Memorable prop handouts for your speech audience from a dollar store

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have been skimming through a 2004 book by Robert V. Smith titled The Elements of Great Speechmaking: Adding drama and intrigue. On page 71 in a section titled Artifacts and Props his second paragraph says:

 

“You have likely been to meetings – especially lunches and dinners associated with professional gatherings – where the host organization provides a small gift -be it a lapel pin or something of greater worth. Have you noticed how many people can’t keep their hands off of the gift during the subsequent event. The gift becomes a type of talisman – a connection object. Now imagine that you plan such a scenario, only using an object of your own choosing – an object that ties into a message that you wish to imbue in the minds of audience members (see figure 9.4). This can work like magic.”

 

For example, for a speech about marketing or personal branding and the need to always blow your own horn, as shown above, you might hand out little plastic horns (at the dollar store a pack of six is just $1.25).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Or you might discuss how preparing great slides is like having a magic wand – and hand out pocket-sized wands, as shown above.

 

 

Where were you on September 16, 1963, when The Outer Limits first was shown on television?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I will never forget precisely where I was. My four siblings and I were sitting in our TV room, next to the kitchen. The front had our 17” 1950 black-and-white television set, while the back had a long sleeper sofa. The television picture had started to flutter and roll vertically, as usual for after about ten minutes.

 

One of my brothers got up from the sofa and started walking over to the set to fix it. Then he got startled, and jumped straight up into the air when he heard the Control Voice first begin reciting the following introductory message for The Outer Limits:

 

"There is nothing wrong with your television set. Do not attempt to adjust the picture. We are controlling transmission. If we wish to make it louder, we will bring up the volume. If we wish to make it softer, we will tune it to a whisper. We will control the horizontal. We will control the vertical. We can roll the image, make it flutter. We can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to crystal clarity. For the next hour, sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear. We repeat: there is nothing wrong with your television set. You are about to participate in a great adventure. You are about to experience the awe and mystery which reaches from the inner mind to - The Outer Limits.”

 

The best-known episode was Demon with a Glass Hand, which you can watch here on YouTube.

 

Over the Fourth of July holiday a local TV station had a Twilight Zone marathon, which reminded me of The Outer Limits.

 

The TV set image came from Openclipart.

 

 

Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees is a great book with forty brief essays about food

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In the new books section at the Hillcrest branch of the Boise Public Library I found poet and writer Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s 2024 book Bite by Bite: Nourishments & Jamborees. Her father is from India and her mother is from the Philippines. Almost half of her 40 essays are about fruits. I have enjoyed reading them. One on pages 154 to 160 is about concord grapes. It begins with:

 

“For fifteen years I lived near the grape belt in western New York, which means each fall, it almost smells like someone is holding a cup of grape Kool-Aid under your nose – that’s how fragrant and fine the roadways become that time of year.”

 

That sentence instantly transported me back to graduate school in September of 1976. The Metallurgical Society (TMS) of AIME held their fall meeting in Niagara Falls, and I was giving a presentation at it about hydrogen embrittlement. So I drove up there from Pittsburgh. Along the southern shore of Lake Erie grapes were piled up within ten feet of the highway. My brother Harry was living in Olean, New York, and I stopped to visit him.

 

She ends her book with a dozen food writing prompts. Her odd-numbered ones are:

 

1] What is the earliest memory you have of trying a new (to you, at the time) fruit? Describe where and when this happened and try to explain the texture and smell as precisely as possible.

 

3] Spice is nice: What is your favorite spice? Coriander? Cardamom? Cumin? Look up the healing properties and/or folklore of that spice and create a scene where a character uses that spice to heal someone.

 

5] Describe what your perfect last meal would be on this earth. Make as many courses as you like, right down to beverages and dessert.

 

7] Write about your favorite guilty pleasure food.

 

9] Try growing your own food or herb – something you’ve never grown before – and take notes! Use a pot and a well-lit window if you don’t have access to a garden plot. Write two or three journal entries a week tracking the progress of what you grow. If it doesn’t work out, try another herb! Tomatoes and strawberries work great in pots! Basil and parsley grow easily for herbs!

 

11] What food or drink sends you immediately back to childhood, no matter where you are? Write why it captures your childhood, and see if there are any connections to your present day. Let us smell, feel, taste, hear, and see what it is like to eat/drink this too. 

 

An image of harvested concord grapes is from Agne27 at Wikimedia Commons.

 

My brain is full. (I am out of memory).

Yesterday’s Dilbert cartoon has the following dialogue:

"Pointy Haired Boss: Why aren’t you working?

Alice: My brain is full.

Pointy Haired Boss: I’ll check back later.

Alice: I won’t remember you."

I don’t think Scott Adams realized he was recycling a well-known punch line from a classic Far Side cartoon by Gary Larson which had been:

“Mr. Osborne, may I be excused? My brain is full.”

