John Ratcliff's Weblog

Today I took my family to attend the first annual Greater Saint Louis Pirate's Festival. It was lovely and I got to see the " Limey Birds " yet once again. I was most pleased to spend time listening to the group 'Shillelagh Law '. I took the time, once again, to take a selection of photographs of the days events as a record for a memory and, in this case, to share with the artists at the event. This morning Lake Saint Louis held approximately a 100 garage sales. My wife held one too and within a short period of time I had spent far more money than she earned with her own. In fact, I'm fairly sure I brought as much booty back into the house as she was able to unload. My biggest score was when I purchased three full boxes of piano sheet music from a piano teacher for my daughter. The price of three full boxes was only $25, about the same as a *single* book of sheet music at a music store. It included many extremely old pieces, clearly antiques, with beautiful ...

Years ago my good friend Rob Wallace and I were fortunate enough to be allowed to create a truly bizarre little audio- CD with a wacky interactive screen saver application that I wrote. Just a few weeks ago someone sent me an email asking if they could get a copy of the music. How delightful I thought. Over a number of years, with Rob Wallace, we produced a lot of great music, two albums, and computer game music. Last night I tracked down all of the CD's and ripped them so I can put them online. Since the first email request I got was for Kaleidosonics I'm putting it online first. Here are all of the tracks on the CD in high-quality MP3. The second track is a piece of music that Rob composed for and dedicated to our wedding. Beamed John & Terry's Wedding Song Tribes Cape Pastoral Cancun Side Kaleidosonic Sky Father Sky SPACE! GMW - A Tribute Guardians Chasing You Moonlit Gratitude Hip

About a month or so ago I wrote a long and rambling post that included a piece that tried to address the elephant in the room of Freemasonry. I decided to talk about just what it is we actually 'do' in our meetings. In fact, that single thing we do which consumes the bulk of our time, resources, and energy. As most of you know Freemasonry is an organization that teaches through the process of ritualistic 'initiation'. This tradition of 'initiation' is extraordinarily old; going back literally thousands of years in human culture. Over the past three hundred years the initiatory process of Freemasonry has been deeply ingrained in the evolution of Western civilization. It is now commonly known that Freemasonry was completely intertwined with the enlightenment movement and the American Revolution. This process of initiation is unique, and a bit odd and strange. Personally I think that it is absolutely remarkable that in the year 2006 an average guy, for about $100, ...

I haven't made a blog post in a while, and I don't have very much time right now, however, when a few weeks go by and I don't post anything I get a feeling I will regret it in years to come. Today I came to appreciate yet once again what a truly special piece of Masonic history I own. The photograph above is of a Waltham Masonic triangular wrist watch I bought off of ebay about a year ago. Today I took my watch in to be cleaned and the master watchmaker who has been in business for 40 years had never seen one before and couldn't find it in any of his books. Apparently this was a posh gift to give to newly raised Masons back in the 20's, 30's and 40's. They seem to be fairly rare. For example, here is the link to a recent Ebay auction for one just like mine. Notice a couple of things. The watch received 48 bids, with a final bid of $1,403 dollars....and this was not enough to meet the reserve!! I bought mine from an Ebay auction as well. It had a starting ...