http://my.spaith.com/blog Listening * Thinking * Public Speaking * Self Improvement Wed, 14 May 2008 02:50:46 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en 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. ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/05/13/speaking-order-paper-clips-and-honest-abe/ 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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/05/09/against-bean-counters/ 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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/04/22/home-of-the-tacky-speech/ 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." ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/04/19/keeping-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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/04/17/ok-now-i-dont-like-this-character-anymore/ 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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/04/09/taxes-taxidermy/ 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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/04/06/hungry-for-options/ 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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/04/05/get-to-the-point-six-words/ 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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/04/02/how-im-funny-makes-people-not-funny/ 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 ... http://my.spaith.com/blog/2008/03/29/toastmasters-fashion/