The time has come for our next piece of parchment!  Seeing as we are men of opportunity, I thought we might try and assemble a council this Friday, Saturday, or Sunday when all but our brother Danny Love are here in Central PA.  I would love to have us all present as the book announcement will come with a bit of friendly competition with the reward being the very parchment we will be digesting!  This competition will be one of mental prowess, something for which we all excel, so be sure that your minds are well rested.  Danny Love will have the opportunity to play along from the comfort of his home as we Facetime him into the games!  Please respond ASAP to give your preferred day for the council!  I would like to offer up my house for the event but am fine with another location if this does not suit the council.  One last note...YOU MUST BRING A LAPTOP TO THIS COUNCIL!  Colin, I know you might not have one so borrow Logan or Quintin's.  The rest of you, I think it is in your best interest to bring a laptop as opposed to a tablet, or at least a tablet with a keyboard.

GO FORTH...

Another Year...

I wanted to take this opportunity to wish the council a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I think we can all give ourselves a pat on the back for another successful year of reading fine parchment. Santa would be proud of us - as he is clearly an avid reader himself!

The Winter's Tale is a 750 + page book that resembles the bible in size. Once inside I found the novel to be filled with similar mystery and rich symbolism. It's a big book and a challenging read for busy broad- based individuals that make up the MOP. As men without pity would we wolfed down the prose and digested the mythical verse to form a well conceived rendition of how the destiny of justice is disguised within the natural forces of good and evil. 

The books girth rendered a two meeting book review; an MOP first.

Hmmmm

The first meeting was held at Readie's place on the deck. The evening was clear as we gathered around 7:30 and faced the linear glow of city lights  across the river from the precipice of his back yard. We faced the north and the chilling breeze that fit both the title and was apropos for the first half of the story.

Not that we needed any help but we elicited the support of a period cocktail to become more thoughtful in our understanding. The hallucinatory mystical cocktail of 1890 called Absente was called upon. We poured cold water of equal portion over a sugar cube into a 2 ounce pre-poured measure of the green liquor. The160 proof green liquor turned cloudy white before our unbelieving eyes. 



The second meeting was held after work on Friday, November 9th at Pompouse's home. Peter Lake and the Baymen would have been at home with the spread of freshly shucked oysters, shrimp, smoked salmon, and hot clam chowder.
  Pompous opened the meeting with the usual and customary rituals. We agreed the author, Mark Helprin was a brilliant writer. His level of description seemed tedious at times or perhaps it was our level of impatience? We found the novel to be a complex linkage of mystical characters interwoven into surreal scenarios. Sorting through the levels of fantasy, mystical, spiritual, and real life drama produces a great deal of reader interpretation. It 's a wonderful book to discuss in that sense. The book has a set of heroes and villains and a few still undecided characters searching for justice and everlasting peace in an overcrowded city of haves and have nots called NY. The author appears to be very sensitive to the big R (rationalization) that we all keep in our back pocket and use as needed like a snot rag. Such is needed to tell any story of good and evil and calibrate the history of mankind.

 On this night we again sought out the Absenthe. Perhaps seeking a higher plane of wisdom we soaked a sugar cube in the alcohol, ignited it for nearly a minute, dropped it in the green liquor producing a highly visible flame, and then extinguished with cold water before declaring" down the Richard".

You have to be patient with this great novel as it depicts the struggle of life over 750 pages. I came to find out that a movie of the book is planned with some great actors. I for one can't imagine how this can be done!!

Disaster Prevention versus Relief

Great little article on Disaster Economics and how you get the most 'bang for your buck.' I have two research papers that deal with this topic area (one is public/private collaboration; the other is when and why do consumers donate to charities). It's tough to get people to devote more resources to a problem that might happen...even when that might happen is practically a will happen. It's much easier to worry about the problem after it occurs. Not just from a government standpoint, from a human and corporate philanthropy one as well. Look at Maslow's hierarchy.

 We want to self-actualize, so we want to provide other people with the most basic necessities so that we can do that. The most basic necessities are physiological in nature (lowest level), not safety/security (second level). You feel more valuable when you provide someone with food and water than you do when you give them a Rolex (esteem is higher up the pyramid than both physiological and safety/security needs). Hence, we donate to Haiti after the earthquake so we can feel as if we gave actual water and actual food to someone; rather than donating before so that the infrastructure could be improved to prevent the scope of the disaster. Granted, there was no (I don't think) "Help Protect Haiti" fund before the earthquake, but the point remains. We like to see the tangible nature of our philanthropy just as we like to see Red Cross dropping sand bags. The only problem is that a dollar before is worth ten dollars after. Anyway, my blurb is a bit rushed, so I apologize if it not incredibly coherent. Really, I just read this and it was exactly in line with a few papers I'm working on and I thought the MOP would like to read it.

