In 2001-2007, I wrote a
weekly column that appeared in several newspapers in northern Arkansas and southern
Missouri. The following piece was a newspaper column published in May of 2005.
* * *
An Octagonal Peg
My great, great, great grandfather came to America from
Sweden and settled in Minnesota among the mosquitoes and Chippewa Indians. His
surname was Bergqvist. Since most people in the new land had trouble spelling
his name, he changed it to Burquest. It didn't do much good though, almost
everyone still misspells it.
To my knowledge, everyone named Burquest in America is
somehow related to me. My grandfather's brother's son (second cousin?) is named
Bret Burquest. My parents, short on originality, thought it was a neat name and
gave it to me. The other Bret Burquest is a psychiatrist who resides in North
Carolina.
I did an Internet search on my name and found it on 208
websites. About 70 of them are related to Bret the psychiatrist; the rest refer
to me. If there's a third Bret Burquest out there somewhere, he's keeping it a
secret.
When my four novels were published five years ago, they were
listed on amazon.com. Now they're for sale on dozens of websites.
Unfortunately, no one reads novels anymore – they're too busy surfing the
Internet.
However, the most interesting discovery about tracking my
name on the Web was finding some of my newspaper columns reproduced on other
websites. Obviously, certain individuals have found my columns on the website
for The News (areawidenews.com) and copied/pasted them elsewhere. I
started writing weekly columns in February of 2001 – a total of 230 so far.
About half of them are now archived on the newspaper website.
In May of 2004, I wrote a column titled Conspiracies in High Places about the connection between the
sighting of flying saucers in Washington State in 1947 and the assassination of
President Kennedy in 1963. This column has been reproduced on many websites,
including Wiccanweb.ca (a site supporting Wicca beliefs which include the
religion of witchcraft) and VirtuallyStrange.net (a site that includes the
latest UFO sightings).
In June of 2004, I wrote a column titled Bilderbergers and Hackensackers
detailing the recent meetings of an organization called the Bilderberg Group
which is made up of the most influential and wealthiest people on the planet
who meet secretly every year to manipulate the world into a one-world
governmental system. My column appears on bilderberger.org and other websites
that monitor the activities of this nefarious organization.
In September of 2004, I wrote three columns leading up to
the 2004 presidential election where I encouraged consideration for third-party
candidates. Portions of these columns appeared on various political websites
that included feedback from readers. Referring to the author of the column
(me), a respondent on badnarik.org, the official site for the Libertarian Party
candidate, wrote, "Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The
round pegs in square holes. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify, or
vilify them. But the only thing you can't do is ignore them. They push the
human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see
genius." Very perceptive indeed, however I'm more like an octagonal peg in
a trapezoidal hole.
In October of 2004, one week before the presidential
election, I wrote a column titled Bonesmen
and Barbarians about a secret society at Yale University called "Skull
and Bones" where George Bush and John Kerry, the two major presidential
candidates, each had been selected for membership. It seems our choice for
leader of the free world was between two rich guys who belonged to a cult of
devil worshippers.
In December of 2004, I wrote a column titled Albert Pike chronicling the life of the
infamous Civil War general and supreme leader of the freemasonry movement in
the United States. The column is displayed on freemasonrywatch.org, an
impressive website that apparently attempts to expose freemasonry as evil.
It's flattering to learn that strangers find my column
interesting enough to reproduce them on other websites, even if they skew my
ramblings to fit their own point of view. My scattered thoughts and words of
wisdom will now be floating around on the Internet in perpetuity, or until we
run out of electricity, whichever comes first.
Pushing the human race forward is a heavy task but someone
has to do it.
___________
Quote for the Day -- “Democracy is a
pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance." H.L.
Mencken
___________
Bret Burquest is the author
of 11 books. He lives in the Ozark Mountains with a few dogs and where life is
what happens when you can't sleep.
___________
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