Blurbs in the Blogs

Now many of you are thinking, “What a waste of time these blogs have been.  All this talk about giving when everything we needed to know was already in the printed BLURBS we read in our programs each week.”  And you know what?  You are right.  But familiarity breeds contempt.  Many of us haven’t read the offering blurb since 2005, and some people simply skip that section of the program thinking that it must be advertising.  But our whole philosophy of giving is articulated in these eight rotated blurbs.  If you’ve never read them, here they are in one fell swoop.  If you read them long ago, but have forgotten what they said, here they are in DDTS (Dolby Digital Theater Sound).  If you always read them (or read them once a year), you get to take today off!  You may pass go and collect two hundred “way to go’s.” 

To Forfeit and To Astound

To Forfeit and To Astound In our previous blog, we took note of some predictions that went terribly wrong.  People studied a situation, made up their mind and could not see it in any other way.  Unfortunately, they were really wrong.  For instance, "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." -- Western Union internal memo, 1876. “With over fifteen types of foreign cars already on sale here, the Japanese auto industry isn't likely to carve out a big share of the market for itself.” Business Week, 1968 "The horse is here to stay but the automobile is only a novelty—a fad." – -The president of the Michigan Savings Bank advising Henry Ford's lawyer not to invest in the Ford Motor Co., 1903 “Television? The word is half Latin and half Greek. No good can

All We Are Saying, Is Give Paul a Chance

All We Are Saying, Is Give Paul a Chance People say things all the time.  Sometimes they are right on the money and sometimes not so much.  Consider these predictions that didn’t quite turn out the way the speaker thought. "Who the heck wants to hear actors talk?" --  M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927. "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." -- Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre. "Ours has been the first and doubtless to be the last, to visit this profitless locality." --  Joseph Ives, after visiting the Grand Canyon in 1861. “What can be more palpably absurd than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as stagecoaches?” -- The Quarterly Review, March, 1825. Sometimes the past has something to say to us and sometimes it doesn’t.  In this post and in our next one in the “giving series,” we

Why Should You Not Give?

Why Should You Not Give One morning, Philippe Petit decided to take a walk.  It was 1974.  He decided that he would like to walk from one of the newly constructed Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York to the other.  No big deal.  Except, he decided to do it 1,350 feet above the ground on a tightrope, without any safety net whatsoever.  And to make it even more insane, he walked from roof to roof without any permission whatsoever from anyone.  I strongly recommend that you watch the movie (The Walk, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt) or the documentary (Man on Wire) to get a sense for what Petit did, because it is nothing short of terrifying.  See, there is something about keeping your balanced when you are a quarter of a mile above the ground that is really difficult (I tried to figure out how long it

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