I was looking through my blog statistics and saw some hits on “tacky speech.” I decided to Google it and low and behold, this site comes up first.

Googling “good speech” doesn’t even put me in the top 200.

I hope this is just a blip and not an indictment of yours truly.

A few weeks ago I visited a club where the speaker was doing a folk tale from Hawaii. It was introduced as such by the Toastmaster but without much more background. The speaker began with, “The days in Hawaii are mostly the same length the whole year.” Because it’s close to the equator, I thought. Next sentence the guy said, “This is because Maui (a Polynesian hero) battled the sun to make it so.”

I loved it! He didn’t start with, “This is some Hawaiian folk tale, from 1000 AD, it shows their rich cultural heritage, blah blah.” He threw us in the middle, no details required, no science. He did the entire speech straight, as if it were real.

On the opposite side would be George Lucas in The Phantom Menace. The Force and the original Star Wars in general was a cool, anti-Star Trek type thing because they never delved into the technical details. Until we learn from Obi Wan that the Force is some sort of mitochondria field and that you can scan someone with some Tricorder type thing to see if they have it or not.

Ugh. It doesn’t take much to blow the magic.

One of my favorite shows back in the 90’s was Mystery Science Theater 3000. The premise was this guy and two robots were locked on a space station and forced to watch awful movies, which they made fun of.

The guys doing it were really good film critics and I was thinking of general stuff around speaking you can pickup from a bad movie. On one of them (I can’t remember the title for the life of me) they had this completely over the top super villain. They were trying way too hard to make him evil at basically every moment. After about an hour of this, the character did something else that was random and evil and one of the wise cracking robots said something like, “That’s it. I don’t like this character anymore.”

A simple moral from a sarcastic robot that I still screw up. Don’t overdo it!

When I was doing my taxes a few weeks back, I had to look up the IRS rules to figure out how to deduct some donations I had made. The information is available at http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/p526.pdf

I got my answer. On the way through this overly long document, I learned far more about Government policy to dead, stuffed animals than I cared to. I learned that:

If you donate taxidermy property to a qualified organization, your deduction is limited to your basis in the property or its fair market value, whichever is less. This applies if you prepared,stuffed, or mounted the property or paid or in-curred the cost of preparing, stuffing, or mount-ing the property.

Desrcibing determining basis:

It also does not include direct or indirect costs for hunting or killing an animal, such as equipment costs and the costs of preparing an animal carcass for taxidermy.

And I also learned that:

Taxidermy property means any work of art that:

• Is the reproduction or preservation of an animal, in whole or in part,
• Is prepared, stuffed, or mounted to re-create one or more characteristics of the animal, and
• Contains a part of the body of the dead animal.

No wonder CPA’s make 6 figures if even taxidermy donations are this complicated! This is the type of thing that could drive me to become a Libertarian.

Yesterday a guy in my club gave a speech evaluating Obama’s recent speech on race. The speaker is an Obama supporter and was also trying to get people rallied up. The audience response was OK but not great. This guy usually owns audiences so- using the language of Paula Abdul on American Idol - “I’m afraid it wasn’t his best performance.”

At one point he asked something like, “Are you hungry for change?” Not a lot of response. Then he said, “Are you just hungry?” It got a lot of laughs. I don’t know if he ad-libbed it or if he had it prepared, but it did have the effect of getting people more into his speech. If the “Are you hungry for change?” line had got a lot of response I would not have done “Are you hungry.” The “change” theme is the center of Obama’s platform and you don’t necessarily want a joke right after.

This makes me think of football teams that run the option, where they read the defense and can change up the play once it’s running. Being able to tweak a speech in the middle depending on audience response is the stuff of pro’s, but more important is setting up for it by having lines like “Are you hungry for change?” Here you can stay serious or be a smartass depending on whether the audience needs a jolt or not. The “Are you hungry” I plan on stealing, though unfortunately I can’t use it at my club until enough people forget its original use.

I visited my club’s sister club, Eastside Toastmasters, last Thursday. The theme was really interesting - describing yourself in six words. The inspiration for this was Earnest Hemingway, who once got a bet to write a story in six words.

“For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”

Wow! There was just dead silence after the Toastmaster read that in the meeting.

The next time I gripe because I only have 5-7 minutes to say something instead of the 20 I wish I had, I’ll rethink the time limit being so bad. Shakespeare may have said it best, also in six words. Brevity is the soul of wit.

