This Saturday in my club’s meeting, a guy gave one of the “how to sell a product” speeches from the manual. These tend to be dry, but this member had a cute deal where he was selling premium paper clips - the paper clip experience as it were. Only for the first few minutes he didn’t get that many laughs.

What went wrong? It was kind of my fault.

I was on the program right before him, doing an interpretive reading of Lincoln’s Second Inaugural. It’s a very powerful speech, even by Abe’s standards. He speculates that the Civil War was God was punishing North and South for the sin of slavery (imagine an American President saying God was punishing us today). It’s where the “With malice toward none, with charity for all” line comes from. I got choked up reading it, which has never happened in my TM career and took the club members by surprise since I’m usually the smartass. Wise Lincoln was assassinated a few weeks after giving this healing speech and was replaced by a petty, vindictive racist who did basically everything the opposite of what Lincoln would have for black people.

Are you kind of depressed now? The audience was and the minute break wasn’t long enough to get ready for the premium paper clip.

What I learned:

• I knew my speech was depressing, even if my getting choked up took me by surprise as much as anyone else. But if I could do it again I would have been the last speaker on the program, so that I wouldn’t leave the audience bummed out for anyone coming after me.
  
• If in the future I give a smartass speech, I’ll make sure that I go first so someone can’t pull this on me. This gets back to my obsession with controlling your environment as much as possible.
• The Toastmaster could have made it a two minute break, not a one, to try and give a bit more time for the “John getting choked up” effect to wear off.

A lot of clubs have someone throw a bean into a jar whenever someone says “um” or “ah.” Or they’ll click on a little clicker or do something else obnoxious in order to remind someone that they’ve goofed the very moment it happened.

I don’t like this one bit.

My biggest objection to this is that this will freak out and intimidate new speakers. It certainly would’ve demotivated me when I was starting out worrying about it, and I really have never had uhm or ah problems. This is when proponents of the bean tossing say, “Oh no, John, we only do this to someone after they’ve given at least X speeches.” The problem is that the person throwing the bean into the jar, at least every time I’ve seen a club do this, has to apologize to the person who has given < X speeches that they threw beans for because they didn’t realize where the person was.

The next objection is that this can freak out and intimidate experienced speakers. When I’ve had this done to me, not only does the initial bean throw off my thoughts but I have a secondary distraction when the audience smiles or winces or whatever when they hear the bean going around. I can deal with people entering and leaving and even straight out not paying attention, but the bean is pushing it.

Next, why do we interrupt only on uhms & ahs? Why not if someone has lousy eye contact? Maybe the grammarian should make a big production of covering his eyes the second that happens. Or how about if they mess up on grammar, we should start stomping on the floor?

Finally, the bean toss doesn’t simulate reality. No one in your speech to your boss is going to be throwing things if you “uhm” or “ah” unless you’re in front of a very hard audience.

A club I helped found a few years ago of course did not do the bean jar at first. An experienced member from another club where they do this introduced it to the club, and then suggested a clicker. I let the other members know that there was no rule for doing the bean counter/clicker and they got to decide whether the club used it or not. It was voted down overwhelmingly.

I’m not against someone asking for immediate feedback on messing up on uhms and ahs, bad eye contact, or whatever and having a club member make a noise to let them know. In fact, it’s a very powerful training technique that the speaking coaches I’ve worked with used on me on areas that I needed work. But it needs to be voluntary and on the area that I need work on. 

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.