On a similar note, here is a story on the hashtag #FirstWorldProblems.

Water for Life, is trying to 'reverse-trend' it on Twitter and raise money to build wells in Haiti. I talked about this initiative in my class to tie together social media and CSR. Neither of these are me trying to make myself or you guys feel guilty, I just think it's interesting.

 

A Resource for Men

Gentlemen,

I happened upon this fantastic resource for men that I wanted to share with you all: www.artofmanliness.com. It's a very well put together website, and has a great mobile version for browsing on your smart phone while your on the John at work!

The website has a vast catalog of articles specifically written for men, by men. Articles include "How to Throw a Perfect Football Spiral", "How to Make the Best Beef Jerky in the World", and "How to Grow a Handlebar Moustache". 

To be honest I'm a little jealous of this website! I feel like the MOP have the skills, knowledge, and breadth of experience to produce an equally (if not better) resource for men. Our group includes men who have served in our military, travelled the world, shot at (and sometimes hit) large mammals, raised small humans, fought and defeated cancer, jumped out of a plane,  spied on the Chinese, drove across the U.S., seduced beautiful women and tricked them into marriage, walked on a frozen river, launched a mouse into space, helped people less fortunate, skied down mountains, climbed up mountains, drank their own urine, graduated with Bachelors, Masters and PhDs, cooked delicious meals, mixed elaborate cocktails, smoked the finest cigars, been in bar fights, shoveled out of record breaking blizzards, hit a hole in one, bowled an almost perfect game, read the greatest literacy masterpieces etc. etc.

Why can't we have a website that men flock to to gain knowledge and expand their minds. We have everything we need. Perhaps we should launch a new website/blog for writing full articles for men? Something like www.menoftheworld.com. 

We could break it down between the group, so someone writes and posts an article each month to start. With 6 members that means we'd only have to each write 2 articles a year. Not too taxing I think. The articles should come from your own life experiences. For example maybe McPageTurner writes a piece about how men should travel for work e.g. 10 things to pack for business travel. Or Pompous writes a piece about how golf e.g. 5 tips to help your short game. Or Master Lieb shares advice on geocaching e.g. Geocaching for the beginner. 

We have too much knowledge not to share it with other men who need our help. 

Please let me know your thoughts on this idea. I see it as a way to draw attention to the MOP in the long run. 

Go forth,

LLdP

Meatlovers rejoice

Just when you thought you'd seen all the bacon-themed products there could possibly be in the world, someone goes and throws us all a curve ball from left-field! Bacon Shaving Cream. Just let those three simple and 66.6% delicious words resonant in your mind. Bacon. Shaving. Cream. I mean why on earth would any man want his face to smell like menthol, aloe, or original ever again–when your chops could literally smell like chops–bacon chops that is! Genius.

Are we getting dumber?

This may not be the first time you've heard this argument, but it is an interesting one all the same. This guy basically argues that our cozy lifestyles are dumbing us down as a species. If you, say, brought some homeslice from ancient Rome into our midst, he would be the leader of the pack, vroom, vroom, vroom vroom: Dumb little babies

On a similar vein, I recently listened to a story that argued intelligence in 2012 and beyond is not about possessing a wealth of knowledge. Years ago, acquisition was the most important part of being 'smart' because information was more limited and access was also limited (or restricted). But now that information is expanding exponentially, the real mark of intelligence is the ability to sort and organize that information. Everyone has access to Google, Wikipedia, and tons of other sources of data. So the necessity to know things is not as important as the necessity to find and organize things.

Preparing our mind for The Winter's Tale - Absente with burning sugar cube

flickr.com

Vespa

How awesome would we all look riding down the street on one of these bad boys! We could even customize them with the MOP seal! This post is a test using the aforementioned email posting technique. Hope it works!

Blog Updates

Members of the parchment, I wanted to bring you all up to speed with some recent changes to the MOP Blog. Firstly, I added a new page entitled 'Library'. This page is basically a chronological list of all the parchments we have read to date. It's an impressive list of literature - 15 books in all. We can of course add to this list as we digest more written words.

Secondly, I have added to the 'Council Meetings' page. I have listed out all of our meetings (from first to most recent), with some key stats for each e.g. book title, location of meeting, the selector etc etc. I spent some time filling out some of the details for each, but it should be the responsibility of the selector to complete the stats for their own meeting(s) (or at least to the best of their abilities/memory). Of course, feel free to fill out details for a meeting that wasn't your own. My hope is that we can 'document' all our council meetings before memory loss sets in!

