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Dec. 8th, 2011 11:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
pedantherToday was the last meeting of the year for our local Toastmasters club. The theme was inevitably Christmassy.
I gave a speech on the unexpected difficulty of finding somebody with a 25th of December birthday. (Jesus wasn't really born on Christmas Day. Isaac Newton was, but due to calendar reform his birthday is now in January. Humphrey Bogart's official bio said he was born on Christmas Day, but we all know about 1940s movie star bios. Sissy Spacek - whoops, out of time. Happy holidays, everyone!)
While we're on the subject, I see that once again I've been behind on reporting Toastmasters events. I've missed mentioning:
- The combined event with the local wine appreciation club, which interspersed wine tastings with speeches on wine-related topics. A fun afternoon, even for a non-wine-drinker like myself, but not very successful on the score of encouraging membership crossover. (At least in our direction; I don't know if the wine appreciation club got a membership bump out of it.)
- The annual Table Topics and Humorous Speech contests. Once again, I entered the Table Topics contest, didn't place, but felt I improved on my performance of last year. Not that it would have mattered if I had placed, since as it turned out the area final (away off in the big smoke) coincided with one of the premier days of the local social calendar, so I wouldn't have been able to go and compete anyway. Neither, in fact, could any of the people who did place go and compete, so our bid for Table Topics competition glory ended early this year. The local winner of the Humorous Speech contest did go on to the area final, and won, but was defeated in the division final.
- One of the meetings in July was themed around the dubiously authentic holiday "Embrace Your Geekness Day", which the meeting's organizer had come across on a web site somewhere. I enjoyed the speeches, had some interesting conversations, and came away with two ideas for speech topics which I sort of promised to give on some subsequent occasion and haven't really worked on. One is about my role as the token geek of my family, and the other is about invented alien languages (Quenya, tlhIngan Hol, etc.).
- I've been sergeant-at-arms of the local club for the last couple of years, which mostly meant it was my job to remind everybody to turn their mobile phones off at the start of each meeting. This year I reached the term limit and had to pass the role on to somebody else. My successor expressed disappointment that this wasn't the kind of sergeant-at-arms role that came with a ceremonial mace (ie. a big impressive stick you can threaten misbehaving people with), so I obtained a ceremonial mace (ie. a foam toy baseball bat) and presented it to him with appropriate pomp at the official handover. He seemed pleased.
I gave a speech on the unexpected difficulty of finding somebody with a 25th of December birthday. (Jesus wasn't really born on Christmas Day. Isaac Newton was, but due to calendar reform his birthday is now in January. Humphrey Bogart's official bio said he was born on Christmas Day, but we all know about 1940s movie star bios. Sissy Spacek - whoops, out of time. Happy holidays, everyone!)
While we're on the subject, I see that once again I've been behind on reporting Toastmasters events. I've missed mentioning:
- The combined event with the local wine appreciation club, which interspersed wine tastings with speeches on wine-related topics. A fun afternoon, even for a non-wine-drinker like myself, but not very successful on the score of encouraging membership crossover. (At least in our direction; I don't know if the wine appreciation club got a membership bump out of it.)
- The annual Table Topics and Humorous Speech contests. Once again, I entered the Table Topics contest, didn't place, but felt I improved on my performance of last year. Not that it would have mattered if I had placed, since as it turned out the area final (away off in the big smoke) coincided with one of the premier days of the local social calendar, so I wouldn't have been able to go and compete anyway. Neither, in fact, could any of the people who did place go and compete, so our bid for Table Topics competition glory ended early this year. The local winner of the Humorous Speech contest did go on to the area final, and won, but was defeated in the division final.
- One of the meetings in July was themed around the dubiously authentic holiday "Embrace Your Geekness Day", which the meeting's organizer had come across on a web site somewhere. I enjoyed the speeches, had some interesting conversations, and came away with two ideas for speech topics which I sort of promised to give on some subsequent occasion and haven't really worked on. One is about my role as the token geek of my family, and the other is about invented alien languages (Quenya, tlhIngan Hol, etc.).
- I've been sergeant-at-arms of the local club for the last couple of years, which mostly meant it was my job to remind everybody to turn their mobile phones off at the start of each meeting. This year I reached the term limit and had to pass the role on to somebody else. My successor expressed disappointment that this wasn't the kind of sergeant-at-arms role that came with a ceremonial mace (ie. a big impressive stick you can threaten misbehaving people with), so I obtained a ceremonial mace (ie. a foam toy baseball bat) and presented it to him with appropriate pomp at the official handover. He seemed pleased.
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Date: 2011-12-08 09:23 pm (UTC)That is all, really. :-)