Impending Solar Storm Keeping Freemasons From Attending Lodge

 Niagara Falls, NY -- While scientists and technical crews are bracing for a potential solar flare to hit the planet this week, Masonic Lodges around North America and even Canada have reported that member attendance is at an all time low. 

"It's crazy. I mean, we usually at least have enough guys to open, but only two of us showed tonight.," said WB Nick Tesla from Aurora Lodge. "And Charlie Sprockets, from Ionic Lodge over in Shelbyville called me to say that not even the master showed up. Can you believe that?"

WB Tom Steinmetz from Corona Lodge could believe it. "We had a degree scheduled, and no less than fourteen guys called in at the last minute to say that they couldn't make it tonight," he told The Past Bastard. "I 've heard the same thing has been happening all week to other lodges, but nobody seems to know why."

It seemed that the impending internet outages made quite a few brothers hesitate to attend lodge this week. The Past Bastard has received reports of new recruits and even higher ranking officers (in fact, mostly higher ranking officers) who decided to stay home if they were faced with lack of internet access. 

The Past Bastard contacted RW Jim Westinghouse, WB Graham Faraday, and WB Ed Franklin, who all asked to remain anonymous. All had reported missing, or planning to miss their lodge meetings this week. 

"I really was going to go to that meeting tonight, but I heard that the sun did this thing, like a gas ball or something, and that it was headed toward Earth," one anonymous person told The Past Bastard. "Not that I'm afraid of sun gas, but they said that it was going to shut down the internet. I mean, how would I check my email during the meeting?"

Several explosive events have occurred on the Sun this week, with each sending different kinds of Coronal Mass Ejections towards Earth. In the last 48 hours, the aurora has been spotted in southern Alaska and across New York, Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine

The National Weather Service’s Space Weather Prediction Center (SWPC) is warning that a G2 class Geomagnetic Storm could impact Earth on Thursday, perhaps impacting electrical grids and transformers, interfering with satellites, disrupting radio communications, and sending the Northern Lights much more south than usual.

Another anonymous user also told The Past Bastard that he was concerned about the solar flare. "I honestly didn't want to be sitting there at a lodge meeting with nothing to do," he said. 

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Masonic researcher discovers source of Masonic social media memes

Walla Walla, WA - - Once broadband internet access became common, social media exploded in popularity, and that attraction included Freemasons. Part of the spread of Freemasonry on sites such as Twitter, Facebook, Google+, and MySpace included the passing around of simple pictures with Masonic themes; generally such things as large square and compasses with some kind of text.

These "Masonic Memes" have become so ubiquitous that we take them for granted; however, Bart deJoyos, a noted Masonic historian, recently became interested enough to track down the origins of such memes.

"I don't really care for  them, myself," said deJoyos in an interview with The Past Bastard, "but they show up so often that I began to wonder what the deal was with those things. So, I started sifting through my own social media history, and asked my friends to send me examples of the oldest ones they could find."

deJoyos ended up spending several months on the project, when he made a startling discovery.

"You see, most of the memes have similar patterns designs, usually a stylized square and compass on a colored background, and quite often copied from one of the many designs available online. So I focused on the words of the memes, which tended to be simple, trite or maudlin, and quite often with error in spelling or punctuation. These errors were so frequent and predictable that I began to suspect they were done by the same person. "

After a number of emails and phone calls, deJoyos managed to narrow down his search to the Chicago area.

"It sounds incredible, but close to 80% of these 'Masonic Memes' that are passed around were created by one guy, a man named Adoniram Fernando. He's been turning these things out since 2003."

The Past Bastard contacted Fernando.

"Yes, I suppose it's true," he told our intern repoeter. "I had recently joined the King Hiram Grand Lodge in Chicago, but the recession hit, and I lost my job. I was working part time odd jovs, and had a lot of free time on my hands. One of the brothers gave me a bootleg copy of Photoshop, and I started doodling little designs. I'd post them on different groups, never expecting that they would have become so popular."

The Past Bastard asked Bro. Fernando about the errors in spelling that detracted from the messages.

"Well, as I said, it was a bootleg copy, and I guess the spell check part wasn't working. I never really gave it much thought."

"But it's kind of silly, you know?" he added. "I mean, some of those things are so bad, that it makes you wonder why other brothers keep passing them around."

Brother deJoyos didn't have much more to comment on this.

"I have to admit that I was hoping this would lead to another book, but I doubt anyone, except maybe Chris Hodapp, would be able to milk an entire book out of this," he told us.

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