There is an F Minus comic by Tony Carrillo on July 28, 2025 showing the driver of a car and captioned:
“It’s a new hand gesture I just came up with, and if you knew what it meant, you’d be so mad right now!”
Likely it means the opposite of the Vulcan Salute from Star Trek (shown above being done by Leonard Nimoy) which means to “Live long and prosper.”
Another new gesture is shown above. I don’t know what it means, but it might be used in a coffee shop or a pizza parlor.
I have been reading a 2025 book by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva which is titled Speak, Memorably: the art of captivating an audience. It’s not awful, but it’s not great either. There is no index. On August 2, 2025 I posted about A bogus car story from the 2025 book Speak, Memorably.
On page 10 of that book they state that:
“….in the chapters that follow, we commissioned a survey by the Clarity Media Group of over one hundred people. The respondent pool was comprised of full and part-time employees between the ages of twenty-five and sixty-five.”
There are 31 horizontal bar charts shown in this book on pages 11, 15,21, 27, 36, 38, 55, 58,60, 71, 113, 114, 135, 139, 153, 155, 168, 183, two on 185, 194, 197, 199, 204, 214, 215, 226, 228, 229, 243, and 244. They are shown in monochrome, and only are 3.3” wide by 1.5” high. The percent is labeled at the center of the bar, and the description of the question is to the right of the bar.
My slightly different Excel version of the chart on page 11 for Do You Consider Your Public Speaking Skills at Work Important? is shown above. But those bars are not presented in what should be their order, with the most significant and largest percentage placed at the top. My revised version also is shown above.
Another example from page 168 about How Do You Determine What Your Audience Wants to Know? and a corrected version are shown above.
18 of 31 charts have this incorrect order, those on pages 11, 21, 27, 36, 113, 139, 153, 155, 168, 183, 185 bottom, 194, 199, 204, 214, 215, 228, and 229.
And as shown above, the chart on page 21 for How Often Do You Know with Certainty the First and Last Sentence of Each Slide? has silly labels from top to bottom of: Never, Rarely, Sometimes, and Frequently. That is opposite to what should be: Frequently, Sometimes Rarely, Never. They used the same sequence on pages 27, 113, 139, 155, 199, and 215. Also the chart on page 194 has Never, Seldom, Occasionally, Frequently.
Back on September 6, 2022 I blogged that we should Beware of surveys with small sample sizes, which have large margins of error. There is a Wikipedia page about Margin of error. For a typical national survey with a sample size of 1,000 the margin of error is 3.1%. For a sample size of 100 the margin of error instead is 9.8% (as is shown above in my revised version for page 11).
Is the difference between the largest percentage and the second largest percentage twice the margin of error (or 20%)? That only is true for ten charts, those on pages 36, 55, 58, 71, 135, 139, 168, 183, 185 top, and 215. Not the other 21 charts!
I first mentioned the mythical Bar Chart Police (and showed a version of their badge) in a post on November 3, 2023 titled Five of six British age groups are more confident about public speaking after COVID.
There are lots of recent books about public speaking. Currently I am reading one from 2025 by Bill McGowan and Juliana Silva titled Speak, Memorably: the art of captivating an audience. It is not awful, but it is not great either. At the bottom of page 87 and top of page 88, in a section mistitled The Cadillac of Analogies, they tell the following bogus story about the Cadillac Cimmaron (shown above) and the similar Chevrolet Cavalier (also shown):
“In 1982 Cadillac wanted to capture the middle-class car buyer who aspired to own a Cadillac. The model they built was called the Cadillac Cimmaron. On paper it sounded like a good idea, but it turned into a debacle that damaged one of Detroit’s most iconic luxury brands. What they should have done was build a new car from scratch. But they thought they could take a shortcut and merely add some quasi-luxury touches to the down-market Chevy Nova and pass it off as a Cadillac. It was a colossal failure. The consumer, whom they clearly underestimated, saw right through it. The historic blunder, however, did lead to something spectacular. Acknowledging the value of creating something genuinely new, GM created not just a new model, but a whole new category: luxury SUVs. The Cadillac Escalade was the phoenix that rose out of the ashes of the Cimmaron. It was a mega success, undoing the damage done by the Cimmaron and then some.”
