John Ratcliff's Weblog

Happy New Years to my friends. I have to apologize to my friend John Ratcliff. You see, I worked long and hard (over twenty five years shooting my mouth off in cyberspace) to make sure that I am the number one search result for my name. The thing is..I am hardly the only John Ratcliff in the world. One of my namesakes (not surprisingly from the UK) sent me an email this weekend letting me know that he reads this blog and forwarded me a link to his own. This John Ratcliff is a music promoter and you can find his website here. As I sit here on New Years Eve, drinking my first glass of Domaine Chandon 'Riche' , I find myself in a contemplative mood. I had this entire past week off of work. In fact, technically speaking, I was unemployed or 'between jobs' as they say. My new job starts on Tuesday so my stint in the unemployment line was quite brief to say the least. Unfortunately, rather than using my time off of work to rest, refresh, and reflect, I instead spent the whole

How completely obnoxious. I checked my hit counter this morning and saw that traffic was unusually high. I went through the track backs and found many hits from a site called 'conspiracy archive' . I clicked on the link only to find out that it is one of those insane conspiracy websites that peddle crap and nonsense to the gullible and weak minded. I was so honored because one of these conpsiracy nut jobs stumbled across my post honoring the late President (and Brother) Gerald Ford. My post here was 'referenced' as if I were some leading authority on this kind of information. Now a bunch of wackos are going to be wandering in here, probably soon to infest all of the masonic blogs, in an effort to accuse us of all manner of insane nonsense. Great, and Happy New Year to you too. P.S. To the conspiracy types who wander in here. Please, get a life. If you want to know what evil deeds the Freemasons are up to, why not petition a lodge and join. What you need are some

Noble Gerald Ford "A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have." President Gerald Ford ( A special note to those who are coming to this page from some wacky conspiracy website . This posting was meant to honor President Gerald Ford for his noble association with Masonic organizations and their principles. Freemasonry is a fraternity dedicated to making good men better by inspiring in them a deep sense of morality and duty of service to their fellow man. It saddens me that so many have turned a great badge of honor into salacious gossip and nonsense. Please read my full post on this topic .) President Gerald R. Ford was Initiated in Malta Lodge No. 465 in Grand Rapids, Michigan on September 30, 1949. Columbia Lodge No. 3, District of Columbia, conferred the degrees of Fellowcraft and Master Mason on Brother Ford as a courtesy to Malta Lodge on May 18, 1951. Brother Ford's father, Gerald R. Sr., a 3

Joanna Newsom on Wikipedia I was fortunate enough that one of my co-workers, Dave Sullins, turned me on to Joanna Newsom this past week. She is now, by far, my new favorite musical artist. My previous favorite musical artist was Sheila Chandra but, considering the fact that I own every single CD Sheila Chandra has ever produced, she is still holds a firm location in second place. Before I had read anything on the Internet here was my own personal impression of Joanna Newsom. Imagine that Bob Dylan had a harp instead of a guitar and that he was female with a high pitched voice rather than a man with a low gravely one. Yes, Joanna Newsom has an unconventional vocalization technique but then, so does Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. I had read somewhere that Joanna Newsom is an acquired taste. If so, it took me all of thirty seconds to acquire that taste. She plays a harp while singing poetry with a with a sing-song style. She reminds me a great deal of both Bob Dylan and Patti Smith; perhaps

How is it that I own three Tivos with a combined storage capacity of roughly 300gb holding hundreds and hundreds of hours of video and capable of recording as many as four shows simultaneously and I still missed an episode I wanted to watch? I had heard about the show "The Lost Room" and it sounded interesting so I programmed my Tivo over the Internet to record the miniseries. I didn't think to set any of my other Tivos to record it as well since there was not going to be a conflict. Two of my Tivos have to use the infrared extension to change the channel on my DirectTV receiver. Wouldn't you know it, during the day of the second episode broadcast the infrared unit had been knocked out of place. Harrumph... The miniseries was only broadcast the one time as far as I know and it isn't scheduled to be rebroadcast any time soon. Here is a case where I would gladly pay a couple of bucks to watch this video on Google or any other pay-per-view service, but it is nowhere

