John Ratcliff's Weblog

The New Masonic Temple building, where my lodge Naphtali #25 meets once a month, just got showcased on "Show Me St. Louis" KSDK channel 5! You can view the story online from this link!! How very exciting! This is the 80th year anniversary of the dedication of the Temple in October of 1926. This October I hope to be able to give an eductional lecture about the building of the temple based on materials I am slowly gathering. One final note for anyone who wanders into this place.... This is my personal web log! It is filled with photographs of my children, my vacations, and my random thoughts. It is not 'official' in any way and, even though I may talk about subjects of interest to me in my personal life (Freemasonry, DeMolay, or the Temple), it does not represent any sanctioned material. I babble on here about comparative religion, UFOs, history, philosophy, and all manner of nonsense. There is nothing on this website that is particularily 'profane', but plenty ...

My rambling post about Robert Anton Wilson has really got me thinking. One of the things it made me think about was how much I missed owning my copy of " Passport to Magonia " by Jacques Vallee. The book is now apparently somewhat rare. If you click on the link above you will see that it is no longer in print and the only used copy available offered is for over $900. When I saw this I just about choked. I sold my copy for about $1 on Ebay a few years ago. It reminds of that line in 'Adaptation' when the John Larouche character just says, "I was done with fish." That's what I felt about UFOs. I was 'done with UFOs'. So, I sold my entire library of books on UFOs, quantum physics, parapsychology, cosmology, the occult and, (gasp), my entire collection of Robert Anton Wilson. I sold 350 books in roughly lots of ten each on Ebay. I kept all of my fiction. Still, today, my house is overflowing with books. I hate getting rid of books, I love 'owning...

I have decided that every time I make a blog post I will always include a photograph. This evening I am including a copy of one of my favorite Dali paintings. My last post was about the relative merit of art in the medium of painting or drawing. I have always loved Dali and if you review my own personal portfolio you will see that I dabble in surrealism myself. This post isn't about art though. This post is a troll. I am trolling my friends at " The Masonic Traveller " blog and " The Burning Taper " to tackle a topic I am not comfortable confronting. In the past year I have twice had the experience of either reading a book or watching a show on TV and thinking, man, this guys has *got to be* a Freemason; only to find out he was a Mormon instead! In the first instance it was while reading a book by Orson Scott Card from the " Tales of Alvin Maker " series. The second case was this evening when I was watching a TV show on the Travel channel titled 'S...

Since my late night post last evening I have received an email from the photographer on the website I mentioned. He sent me a very terse and slightly testy response. His reply consisted of letting me know that he did not comment on legal issues and referred me to 'copyright law'. I thought this was kind of a shame because I'm afraid he missed the point. I didn't send the email, or make the post, to debate any perceived legal issue. What I was trying to discuss was the topic of ethics. Some of his photographs of sculptures are truly incredible and are clearly works of art in their own right. A sculpture is three dimensional and how you choose to light it and in every other way frame the image is an aesthetic choice. However, when your goal is to photograph a painting so that you create an exact digital reproduction you are acting as little more than a human digital scanner. In fact, this should certainly be your goal. Though lighting is important, the goal is to reprodu...

Just a couple of links. While browsing the internet last night I came across this site, called 'Art Renewal' . The layout is like a blog, but the author posts high quality art images that he finds personally appealing. This morning he sent me an email directing me to the ARC International website , which is the worlds largest online art gallery. I am finding it extremely satisfying using my high speed internet to take virtual tours of this incredible art. Speaking of high-speed internet. My phone copmany CenturyTel sent me their 'high-speed internet via cable modem'. Ahem...it's only 'high-speed' if you are switching from dial-up. Compared to the high speed wireless service I get from Netlogic it was excruciating to use. I ended up cancelling the CenturyTel service after having it for just one day. At least now I know I am getting something for the extra $25 a month I pay Netlogic. This also means my email address can stay the same for the forseeab...

I am looking for some very high quality images of Masonic artwork; something at least 1024 x 1024 in size. Please email them to me if you have something compelling. I have been scanning the various image search engines and, though I have occasionally found some nice images, they have all be too low resolution. One interesting observation though, I note that a lot of the hits that come to this site source from locations other than Google. For example, a lot of image hits come from Altavista. Hell, I didn't even realize Altavista still existed. For the heck of it, I tried typing my name into an Altivista image search and it ended up pulling up nearly every image I have ever posted on this blog. That is certainly a lot more relevant than I have seen from other sites in the past! Of course, if you type in 'big boobs' you find an equally relevant set of search results so I can only imagine that this explains the continued existance of this ancient search engine (what is...