I’m a big Robert Ludlum fan. I got into him recently, thanks to the Bourne Identity movies, and have finished five of his novels in the last half year.

One of his novels I did not finish was “The Road To Gandolfo.” I saw it in the library and was curious when it said it was a comedy, since normally he does suspense-thriller stuff like Bourne. In the preface, Ludlum explained how he wanted the book to be serious at first but that as he was reading his material, he fell on the floor laughing at every page.

I’m happy he was amused.

It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t close to being funny. Had it not stated on the jacket and preface it was a comedy, I wouldn’t have known. There’s a bigger problem, though. It would’ve had to be the best thing this side of Mark Twain for me to have enjoyed it since the author puffed himself up so much. It’s not nice to say, but I went in with a bad attitude even before I was on page one. This is why I’m a believer in UPOD - under promise, over deliver.

If you do want to get into Ludlum, I recommend The Holcroft Covenant even over Bourne. Holcroft is my favorite low-brow action-adventure novel ever, displacing Red Storm Rising ( which had the spot since I was 15). Holcroft was amazing throughout and the last 25 pages were unbelievable.

Last week we had our Area contest. I decided to wear a nice shirt, dress slacks, and a tie to make my annual attempt to look halfway decent. My neighbor saw me when I was leaving and I asked her advice on the tie and if it was too short. She wasn’t sure so she told me to look at what the other guys at event were wearing to gauge the modern fashion.

Bad idea. Sorry fellow guys, but I don’t think GQ will do a “Men of TM” anytime soon. At least in my experience in the Seattle area, doing the opposite of what most guys in Toastmasters do is probably a better guide than anything.

Looking at what people query in Google (or, uhm, Microsoft Search) for on this blog, a few hits have shown up for “Toastmasters clapping”. So I guess there’s some interest in the etiquette around this or maybe just why we do it so much, so here goes.

My thoughts on all the clapping are mixed. Sometimes it feels like we just go overboard on it. If it was just for general politeness, I would actually say we should only do it after someone speaks a sustained amount of time. Think about this exchange:

“Madam Timer, can we have a report please?”

“All speakers were within their time frames.”

Clapping

“All speakers were within their time frames,” doesn’t seem the type of thing you clap for. But I’m a 5 year TM now. I tend to forget that for a lot of people standing up and saying, “All speakers were within their time frames” is nerve wracking and is praiseworthy.

The thing is that we don’t know scared someone was. We can’t say, “Hey, were you about to poop your pants on that new member? If you were we’ll clap.” So we applaud everything.

We do need to be consistent. It’s lame when a minor role like timer gets clapping but grammarian doesn’t. It can make new members who think too much start second guessing if there was a reason they didn’t get applause, if they did something wrong. It is always the Toastmaster of the day’s job to lead the applause.

Ironically the one person who doesn’t always get applause but always should is the Toastmaster them self. When they hand off control back to the president at the end of the meeting, the president always needs to thank them for a job well done and lead the applause.

A few nights ago I watched the open-mike section in the Bellevue City Hall meeting on the local government channel. Back in Columbus we had this too and I always remember the people griping about random local stuff. In Bellevue we gripe about random national stuff. There was a woman attacking the Bear Stearns collapse, the Fed monetary policy and especially printing out money to increase liquidity, and predicting we’d hit hyperinflation not seen since the Weimar Republic (1920’s Germany). Not the “Fix the pothole in front of my house” speech!

They she told the local Bellevue mayor and city council that they needed to come up with a plan to deal with it. It made me chuckle to think that tiny Bellevue could save the world or even itself if the US turned into pre-Hitler Germany. And I was happy since I predicted right away that there would be a “Weimar Republic” someplace in the speech and that a few seconds before it came I sensed it was about to come.

Also in the news, The History Channel has dropped “The” and “Channel” and is just “History.” I like the title; “History” is not just more succinct, it has the feel of boldness to it. Too bad the quality of the channel doesn’t match the name. I remember when they used to be the World-War II obsessed “Hitler Channel” - the Weimar Republic woman of Bellevue must’ve liked it! Now they have guys driving trucks in Alaska cussing at each other, something about guys cutting down trees, and the article said even more crap is on the way. I mostly read history anyway, but it saddens me that kids that aren’t reading it and could potentially be turned onto it are now going to be turned onto trucking and logging and cussing.

Perhaps instead of dropping “The” and “Channel” from its title, The History Channel should’ve kept those and lost the “History” bit. “The Channel” seems to be where it’s going.