Finally, I had to change us all from being 'Authors' of the blog to 'Admins'. This will allow each one of us to edit these pages - not just make posts, as was the case before. To update a page simply go to the page and click on the small pencil icon at the bottom. This will open up a content editor that will allow you to add, edit and delete information. Just remember to click 'Save'!

We can all be very proud of how we've contributed to the blog, through posts, book reveals, and even comments. I think we have a good thing going - and it should prove to be a tangible part of the MOP archives. The blog can be more than just posts about the current parchment. For instance if you come upon an interesting article, photograph, weapon, large breasted wench, or potential mascot while surfing the inter-webs that you think would be of interest to the group - please share in a post. I know members have been doing this, but I think we could really push for more of this sort of thing.

Go forth,
Lord Lloyd de Papel

The Chosen Words; Unscrambled and Revealed

Seekers of The Truth in the Written Word;

Prepare your minds for a healthy dose of reading. Our next book discussion will be during our week at da beach.Plan to carve out some special time to enrich our manly souls and languish in goodhearted nature and tomfoolery that is reserved but for our kind. I have no plan other than cheez-its.

"Do you want to play a game?"Don't look for this blog note to reveal the book or author.

The title and author of this 29 year old heralded novel lies buried, scrambled under your feet.
You will have to dig it up like the literary treasure of prose it surly is. No metal detector will be able to locate this script. The map to your treasure is buried on your property. Your sense of anticipation and discovery will accumulate as does the dirt under your fingernails as you search for the written word. Seekers, what your hands will soon find will require your keen minds to reveal. Truth lies hidden.... but is always within our grasp.

You will require clues to this discovery. The exact location of your buried treasure is described individually below.

You have three clues:
(1)  "Tis an out of season Tale to be discovered;
(2) Mark... my words;
(3) Search due north seekers; turn your jaw to face the coming Winter's chill

Declaration of Advance Meeting Notice:  Due to the length of this book, nearly 700 count'em pages, our book review at the beach will encompass about half of this great transcript; i will plan a follow-up meeting to complete the book review at a later date. This will net us more meetings and more reading and ample time to complete the book for thoughtful review.

Readie McPageturner - dig one yard due north from the light pole in your front yard.
Count Lapiz Von Pluma - It is buried due north one yard from the fire pit down by the river.
Lord Lloyd De Papel - dig 1 yard due north from the telephone pole along the fence in your back yard.
Danny Love - walk off the elevator to the 7th floor, rooftop terrace; proceed north for 20 steps; dig at your feet.
Master Lieb Schmear - Dig 1 yard due north from the last loose brick on the edge of your ground cover.

Now go forth ye Seekers of the Written Word with your ample codpiece in hand.

A wonderful truth awaits your discovery.

In the moment I am,
Pompous de la Pundit


  

MOP Firearm

I came across this rifle on one my favourite websites uncrate.com. Seems perfect for the MOP! It features a unique design that allows the receiver and the barrel to fit inside the impact-resistant, waterproof stock - perfect for hiding away until needed! It's a semi-automatic firearm that sports an 8-round .22 LR magazine - great for shooting targets, beer bottles, and whatever small animal that happens to be in the area at the time of assembly! Here's a link to the website for photos and video. Enjoy.

If we each chip in $45 this puppy is ours. I wonder if it would fit in the MOP box!

Breweries of the United States

So I came across this really neat poster showing all the breweries in the U.S. and thought I would share with the group. The poster itself is $30, and would make a great talking point in any home! Here is the website I found it on.
The concentration of breweries in the Central PA area is incredible! We should really plan to visit one (or more) of these breweries as a group some time soon.
Go forth thee seekers of the brewed barley, with thou pint glass in hand!

Remember books?

My dear brothers,
I trust by now your insatiable appetites for knowledge are crying out with hunger pains and your cavernous capacities for learning are made even more glaringly disproportionate, in particular to those of the wench's we allow the pleasure of our companionship, by the shear absence of high level stimulus with which to utilize such capacity.  It is not without a great deal of disapointment in myself that I come to you with our storied Order's next selection with so many fortnights having passed since our last.  One of the struggles faced by great men is to prioritize and share their time and talents with those of lesser ability and means, and such struggles are in many ways responsible for the great span of time since our last meeting.  Still, such excuses may extricate lesser men from deadlines and responsibilities, but a MOP it does not.  I will not belabor the apology or explanation further except to say that I regret such time has passed since our last meeting.

I will ask that you click on the links below in order and do not read ahead, as the reveal is intended to happen in real time as you go.  The parchment selected has been chosen from a carefully considered long list, all of which are worthy and would both entertain and enhance men of even our heightened intellect.  The parchment selection is a dystopian story, a fitting genre for the political season we find ourselves in; a time where agendas, platforms and promises of leaders are made for the sole purposes of winning votes, and politics is at the helm of the ship that guides our own future.  Not to suggest this is a political book, nor that our own future is dystopian, but novels about a fictional future government resonate a little more loudly when we are deciding our own.