Just a brief post this morning. Ever since my last post, where I commented on frequent search terms to this site, my traffic has exploded with people looking for those damned 'M****d Cart***ns'. I wonder what all these people thought when they found the pile of weirdness I included in my last post!? I have been down here in Florida the past few days working with a customer. The work has gone smoothly and it has been very enjoyable. My drive down here was uneventful but was quite a long haul. I left at 6am and didn't get here until after 9pm. Tonight I will be attending a Freemason lodge meeting at R.T. Schafer Lodge #350 in Gainesville, Florida. I'm quite looking forward to it. Tomorrow morning I am driving to Cape Canaveral to pick up my son John and will begin the long drive back home. I will have to take two days going back, breaking the trip into two 9 hour chunks. I don't have much else to say so I will close by cross-posting a comment I added to a Masonic Blo...

I have decided to get my hair cut today .....which, brings me to a point. Apparently my personal weblog has now been reclassified as some sort of an 'official' Masonic blog or something, as it is now hyperlinked by several other sites. In the past week I have become a part of the Masonic online community. I didn't really know there was one, per se, but now I am in it. I kind of like to run off at the mouth and it seems I am not the only one. In general Masons are pretty tight-lipped. In fact a lot of our teachings tell us we are supposed to be. Even though I have never disclosed any of our secret rituals, handshakes, or passwords, I do blather on about the institution an awful lot. This makes sense when you think about it because this is a personal blog, and it just so happens that my personal life intersects with Freemasonry quite a bit these days; it seems only natural that I would talk about something which is so important to me. About 15 years ago I was really 'into...

I am cross-posting my answer to a question I received on a message forum: "Tell me what do Freemasons do or think, I have been hearing alot about them lately!" Hmmm..there are so many answers to this question. At it's most basic level it is this: "A men's social club that practices a bit of amature theatre." And, that, really, is all there is to it. We are a men's social club, we meet once or twice a month. We are an amature theatre group in that we put on a ceremony. We all memorize our parts and try to perform them exactly correctly. At each meeting we perform our roles and them retire for pie and cookies. In between the theatre we hold a brief business meeting where we do the following: (1) Introduce visitors (2) Read the minutes of the last meeting. (3) Read petitions for people to join the club. (4) Vote on new members. (5) Get a treasurers report. (6) Inquire into the health of our members. (7) Discuss fund-raisers and community service projects. T...

Just a brief post this morning to exercise some thoughts. On Friday evening I randomly ran across a program on 'live' TV. I rarely see live TV at all since 99% of my viewing is off of Tivo. In fact, I was just going to bring up Tivo when this program caught my eye. Dateline NBC was running a story they had, apparently, run twice before. They were running a 'sting' operation trying to 'catch' sexual predators. The first two times they did this they caught these guys on camera but then let them walk out the door. This time when they walked out the door they were arrested. The sting involves having adults pretend to be children on various internet chat rooms. Grown men would troll for kids, arrange a sexual liaison by chat (usually emailing nude photos of themself) then have a phone call and, finally, the person show up at a suburban home carrying a six pack, condoms, and a camera. They ran the sting for three days and netted over fifty men. I was shocked, shocked,...

After some effort, the vast bulk of the links on this blog are now fixed. Nearly all of the embedded images are repaired now. Even though it is almost certainly not worth the time, trouble, and effort, to read through all of the crap I have written over the past three years on this site, it is actually quite entertaining to review the photographs. They tell an interesting visual story. I will have to remember to keep taking photographs as I engage in regular activities in my life so I will have them available for upload to help the narrative flow. Today I am doing a DeMolay activity. I am first going to the Wentzville Rainbow Girls installation at our lodge and then, next, heading up to Troy Lodge for their Chilli dinner and the DeMolay chapter will be helping with cleanup. Tomorrow I have no specific plans for the SuperBowl. I am considering going up to the Shrine since none of my friends are throwing any big parties or anything.

It's 12:15am. I should be in bed. I should be going to sleep. I have a touch of insomnia. So I'm posting a blog entry instead. By the time I am finished with this rambling post I will be so tired I will go right to sleep. I hope I will be in a decent mental condition for work tomorrow! I hope... What is my theme for this post besides insomnia? It is supposed to bump my last post. My last guilt inducing post that caused five people to confess to me to performing Google searches on my name (plus the name of my employer). Four of the five were people I know and one was a random guy who admitted he was searching me out for dirt on my company but wondered why that bothered me. It didn't bother me so much as aroused my curiosity. Tonight my curiosity is moved by the fact that I have a lot of public persona's. The issue is where do they meet? I have one persona while in the office. Another with my friends. Yet another with my family and children. I have a different persona whe...