Their story was superficially researched and wrong in two different ways.They referred to the Chevy version as the Nova. But Chevy built a Nova from 1962 to 1979 and then revived that name from 1985 to 1988 for a NUMMI version of a Toyota Corolla.
The real reason that the Cimmaron failed is that there was a series of five very similar looking J-Cars, one from each GM division: the Chevrolet Cavalier, Pontiac J2000, Oldsmobile Firenza, second generation Buick Skyhawk, and Cadillac Cimmaron.
Second, GM and the Cadillac Escalade (first produced in August 1998) did not create the luxury SUV category – it was preceded by Ford’s Lincoln Navigator (first produced in May 1997).
I know about the J-Cars because in 1985 I looked at the Chevy, Pontiac, and Buick versions. Instead I bought a 1984 Toyota Corolla from Avis used car sales, and drove it till I got a 1993 Saturn SL2 sedan.
Images of a 1983 Cimmaron and a 1984 Cavalier were adapted from Wikimedia Commons.
There is a twelve and a half minute TED Talk by Hany Farid that was given in Vancouver on April 10, 2025 and posted at YouTube on July 18, 2025. It is titled How to Spot Fake AI Photos | Hany Farid | TED. He discusses using vanishing points and shadows:
“If you image parallel lines in the physical world they will converge to a single point, what’s called the vanishing point.”
“Surprisingly shadows have a lot in common with vanishing points. Here what I’ve done is I’ve annotated a point on the shadow with the corresponding part on the bottom of the rail that is casting that shadow, and I’ve extended those lines outward. And they intersect, not at a vanishing point, but at the light that is casting that shadow.”
There also is a ten-page article by Hany Farid at PNAS Nexus on July 29, 2025 titled Mitigating the harms of manipulated media: Confronting deepfakes and digital deception. Reference #35 from that article is a 13-page pdf preprint titled Perspective (In)Consistency of Paint by Text which discusses vanishing points, shadows, and reflections.
A multiple-exposure spirit photograph from 1901 by S. W. Fallis with a portrait of John K. Hallowell and super-imposed faces of fifteen deceased people including George Washington and Queen Victoria came from Wikimedia Commons.
Editing may involve serious digging. There is a useful article by Yi Shun Lai in The Writer magazine on September 20, 2024 titled The editor, the excavator and subtitled Sometimes it takes another set of eyes to see what your story is REALLY about. She begins:
“The essay begins nicely. It’s fabulously written, ostensibly about the way a young man feels having his life chronicled each week in his mother’s newspaper column.
About three-quarters of the way through, the writer recounts an event that makes my ears prick up, something so significant that it gives the words and events in the pages before a new angle. And then he kind of just drops it. I can feel him physically dragging the essay back to what it was about before, trying to give due diligence to the narrative plan he’s laid out for himself.
The essay holds my attention all the way through, but by the end of it, I’m feeling hungover, literally, because hangovers are accompanied by the sense that you know you did something last night; you just can’t place exactly what it is. I read the writer’s cover letter, thinking there might be some hint as to whether or not I’ve misread the essay, but it doesn’t elucidate the issue for me, so I ping the writer an email asking for a phone conference.
Long story short, we published the writer, but what went into our literary magazine was a reasonably far cry from the submission I received. The lead-in had changed. The event that had gripped my attention was given more clout, and was recounted all the way through. The final touch was a new title for the piece, since the essay was no longer about what it used to be about.”
Dropping an event is known as Chekhov’s gun, which I blogged about on July 12, 2019 in a post titled Chekhov’s Gun – speechwriting advice from a cartoon. Both Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations and the Yale Book of Quotations state it as:
“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it.”
An image of a Caterpillar 330 Excavator came from Wikimedia Commons, and a Winchester rifle came from OpenClipArt.
There is a post from Bob ‘Nugie’ Neugebauer at the Gem State Patriot News blog on July 27, 2025 simply titled Disinformation. The third sentence in his last paragraph says that:
“You will not find any disinformation in our newsletter and if you ever should we ask that you please let us know where we have gone wrong.”
