's the topic today and this is where you get to help out. Send me an email if you have your own suggestions and I will add them to the lists. The first point to be made about these lists is that I am talking about movies that would be fun to 'show'. This is not necessarily a favorite movie list. Many of our favorite films are dramas, sometimes quite serious dramas, or perhaps mysteries as well. However, these kinds of movies tend to be far too serious to be appropriate for an evening of fun with friends. Showing a film is a social event; with lots of intermissions at reel changes, cartoons for the kids, as well as food and fun. A very serious film does not match the tone we are trying to set. Additionall...

Life Trivia As I said in my first blog post, I plan to just talk about the trivia in my life. This blog is going to be about my new hobby, which is 16MM film collecting. This is an incredibly exciting hobby and, in my opinion, is one of the most fun things a person can be a collector of. I liken it to owning a work of art that, instead of hanging on a wall, allows you to create a social event out of sharing a piece of movie history. I'll start by explaining how I fell into this hobby to begin with. Over the last couple of years there has been this guy here in Lake St. Louis who was showing movies off of his dock. He would set up a projection screen and a portable multimedia projector and show movies on DVD. Some people would just be sitting in his back yard on lawn chairs, others would float out in the water off of the dock, but the most fun was when you were just going along on your boat with friends and could pull right up to a 'float-in' theatre. Even t...