Some more Party Pictures and Some Press

The final table, Danielle the champion on the right.



Serious Poker


Rachel and Dennis


Dilip and John

My friend Adam Moravanszky emailed me a frew more photographs from the poker party so I am going to include them here.

Over the weekend I received several additional donations for my fundraising website 'A Million Pixels US' which now makes it a grand total of $289 raised to date! In the past week two major Freemason themed weblogs have posted stories about my site, which has helped draw fresh traffic and attention to our worthy cause. First the Masonic Traveler and now the Burning Taper have been kind enough to showcase our effort. You might need to scroll down a bit to get at the stories but they should be easy enough to find.

It is interesting to me that both sites have been posting commentary critical of their experiences with Freemasonry in the southern states. I have spoken to the authors of each site via private email and it seems their experiences are quite a bit different than my own. Maybe I'm living in some kind of fairy-tale world or I'm just slightly far enough north of the Mason-Dixon line that I haven't encountered the kind of problems they report. To date my Masonic experience has been entirely positive. In fact, the senior members of my lodge are the ones who impress me the most with their knowledge and brotherhood. They are all genuinely excited to see a 'young guy' like me (only 45) learning the ritual. And, when they see my nephew Charlie, only 20 years old, they grin ear to ear.

I do note that my brothers on these sites seem more interested in the 'esoteric' aspects of Freemasonry. To be quite honest, I don't even know what that means. I would like to speak to either of them by telephone at some point to gain an understanding of what they think it means. I believe that you are not going to find anything overtly esoteric in a Freemason lodge and you shouldn't expect such topics to be openly discussed. Perhaps in private, with a brother who is interested in that sort of thing, but to the average Freemason they aren't going to be interested in this topic. At the turn of the previous century there was a great interest in esoteric topics and there was an awe inspiring Fremason movement across this nation; which you can witness in the incredible architecture that was built and documents written during that era. However, that time is past and things have changed.

I am ready and willing to discuss the 'esoteric' aspects of Freemasonry with a like-minded brother. I just don't expect that topic to come up in an open lodge meeting. I think we perform the ritual and if that performance has some personal esoteric meaning than we can experience that relative to our own belief system. I wouldn't presume the average Freemason is into Manley P. Hall or Wilmhurst no matter how much I, personally, enjoy reading them. I will have to continue this discussion in private with my Internet brethren and hear what they have to say on the topic.

Meanwhile, each time someone is so generous as to purchase advertising space on our website I make a point to acknowledge their generosity on our weblog. Even though I started out by soliciting donations from Freemason websites, and I have received a few, most of my donations have come from my personal friends. My hope is that each of my friends will feel compelled to donate to the cause, afterall it is a simple click of the mouse to throw a few bucks our way and the return on investment is to be honored in the halls of the blogosphere for time immemorial.

Finally, I have become completely bored with blogshares. As a game it is horribly flawed. The only legitimate value in it I can see is that you can easily monitor all of the sites that hyperlink your own and their links as well. This feature is mildly useful but nothing more. That said, I do 'own' all of the shares in all of my friends websites should they ever care to check some day...