John Ratcliff's Weblog

As I have mentioned before on this blog, I get a lot of traffic to this site from candidates interested in joining Freemasonry. Almost all of the time I have really good answers for their questions and I am happy to send them off on their quest. Occasionally I get follow up replies after they have joined and this kind of correspondence is always satisfying. Today I received a very difficult question from a candidate that I did not know how to adequately respond to. It is especially poignant as it comes at a time when we just nominated the first African American as a presidential candidate. I am going to include the original email I received, though I will not mention the candidates name. I will follow with my response. I am very curious to hear from my Internet brethren how you would have responded to this email. Please leave your responses in the comment section of this post. From the candidate: "Hi, My name is John Doe , I live in Somehwhere Town, NC. I have a question f...

Last evening I hosted my first boat-in theatre event in several years. I have been having mixed feelings about my hobby of collecting classic 16mm films. I do a few showings a year, but I never get a really big audience. I am hosting a dive-in theatre event for the Rainbow Girls this Saturday at my home. I will be showing my print of 'Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure' for that event. The logistics of showing a movie on my boat are always challenging. I have to worry about weather, wind, and electricity. I was disappointed earlier this week to find out that my small portable (and quiet) gas generator wasn't working. It has been used for less than five hours but, apparently, just sitting unused for several years is enough to cause a problem. There was no way it could be fixed in time, so I had to rely on batteries. However, my deep cell batteries are also over four years old, and I didn't know if they would be able to hold a charge. All day yesterday it ...

My daughter Lauren is leaving for college this Saturday. This past Saturday Lauren hosted her goodbye to summer, home, and friends party. Lauren's best friend, Kelly, made a goodbye video to celebrate all of the great times they have had in the past year. Enjoy

Recently I have become overwhelmed by a great wave of stupidosity washing over the Internets. Whether is is Archer Quinn with his ' free energy ' device, or Steven Greer with his loving space aliens, or Dumb and Dumber with their Bigfoot body I take a deep breath in awe of the staggering range and quality of stupidity which abounds in our world. But, nothing quite takes the cake as poor, sad, little Eric Dubay on his website where he proudly proclaims that men never landed on the moon, nor did we ever put a rover on Mars. Eric embraces every lunatic conspiracy theory ever invented, including some he invents all by himself. He is obsessed with the fact that people waggle their fingers in the 'rock-on' or 'Texas longhorn' salute. In that symbol alone he rests comfortably assured that nearly everyone is a Freemason and are all complicit in murder, treason, mayhem, disorder, subterfuge, disinformation, and unmitigated evil. In Eric's world people are ...

I haven't made a blog post in about a month. I guess this is supposed to mean nothing is going on in my life, but usually that isn't the case. Really, I just haven't felt compelled to write on any particular topic. That is true even today. Still, I do want to make a new entry just to help fill the void. With the help of my trusty online calendar I will review what has been going on of late... One topic to discuss is the situation with my car. I impulse purchased a Beck 550 in January of this year. Now, here it is the middle of August and I still do not have the car licensed. This has been a long journey of car repairs and paperwork problems. A week and a half ago I finally got the last piece of paperwork necessary for me to get the car titled. I mailed it to the Missouri Department of Revenue and, as of today, they still haven't entered it into their computer. Considering the kind of luck I have had with this vehicle I half suspect the document that took me se...

I was checking my track-back links and found the most amazing search phrase used to get to my website. Apparently, I am the number one link on the Internet for the phrase " My Boss is trying to conduct our company like a Freemason Lodge " Sometimes it just amazes me at the things people will type into an Internet search engine. As long as I'm doing a track-back post, here are some other recent phrases that drew traffic to this site. "how to become a freemason" (number one hit on Google) "Can a Freemason join the Catholic Church?" (number 3 hit on Google) "Craig Ferguson is a Freemason " (number one hit on AOL search; and, for the record, I have no idea whether Craig Ferguson is or is not a Freemason. The link comes here simply because *I* am a Freemason and a Craig Ferguson fan.) "scientific proof that we are going through a fourth dimension " (number 11 hit on Google) "getting naked in the shriners initiation process" ...

Here is an interesting news story that links in very well with the blog post I made yesterday. The article begins as follows: When Gary Crutchley started taking pictures of his children playing on an inflatable slide he thought they would be happy reminders of a family day out. But the innocent snaps of seven-year-old Cory, and Miles, five, led to him being called a ‘pervert’. The woman running the slide at Wolverhampton Show asked him what he was doing and other families waiting in the queue demanded that he stop.