But I already tried to do that, and was rejected. In a previous post on June 22,2025 titled Idaho Faces Growth and Ideological Challenges the fourth paragraph began by claiming that:
“Our nation’s welfare system represents a catastrophic failure that has entrenched poverty rather than eliminating it. Since Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, poverty rates have remained frozen around 15% instead of continuing their post-World War II decline.”
I discussed that claim in a post on June 25, 2025 titled The U.S. poverty rate has not been ‘Frozen around 15%’ since the Great Society. As shown above, from 1990 to 2023 it had moved up to 15.1% and down to 10.5%. And I sent Mr. Neugebauer the following comment:
“Bob:
You are quite wrong about the rate for poverty. The only time the poverty rate was ‘frozen’ at around 15% was between 2010 and 2014. It was ‘frozen’ at 12.6% from 2003 to 2005 and at 11.5% from 2020 to 2022. In 2019 (under Trump) the poverty rate had fallen to 10.5%, which is 4.5% lower than the 15% you cited. Clearly you don’t know what you are talking about. For details see a post at my Joyful Public Speaking blog on June 25 titled The U.S. poverty rate has not been ‘Frozen around 15%’ since the Great Society.”
He rejected it and never posted that comment on his blog.
At the Lake Hazel branch of the Ada Community Library I found a book from 2024 containing an unexpected collection of speeches. It is a posthumous collection titled Sidney Poitier: The Great Speeches of an Icon Who Moved Us Forward. There are portions from it at Google Books. On page 3 it says:
“Sidney Poitier had an inauspicious early life. Raised on Cat Island in the Bahamas in the 1920s and 1930s, he was – from an American perspective, and certainly from a Hollywood one – disadvantaged with the wrong childhood environment, skin color, and accent, but nevertheless he was destined to help change the world’s most powerful country and one of its most influential industries – the movies – forever.”
In his Saint Mark’s School Commencement speech, June 2002, he described Cat Island (page 140):
“I spent my twelve years on an island in the Caribbean. Cat Island was forty-six miles long and three to five miles wide. There were only about two hundred families on the whole island. The population of our village was about thirty to forty families. I had just one friend to play with, and he lived a long distance away. On the island there were no cars, no trucks, no buses, no trains, no paved roads, no electricity, no running water, no television, no ice cream, no movie houses. At night we used candlelight, firelight, or moonlight to get about to see where we were going. Night or day, everybody walked wherever they needed to go, or rode a horse or donkey if they were lucky enough to own one. In fact, there were stretches in my life when I was a kid when I would go for a whole week and never see a single soul other than my immediate family. As a result, some of my best friends were birds and lizards and frogs; some of my worst enemies were wasps, mosquitoes, sea urchins and tarantula spiders. I used to have regular conversations with all of them,”
And in his New York University Commencement speech in May 1995 (pages 116 to 120) he described going from a dishwasher to an actor:
“….I was a dishwasher. That’s how I survived my early years in NYC. Minimal skills were required. Dishwashing provided a salary and three meals a day. I was between job assignments on the morning in question, and my pockets were nearly empty. So empty, in fact, that if no dishwashing position was available, I was ready to glom onto any kind of work that a Black kid with no education might qualify for. I purchased a copy of the Amsterdam News, one of Harlem’s leading newspapers, and started scanning the want-ad page for dishwasher openings.
The last page of want-ad boxes faced the theatrical page, which contained an article with a heading that read ‘actors wanted.’ The gist of which was that a theatre group called the American Negro Theatre was in need of actors for its next production. My mind got to spinning. My eyes bounced back and forth between the want-ad page and the theatrical page. ‘What the hell,’ I thought. ‘I’ve tried dishwashers wanted, porters wanted, janitors wanted. Why not try actors wanted?’ I figured I could do that. It didn’t sound any more difficult than washing dishes or parking cars. And they didn’t say they required any particular kind of training. But when I went in and was auditioned on the spot, the man in charge quickly let me know, and in no uncertain terms, that I was misguided in my assumptions. I had no training in acting. I could barely read! And to top it off I had a thick, singsong Bahamian accent. He snatched the script from my hands, spun me around, grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and the back of my pants, and marched me on tippy-toes towards the door. He was seething. ‘You just get out of here and stop wasting people’s time. Go get a job you could handle,’ he barked. ‘Get yourself a job as a dishwasher or something.’ That was the line he ended with as he threw me out and slammed the door.
