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.