This may be my most interesting lecture yet.
- The ice breaker: Why such harassment? (short)
- If someone said, "I wish I were gifted enough that people would start harassing me," the response may be "Huh?"
But that doesn't make the experience any less real.
- Inspire your audience: A Professional Courtesy to a Fellow Poet
- The poem "Invictus" is a horror. As said in this lecture, it is squeaky-clean free of racism and doesn't contain a single racial slur, but it's just the thing to appeal to the kind of misguided soul who would actually try to make racism into a heroic virtue.
Part of what I said fell flat: "I'm not racist! Some of my best friends are tan! Well, maybe not in this [February] weather..."
- Organize your speech: iPhones and spirituality (short)
- Texting while driving is dangerous; we've learned that texting is a strong enough technological drug not to mix with driving. But there are other lessons in life besides "Hang up and drive!" This is especially true with the technological drug of the iPhone.
- Get to the Point: Humor Delivers Pain (short)
- People see humor as joyful, but take away a joke's pain and what's left isn't funny. As Mark Twain the humor wrote, "The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in Heaven." Orthodoxy would agree.
There is an experience beyond being a big fish in a small pond, and it matters tremendously for some people.
- Simplicity Beyond Complexity
- A look at the relation between simplicity, complexity, and the simplicity that matters most.
If I were to give one last lecture, what would it be? The answer is something close to this ragged lecture.
- A Variation on the Toastmasters Icebreaker Speech
- Toastmasters Icebreakers tend to be individualistic. I took flak through an off-topic speech, but this speech was one that talked about connections that make me more fully human, and not so much about me myself.
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An Orthodox Apologist Interested in Vibrant Human Life in Troubled Technological Times... with FREE EBOOKS!