I have to tell you, his comments stung worse than any wasp on any sapodilla tree in my childhood. I hadn’t mentioned to him that I was a dishwasher. How did he know? If he didn’t know, then what was it about me that seemed to have implied to this stranger that a dishwasher’s profession would accurately sum up my whole life’s worth?
Whatever it was, I knew I had to change it or life was going to be mighty grim. And so, I set out on a course of self-improvement. I worked nights, and on my evening lunch breaks I sat in a quiet area of the restaurant where I was employed – near the entrance to the kitchen – reading the newspapers, trying to sound out each syllable of each unfamiliar word. An old Jewish waiter, noticing my efforts, took pity and offered to help. He became my tutor as well as my guardian angel of the moment. Each night we sat in the same booth in that quiet area of the restaurant, and he helped me learn to read better than I was able to before.
My immediate objective was to prove that I could be an actor. Not that I had any real desire to go on the stage, not that I had ever given it a thought. I simply needed to prove to that stranger that Sidney Poitier had a hell of a lot more to him than washing dishes. And it worked. The second time around they let me in.
But it was still no slam dunk. In fact, I made the first cut only because there were so few guys and they needed some male bodies to round out the incoming class of new students. But not even that could keep me for long, given my lack of education and experience. After a couple of months they were going to flunk me out, and once again I felt that vulnerability – as if I’d fallen overboard into deep water. If I lose this, where am I? One more Black kid who can barely read, washing dishes on the island of Manhattan? ‘Not if I can help it,’ thought I. So, in desperation I conjured up a truly outrageous offer they couldn’t refuse. I would become their janitor without pay if they would let me continue to study. After some brief negotiations, it was so agreed.
Things began to improve, and maybe even I began to improve. As an actor, that is. But when it came time to cast the first big student production, in walked a new guy, another kid from the Caribbean. Not a member of the group, but someone to whom the director had assigned the part I had secretly hoped to get. After all my studies, busting my butt trying to learn to act, not to mention busting my butt sweeping the walk and stoking the furnace, she cast him in the lead. Well, I had to admit, he was a pretty good-looking kid, and he had a good voice. He could even sing a little.
I tried to find some consolation in the fact that they made me his understudy. But little did I know, on the night of the first major run through, the one night an important director was coming to watch the show, the other Caribbean kid who had been cast for the lead – a kid named Harry Belafonte – couldn’t make it. I had to go on for him and, son of a gun, the visiting director liked what I did, and he called me to audition for a play he was planning to present on Broadway.
‘I’m opening Lysistrata on Broadway,’ he said. ‘There might be a small part you could try out for, if you’re available.’
‘Are you kidding?’ I thought to myself.
Next thing you know, five weeks later, on opening night, I’m staring out from a Broadway stage onto a sea of white faces in a packed theater – staring back at me – scared beyond belief as I fumbled unsuccessfully for my lines.
The word ‘bad’ cannot begin to accommodate my wretchedness. I mean, I was bad. The stage fright had me so that I was giving the wring cues, jumbling the lines, and within an instant the audience was rolling in the aisles.
The moment the scene I was in came to its tortuous end, it was time for this Caribbean kid to run for cover. My career was over before it had begun, and the void was opening up once again to receive me. I didn’t even go to the cast party, which meant that I wasn’t around when the first reviews appeared.
The critics trashed the show. I mean, they hated it. But they liked me. I was so godawful they thought I was good. They said they admired my ‘fresh comedic gift.’
If you saw this in an old black-and-white movie on TV, would you believe it? Someone was looking out for me, for sure.
My ‘triumph’ in Lysistrata leads immediately to an understudy’s job in the touring company of Anna Lucasta. Then after a long, lean, and frustrating period I found out, quite by accident, that 20 th Century Fox was about to begin casting for a movie called No Way Out. That, as it turned out, was my first motion picture job. Fifty-years and fifty-six movies later, here I am recalling the year, the day, the words, and the resolve that forged a new and undreamed-of-beginning and launched a journey more incredible than I could have imagined – through the streets of New York, along the highways and byways of life, on to a destiny written in a time before I came, by hands other than my own.”
The 2009 portrait came from Wikimedia Commons.
