John Ratcliff's Weblog

On Friday my son John is graduating from boot camp with Easy Company, 2nd Battalion - 19th Infantry . The graduation ceremony is at 9am (Eastern) on Friday. Tomorrow morning I am going to hop into my BMW convertible and make the roughly 12 hour drive straight through in one shot. My friend David Whatley loaned me his GPS which will make the trip run a bit smoother. I will also bring along my XM satellite radio to provide a steady supply of dependable tunes. Lastly, I plan to bring along a ritual book and finish memorizing the third degree charge and get further on my second degree lecture. I plan to make practical use of my 24 hours stuck in a car. After my son graduates he is immediately reporting to airborne to continue his training to become an Army ranger. I'm quite proud of his success and I am really looking forward to hearing about his training so far. On Friday evening and Saturday we will be able to spend some quality time together. As always, I plan to take a lot of photo...

I was checking the referrals to my site this morning and encountered one of the most strange keyword searches ever performed to get here. I do plan to write a post about all of the referrals I receive since there are many which are amusing. However, I have never seen any search as bizarre as this one. If you type 'Angela Lansbury and pontoon boating' into Google, apparently, I am the number three result for that phrase. After this post I am sure to be number one. Is Angela Lansbury a big pontoon boater? I don't know. I almost shudder to imagine what could have compelled someone to type this phrase into Google.

Wow! That's all I can think to say. For once I find a movie that lives up to the promise of the good reviews. In fact the only negative review I could find appears to have been written by a simpleton who's soul died sometime back in the 1970's. At first I didn't quite understand what a 'fairy tale for adults' was supposed to mean. Now I understand, all it means is that this is a very adult movie, with very adult themes, that unfolds through the eyes of a child obsessed with fairy tales. There is nothing about this film for children but there is a great deal to be learned by adults. I cannot recommend this film enough. I haven't seen anything so wonderful in a very, very, long time.

(Note this entry has been edited since it was originally posted. I still strongly suspect that I received many fraudulent clicks this weekend, however I no longer can prove it. It turns out that the trackback that I was investigating actually is a facade that Google uses to intentionally *hide* the source of certain types of clicks. They are investigating this for me now.) I just got back from State Conclave and I have a lot to say about the weekend. I also have many photographs to share. However, this particular post will have to come later. Today I want to make a comment about my brief experiment with Google AdWords. When I got back from Conclave I checked my Google AdWords to see if I had received any traffic to my site promoting the Lake Property I am trying to sell. I was very excited to see that I had received hundreds of clicks! My first thought was one of excitement, here it is Memorial Day weekend and lots of people interested in Lake Property were seeing my ad and checking...

I got a chance to meet my first cyber - stalker on Wednesday at the office. Avid gamer Adele Caelia first tracked down my website by finding out that I am working on a game she is really quite eager to play. After leaving numerous bemused comments on my weblog, constantly wondering why there was so much crap here about Freemasons and not much crap about computer video games, I eventually devoted my first entire post to this video vixen . A most interesting thing happened when Adele's husband left some odd comments on my weblog. I don't know if he felt threatened by a happily married, fat , and surprisingly boring old man, but it was entirely unnecessary . Nevertheless, I think Adele's husband has something to be worried about. He happens to married to a vivacious, fun, free spirited, and playful woman who embraces life, even if she lives much of it in the confines of imaginary video game worlds. That sort of thing is going to attract the attention of kindred spirits where...

The Widow's Son just posted a new blog entry at the Burning Taper weblog titled.. 'Freemasons Rule the World' : Feed me something new He was referring to a new website promoting a conspiracy laden movie script. I tried to read it, but their font size and color made it too difficult to bother with. It didn't take much to get the gist of what they were getting at. Here is a link a brief excerpt.. The Establishment Movie Script The Establishment founding family is Rothchild based in Frankfurt, Germany; a relatively small bank with its beginnings in the 1700’s. By the 1820’s, the Rothchild family became the dominant banking concern of Europe, controlling the fastest growing banking houses in France, England, Austria, Italy and Germany. Each of the Rothchild brothers controlled a different country; their market dominance within banking is attributed to their alliance with the secret society of Freemasonry. Rothchild benefited from a vast international network of Freemaso...

Well, that experiment was just not going to last very long. It costs a lot of money to run AdWords; clicks are freaking expensive! I really kind of assumed the whole thing would be a bit less harsh on the checking account. Since setting a keyword based on my name is not exactly the most popular search term in the world it 'only' costs about fifteen cents for someone to click to come to my website. The cost of a click appears to be related to the popularity of the keyword phrases. This causes the Google software to go into some kind of a 'bidding war' based on budget to decide who's ad gets placed. Also, Jeff made a note in the comments section that the Google AdSense terms of service say you can't talk about the vast sums of money you are earning (enough to purchase entire six packs of beer) on your site. I don't know if AdWords has the same restriction but if they object they can stop charging my credit card. Here are the results after running AdWords for o...

Well, I just did something pretty goofy this morning. I was reading 'The Tao of Masonry' blog and it gave me an idea. This blog is run by Tom Accuosti , a Freemason in Connecticut , and is always enjoyable to read. Brother Tom's most recent post was in celebration of his rolling over the hit-counter odometer on his site past 10,000. My blog has been online now for four and a half years and is now up to only 33,000 hits. Tom also commented on the pattern of keyword searches that draw people to his site. I have written a couple of posts on this topic in the past and I was planning on doing a new one soon. I am now collecting an enormous amount of log data, largely thanks to the help of Google Analytics which was recently enhanced with some amazing reporting features. Now that I have had Google Adsense running on my site for a while I am finally accumulating some real money. I have now earned (some amount) in AdSense revenue and I am up to about (some additional amount) per ...

This coming weekend I will be taking our DeMolay chapter to State Conclave in Jefferson City. In preperation I put together a short video sgement that I hope to show at the event for the entire state. It is a brief montage piece that showcases some of the talent we had for this fun filled event, including the winner and several other contestants, and closes with the previously posted video of Ryan Cockerham performing as William Hung. Enjoy

In what is apparently becoming an annual tradition I once again attended the Greater Saint Louis Renaissance Festival held in Wentzville Missouri close to my home. Each year the Festival is plagued by bad weather, often times fighting heavy rains the few weekends it is hosted. However, that has not the case this year so far. Today was the first day of the festival and it is a beautiful day with modest temperatures in the mid 70's. Once again I took my camera and tried to capture some of the colorful personalities who attend. And, once again, I focused most of my pictures on the comedy singing group 'The Limey Birds'. I wonder why I enjoy this group so much (besides the obvious) since it is the same act each year they perform. What makes the Limey Birds so entertaining, over and over again, is their sparkling personality and incredibly flexible facial expressions. If you don't believe me, just check out the photographs I took this afternoon. As for a more general upda...