Like several selections before it, our next parchment has been made into several movies over the years and has also served as assigned reading for many school classes.  It has both credibility and controversy, as it simultaneously ranks fifth on the list of 100 best English Language Novels of the 20th Century and #52 on the American Library Association's list of most challenged books.  In fact, the book was banned in Ireland the year it was published for being anti-family and anti-religion.  The story has even inspired an 80s metal band to make an album and title track with the same namesake and message.  As you know, science fiction holds a special interest for yours' truly and this book certainly has sci-fi roots, taking place in the year 2540 (as envisioned by someone living in 1931, the year it was written).

This is a relatively short read which also has factored into the choice.  Although we have much to discuss before a meeting venue and date can be decided, I wanted to afford the opportunity, or at least the potential for us to have a meeting in Alexandria in relatively short order.  Although the MOP are resourceful and adaptive, and I have no doubt wherever and in whatever capacity we will have a meaningful and spirited meeting.  With that let us expedite the announcement, it is time to move further with the reveal.

Below is a URL which holds a clue.  Do not worry my tech saavy brothers, this is a safe tiny URL as I can vouge for its authenticity.  Please click on the link and follow it to its conclusion before you return here.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ

OK, now that you have done that, it's time for me to tell you that you've just been rickrolled and that has nothing to do with the book.  However, the next link may or may not.

http://tinyurl.com/7o3sd83

Gents, I trust the lyrical tapestry of Steve Harris and Iron Maiden has adequately informed and prepared you.  Now go forth post haste, as which no doubt your literature starved brains offer little alternative.

Margraff Readie McPageturner

The Maker's Mark cigar

Gentlemen,
I saw this and immediately thought of the council! We all like cigars, and we all enjoy a good bourbon...so why not have both at the same time? Let me formally introduce:

The Maker's Mark cigar is the perfect combination of fine ingredients and a unique smoking experience. The long-leaf tobacco is grown in the Dominican Republic, and the bourbon is distilled from red wheat in the Kentucky countryside. Together they create a cigar like no other.

The unique process whereby the cigar is aromatically enhanced by Maker's Mark Bourbon makes the Maker's Mark Cigar unique in the industry. You won't find any artificial ingredients in this cigar. In fact, the bourbon never even touches the tobacco! The result is a premium cigar with all of the benefits of a premium bourbon. The perfect combination for a relaxing smoke.

To top it off, each cigar is sealed in a glass tube, and then each tube is hand-dipped in Maker's Mark's signature red wax, just like the actual bourbon. An added benefit to this process is that the cigar is housed in an air-tight container. Once it's dipped, it doesn't require humidification, making it ideal for travel, the golf course, or any excursion where a humidor isn't available. You can purchase them here: http://www.tedscigars.com/makers-mark-cigars/

T&A Bedding!

This was just too good not to share with the group! How do you think the lady friends would feel about these sheets!?

Possible MOP mascot?

Gentlemen,

We've talked in the past about adopting an animal as the official MOP mascot. We have courted a variety of fearsome beasts...but unfortunately none have quite measured up to the high standards set by the council.

I introduce to you all (although I'm sure you're already familiar with) - the Honey Badger. Perhaps the name doesn't immediately strike a chord of terror and pant-pissing, but don't let it's name fool you. This little bastard is hard as nails.

I would ask that we all consider the Honey Badger as a possible MOP mascot. Indeed we should all pray and meditate on the matter. It is a very important decision.

Here is a very short list of what makes the Honey Badger (also known as Ratel) a good candidate:

• Highly intelligent (have been known to use tools in order to hunt down prey)
• Thick skinned (tough enough to resist several machete blows)
• Broad shouldered
• Retaliates fiercely when attacked
• They take what they want
• They don't care
• They don't give a shit
• They have been known to chase young lions and take their food
• They have been known to dig up human corpses

Link to further reading: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Honey_badger

Video: The Crazy Nastyass Honey Badger

Comments and thoughts?

LLdP

Fixing Education Isn't About Sending More People to Harvard

Apple's executives had estimated that about 8,700 industrial engineers were needed to oversee and guide the 200,000 assembly-line workers eventually involved in manufacturing iPhones. The company's analysts had forecast it would take as long as nine months to find that many qualified engineers in the United States.

In China, it took 15 days.

Those sorts of statistics should bring into cold, clear focus why America's education system is at such a disadvantage when it comes to manufacturing. The problem isn't a lack of elite graduates. We have those. It's our unskilled working class.

Continue reading...