Different perspectives matter

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Perspective matters. Last week I was pulling into the parking lot of my friendly local public library. When I glanced in my rear-view mirror, I noticed the vehicle opposite me had a logo on the hood saying it was a q33L. Of course, it really was a Jeep – with its name seen backwards, as shown above (via PowerPoint using a Cooper font).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Upside down is another perspective, as shown above where 7734 becomes Hell. There is a four-minute YouTube video with the Top 10: Calculator Words (Tricks), visual jokes that can be done on a calculator with a seven-segment display by entering numbers and then turning them upside down to show words:

 

5318008.618 becomes Big Boobies

376006.06 becomes Go Google

55378008.345 becomes She.Boobless

5317.345 becomes She.Lies

7734.55378 becomes Bless.Hell

604.513405 becomes So.HeIsHog

57735.0367 becomes Lego.Sells

710.77345 becomes Shell.Oil

6078.335 becomes See.Blog

707.0113414 becomes HiHello.LOL

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And switching word order also can change perspective. I was scanning through a 2017 book (from my friendly local public library) by Megan J. Elias titled Food on the Page: Cookbooks and American Culture. On page 127 was a section heading that would better have been Time-Life Series on Foods of the World. But it instead was Time-Life Foods of the World Series, which suggests a single book on the current championship games, as shown above via an imagined book cover.  

 

The hot dog and beer image came from Wikimedia Commons.

 

Making a distracting room layout tolerable

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In my post yesterday titled Less than obvious sources of Table Topics questions for Toastmasters club meetings I mentioned a 2022 book by Steven James and Tom Morrisey: The Art of the Tale (and subtitled Engage your audience, elevate your organization, and share your message through storytelling). An excellent story about fixing a room layout is described in a section titled Prepare Your Space (No bikinis allowed!). It appears on page 86:

 

“I was teaching a conference in San Diego some years ago, and when I arrived at the venue where the eight-hour-long seminar was to take place, I saw that the entire wall behind the podium was a mirror. That was bad enough – I could only imagine the listeners staring at themselves all day – but then I realized that the back wall of the room behind them was entirely glass, overlooking the pool! So, I was supposed to teach these educators all day while, every ten or fifteen seconds, the reflection of someone in a bikini was going to walk across the stage in front of them.”

 

At this point you can easily imagine the chorus from Katy Perry’s song California Gurls:

 

“California girls, we’re unforgettable

Daisy Dukes bikinis on top

Sun-kissed skin so hot we’ll melt your popsicle

Ooh oh ooh

 

California girls, we’re undeniable

Fine, fresh, fierce, we got it on lock

West Coast represent, now put your hands up

Ooh oh ooh”

 

The story continues:

 

“I knew there was no way I could compete with Southern California pool life on display.

 

Thankfully, I’d arrived early enough to reset the room before anyone else showed up. I turned all the chairs toward a side wall. It only took a few minutes. No one else knew that I’d rearranged the room, and the seminar went fine, with no swimsuit-clad interruptions. That day, I learned to always arrive early enough to adjust a room if necessary to provide the best environment for my listeners.”

 

The gold bikini design was adapted from an image at the Library of Congress.

 

Winston Churchill also can be blamed for advice about rehearsing in front of a mirror

In a recent blog post titled Never Imagine Your Audience Naked (and other speaking myths debunked) Aileen Bennett said that: “…Churchill apparently never gave a speech without practicing in a mirror first...” When I commented that he also gets the blame for imagining the audience naked, she replied that much of the public speaking advice in the UK is rightly or wrongly attributed to Churchill.

Is that old practice habit used by Sir Winston Churchill good advice? Not really. It wasn’t a terrible idea for seeing what your gestures and body language look like, back when filming yourself would have required a camera operator and a long wait for processing.

On page 77 of The Confident Speaker, Harrison Monarth and Larina Kase say about practice to:

“Make it as realistic as possible. The mirror is also a helpful tool, but to see what you really look like, a video camera is better.”

On page 70 of his book, The Elements of Great Public Speaking, J. Lyman MacInnes says:

“Do not rehearse in front of a mirror. You’ll spend far too much time and energy looking at yourself rather than concentrating on content and delivery, all the while forgetting that you’re actually seeing things backward in any event.”

You can play back a video recording repeatedly to focus either on looking at your gestures or listening to your voice. In another post I pointed out that Stephan Pastis even made fun of using a mirror in one of his cartoons.

Maybe the only way to get rid of that advice about practicing in front of a mirror is to point out that Churchill’s old nemesis, Adolph Hitler, also: “…perfected his delivery by rehearsing in front of mirrors and carefully choreographing his display of emotions.”

Pearls Before Swine comic strip on rehearsing

On Wednesday, January 14, 2008 Stephan Pastis’s comic strip Pearls Before Swine was about rehearsing for public speaking. Pig tried standing in front of a mirror, only to have his reflection ask him why he was wasting his time.

The third frame got covered up by my blog archive list. It just reads: “It’s not helping.” You can view the original comic at the Pearls Before Swine web site. I just grabbed their html code by clicking on “Embed”.

Mr. Pastis agrees with the advice from Nick Morgan on rehearsing that I referred to in a post on October 12, 2008.