I just received the following blog comment reply to my last post. It came from 'BeagleFury' who is, in fact Trent Tobler. Trent is a friend of mine from a long time ago when I worked at Simutronics. It turns out that this coincidence fit my previous post quite nicely. Trent is a brilliant engineer and, occasionally, a deep thinker. What follows is his response to my last post. Hello again, John. I don't mind if you want to refer to me by my real name. My pitiful BeagleFury blog should state that I am Trent (Tobler). Maybe not though. :) It also appears I've drawn myself into a religious argument -- I usually save those for the Mormon missionaries, but oh well. ;-) -- It weakens the term 'god' if it is completely relative to a person. If anything can be god, what reason is there even to use the word? "Give me a few gods so god can go buy a god to replace the god broken by god." Maybe in a poetic setting, one might use the term to describe something that

I am pleased that my rambling discussion about theology received a few responses. I have decided to continue the discussion by posting and then replying to two of the blog comments I received. However, before I do that I should probably use this post to do a little update. This Friday is to be my last day with my current employer. Starting on January 2nd I will be working for Simutronics Corporation on their 'Hero Engine'. This wasn't a simple life decision to make and I took into account many factors. I really enjoy my current position and love the people I work with. The reasons for leaving were a bit more abstract. Here in Saint Louis the major highway that goes from the suburbs into downtown is going to be shut down completely for two years and be disrupted starting this spring. My employer lets me work from home a couple of days a week but, still, I often have to commute. I dislike the commute intensly and I don't like being so far away from home. If I want to atte

Kyle wrote: "....that being said, is there a valid reason for Freemasons to exclude atheists?" Not really. As I said, it is just semantics. I'm not the only pantheist who has joined Freemasonry. Afterall, it's all about stating what you *do* believe as opposed to what you don't. The logic within Freemasonry is that the meaning and purpose of our rituals would be lost on an atheist. The meaning and purpose of Freemasonry is to evolve an individual man spiritually and, in so doing, evolve the spirit of the human race. In many ways Freemasonry (and the Enlightenment in general) can claim major success in this effort. Freemasons brought on the American Revolution introducing our Democracy with such high ideas as freedom of speech and freedom of religion. Freemasons fought hard for the public school system so that every child has the opportunity to an education. It was a Freemason President that brought about the New Deal and many of the lasting social programs that ha

The God word is just a game of semantics. So is Atheism. Atheism is stating what you do not believe in. If you don't believe in the Christian God, or the Jewish God, or somebody else’s God, then you are an atheist relative to that dogma. We are all atheists, including Christians, because there are many Gods they do not believe in. 'Atheist' , 'God' , these are just words. To have a real debate you need to stop assuming that there is some Universally shared meaning to these words; especially when it is quite obvious there is not. There are almost as many definitions for God as there are people in the world. Like snowflakes no two people believe exactly the same thing about what these three letters 'G' 'O' 'D' represent. So, instead of wasting your time being an atheist, start spending your time stating what you *DO* believe. Chances are, you believe quite a few things definitively. Take all of the things you do believe in and then, smack, call

FRAUD Mike's instructions to me. The forged check the scammer was trying to get me to pass. Had I deposited this in my account this is what could have happened to me. The UPS label from 'Mike' in Fort Madison Iowa. Note that the shipping label says it was mailed from Omaha, Nebraska. I have to admit that I had quite a bit of fun on Wednesday when some asshole tried to get me to pass a forged check for him. While I may be dumb and gullible, at least I am also getting older and wiser at the same time. Perhaps most of you know this scam by now, apparently it is fairly common, but it was still interesting to experience it myself. I told the story at the office the other day and my friends couldn't figure it out right away and I can certainly see how it might fool some people. For an hour or so on Wednesday I became an amature private detective trying to unravel the mystery of the $2,500.75 'cashiers' check that showed up by UPS at my house in the morning. I suppose