He might have been inspired by having seen an out of memory message on a computer. Back on June 21, 2008 I had blogged about how He ought to be good, he’s using my act.

Did a clinical trial show the dietary supplement pill Prevagen improves memory? Only when you forget about more than half of their data.

When I watch TV, it’s hard to avoid 30-second ads for the dietary supplement Prevagen like this one and that one (on YouTube) which both claim:

“In a computer assessed, double-blinded, placebo controlled study, Prevagen improved recall tasks in subjects.”

On January 2, 2020 there was an article by Jann Bellamy at Science Based Medicine titled AARP Report: insufficient evidence that dietary supplements benefit brain health which linked to a 2019 report by Global Council on Brain Health titled The Real Deal on Brain Health Supplements. On December 9, 2019 there was another article by Ashlee Kieler at Consumer Reports titled Feds, New York accuse maker of Prevagen dietary supplement of false advertising.

I went to the research section of the Prevagen web site and downloaded the .pdf file of their clinical trial, the Madison Memory Study. But that file omitted significant details of the study, like the gender of participants. I looked around and found them in a February 2016 magazine article published in Advances in Mind-Body Research titled Effects of a supplement containing apoaequorin on verbal learning in older adults in the community. As shown above, the first thing you would look for in results of a clinical trial would be a main effect – a significant difference between two groups given a placebo and a treatment (apoaequorin). Also note the strange grouping of subjects - both by gender and between placebo and treatment. The results section from the file on the Prevagen web site instead began by stating:

“While no statistically significant results were observed over the entire study population, there were statistically significant results in the AD8 0-1 and AD8 0-2 subgroups.”

A decade ago on January 25, 2010 I blogged about Bach Rescue Remedy and Anxiety and discussed another clinical trial that did not find a main effect. What they next did instead was data dredging (also known as p-hacking) – dividing the data into subgroups until they found an apparently significant effect. As is shown above, for the Madison Memory Study you can do this if you keep just 29% or 46% of the data  - and ignore the rest. On June 21, 2018 there was another article by Jann Bellamy at Science-Based Medicine titled Prevagen goes p-hacking. A five-minute Prevagen video titled What you need to know about Prevagen eventually (at 3:22) gets around to mentioning just a subgroup.

According to a pair of professors things are even worse. There was an article by chemistry professor Joe Schwarcz on January 14, 2019 at the McGill Office for Science and Society titled Prevagen for mental clarity? that questioned whether the active ingredient apoaequorin could survive digestion, enter the bloodstream, and cross into the brain. Another article by Gary L. Wenk on May 4, 2019 at Psychology Today titled Prevagen: The 21st-century placebo also raised that same objection.

In a 1984 New York Times article with a list of ten fears, did death come third (after public speaking)? No.

On my bookshelf I have a copy of the 2011 second edition of Andy Lopata and Peter Roper’s book  titled …and death came third (The definitive guide to networking and speaking in public). The back cover says that:

“In 1984 a New York Times Survey on Social Anxiety placed death third in the list of people’s biggest fears. The top two responses were walking into a room full of strangers and speaking in public.”

Similarly the first paragraph of the introduction claimed:

“In 1984 a New York Times study on Social Anxiety asked people what they most feared. Death came third. The top two fears were walking into a room of strangers and public speaking.”

Recently I searched the New York Times to find that study. There was only one 1984 article on social anxiety including a survey.  It was an article on December 18, 1984 by Daniel Goleman titled Social Anxiety: New Focus Leads to Insights and Therapy. Just below the title was a small box titled Situations Causing The Most Anxiety with a bar chart listing percentages for ten fears and the following explanatory text:

“In surveys of several hundred men and women, these situations were reported as producing the most anxiety. The research was done by Warren Jones at the University of Tulsa and Dan Russell at the University of Ohio College of Medicine.”
 

My version of that bar chart is shown above. Death wasn’t third - or anywhere else on that list. The fears (and percentages) are: A party with strangers (74%), Giving a speech (70%), Asked personal questions in public (66%), Meeting a date’s parents and First day on a new job (59%), Victim of a practical joke (56%), Talking with someone in authority  (53%), Job interview (46%), Formal dinner party (44%), and Blind date (42%).

Either Mr. Lopata or Mr. Roper could have checked a microfilm copy of the original article before concocting their book title. Apparently they relied instead on fallible secondhand information or memory. When I first found a database version several years ago, there just was the text - but not the bar chart graphic with those numbers.   

On March 2, 2013 I had blogged about how I read it in a book, so it must be true. That post discussed an incorrect version of Jerry Seinfeld’s comparison of the fears of public speaking and death - where death supposedly also came third (rather than second).

Remembering Fred Rogers and the Children’s Corner

Most of Monday’s Fresh Air program at National Public Radio was about how It’s a beautiful 50th birthday for ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.’ That got me thinking about my joyful memories of Fred Rogers, from early childhood in Pittsburgh.

The Neighborhood actually was his third TV show. It was proceeded by Misterogers, a 15-minute program on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation from 1963 to 1966. His first show was only in Pittsburgh on WQED beginning in 1954. It was called The Children’s Corner, and ran for an hour on weekdays. There is a summary for one episode. Fred produced, wrote and played the music, but the visible hostess on live TV was Josie Carey (who wrote lyrics). 

Fred also operated his puppets, who engaged in impromptu conversations with Josie when the educational films they were showing broke. For example, there is a minute of YouTube video about building a house.

Daniel Striped Tiger, King Friday XIII, Xscape the Owl, etc. all first appeared on the Children’s Corner. King Friday had a royally pompous version of Row, Row, Row Your Boat:

“Propel, propel, propel your craft

gently down liquid solution

Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically,

Existence is but an illusion”

There was a 1954 book about the series called Our Small World. I vaguely remember that the Daniel Striped Tiger’s chapter contained several recipes, which all began something like: 

“Take four pounds of medium-grind hamburger.” 

Not much video of the show is easily accessible, but there are some audio recordings on YouTube, like from the 1958 LP Around the Children’s Corner.

A colossal conspiracy called the Mandela Effect

Some people have very curious beliefs. The so-called Mandela Effect is a belief originated by Fiona Broome. She remembered that Nelson Mandela died in prison back in the 1980s rather than in 2013 (after having become much more famous because he was elected President of South Africa in 1994 and served for five years).

Wikipedia hasn’t bothered with a separate page for the Mandela Effect. It instead appears as the last heading in the page on Confabulation that says:

“An internet meme related to confabulation is known as the Mandela effect. This is a situation where a number of people have memories that are different from the available evidence. The term was coined by paranormal enthusiast Fiona Broome, who says she and other people remember Nelson Mandela dying in the 1980’s rather than in 2013. She argues that common memories which appear mistaken could be explained by the existence of parallel universes that are able to interact with each other. A common thread of discussion regarding this ‘effect‘ is misremembering the Berenstain Bears being spelled as ‘Berenstein Bears‘. “  

The first few moments of a YouTube video by Dr. Druanna Johnson titled What is happening to our current reality! Mandela Effect?? gives some other examples, like at 1:05 that department store J. C. Penney was originally spelled Penny, and at 1:20 that Oscar Mayer originally was spelled Myer. Did either name really change? No!

I looked in the EBSCO databases on my friendly local public library web site, and instead found a .pdf file of an article in the April 1930 Harvard Business Review by  David R. Falk titled Central Buying by Department-Store Mergers which referred to the J.C. Penney Co.

When I searched in Wikimedia Commons, I found both a 1936 photo of an Oscar Mayer  Wienermobile, and a 1948 ad from the Ladies Home Journal for Oscar Mayer Wieners.

On July 24, 2016 Snopes had an article by David Emery on The Mandela Effect that said The Glitch Is in Your Memory, Not the Matrix. There also is a web site about Debunking Mandela Effects, and an article at the Rational Wiki.   

I know that my memory isn’t always reliable. Ask any prosecutor or forensic engineer what they think of eyewitness testimony, and watch them chuckle. For example, here in Boise there is a personal injury law firm that often runs TV ads (which I typically don’t pay close attention to and mute). If you’d asked me I’d have told you their name was Lister Frost, but it actually is Litser Frost.  

An image of a mandala found at Wikimedia Commons was colored in.

It also wasn’t Jerry Springer who compared the fears of public speaking and death

People sometimes have faulty memories, and attribute a famous Jerry Seinfeld quote to the wrong comedian. On May 28th I blogged about Did Woody Allen ever compare the fears of public speaking and death? and on June 6th I blogged about Did Jay Leno ever compare the fears of public speaking and death?

Yesterday my Google Alert on public speaking led me to a different variant of attributing that quote to another person named Jerry - syndicated tabloid talk show host Jerry Springer. A June 24th blog post at Speechstorming from Barcelona, Spain titled Glossophobia: You can overcome the fear of public speaking claimed that:

“JERRY SPRINGER ONCE JOKED ’At A Funeral, Most People Would Rather Be Lying In The Casket Than Giving The Eulogy!’ ”

They didn’t say who they got that nonsense from, but two possible sources from 2013 are a May 1st post by Ryan McLean titled Introduction to the Public Speaking Power podcast - helping you (and me) become a more effective communicator and a September 21st post at Pancakes and Parachutes titled Public speaking = a necessary evil for managers? 

It also wasn’t comedian Jerry Lewis. And it wasn’t California governor Jerry Brown, or televangelist Jerry Falwell,  or Grateful Dead guitarist Jerry Garcia, or ice cream guru Jerry Greenfield (of Ben and Jerry’s), or singer Jerry Lee Lewis.

The image of Jerry Springer came from Brett Weinstein at Wikimedia Commons.