Once you’ve mapped out your speech, remove 20 percent. In all my years of preparing and watching political and business speeches, I’ve yet to hear anyone say, “Gee, I wish that speech were longer.
From Al Gore’s Chief Speechwriter: Simple Tips for a Damn Good Presentation (Plus: Breakdancing) - The Blog of Author Tim Ferriss (via jnunemaker)
All very good advice.
(via monkeytypist)
Absolutely. I have a rule for events I’m involved in that no speech should last for longer than 5 minutes, but I might just get bored easily.
When a couple was “going steady” in the 1950s, the young man might have let his girlfriend wear his Varsity team sweater or given her his fraternity pin. But the 1960s swept aside those rituals. Now the Facebook link has become a publicly-recognized symbol of a reasonably serious intent short of being engaged or moving in together.
If It’s Facebook, it’s love (via thesemodernsocks) (via allisonweiss)
I’m always tickled that being “facebook official” is now an important stage in most college-aged relationships. Not so much about it being absurd - because it is a really exciting and special point in a relationship - but in how nobody could have predicted it as little as five years ago and how strange this must all seem to my parents.
(via gregbrown)
(via sarahchristine)
I haven’t been in a serious relationship since I joined Facebook, but my instinct is to always leave my relationship status blank. Not because I don’t care, but because history shows that break-ups render me a mess, and the last thing I want in the midst of one is to make an announcement to my entire broader social circle that my heart’s been trampled on. I’d rather just crawl up in a hole, watch trash TV, bawl my eyes out to my friends, and ignore the world.
A bit hard to stick with that conviction in the flush of new love, though.
Another possible problem, occasionally identified in the scribe’s idle imaginings, is that a couple of generations of journalists are emerging who’ve had no exposure to having to glean their basic information from yellowing files and stray flecks of fading memories. What would happen should someone snip Google’s crucial cable? Are there people doing journalism now who wouldn’t have a clue how to set about a story in the absence of electronic data assistance?
Oh for days of yore when I had six weeks to file | The Australian (via somethingchanged)
Guilty as charged. I have to admit, I find Google an invaluable tool for backgrounding stories, although my present academic training is pulling me away from this (a little). Don’t use Google at all (well, almost at all) for the thesis!
I’m looking forward to reading the Nicholas Carr piece (in my newly arrived edition of The Atlantic) the spurred this latest bout of Google bashing.
Also from the Errol Simper (linked): “Sullivan touched on some internet-Google drawbacks, as quoted earlier. One he didn’t mention is the potential danger of journalistic uniformity. It has often occurred to the scribe in recent times that when journalists from News Limited, Fairfax Media or from the Seven Network set out out to do a story about essentially the same thing, then they’ll probably all perform the same research. Unless you’re formidably familiar with the background to a particular topic it’s become second nature, an automatic reflex, to Google up stories relevant to what you’re examining.
“What you find will very probably influence the questions you ask and which individuals you seek out for comment. It’s as though the internet has crafted a little journalistic suburb within whose boundaries the stories will largely be confined. The only thing that’s going to make one story different from another is the varying thought processes of the human condition. A potential problem, as Sullivan suggests, is that those processes may now be similarly conditioned.”
I was devo’d to discover that the song I heard on the radio the other night and liked was by none other than Miley Cyrus (‘See You Again’ - the chorus is damn catchy!). Almost as devo’d as I was when I texted a friend excitedly about the great song I’d heard in Dotti that went “you want a little of this, want a little, a little of this” and was told it was by Australian Idol runner-up Ricki-Lee Coulter.
Oh well, I did used to think Hilary Duff was adorable, back in her blonde, non-super skinny days, so I guess it’s not that surprising.
Felt like I couldn’t breathe/ You asked what’s wrong with me/ My best friend Leslie said “she’s just being Miley”…
Chorus so catchy!
Awesome. We need something like this.
I am very pleased to present to the world my new, collaborative baby - The Dawn Chorus is a new Australian feminist commentary blog. I would love all you awesome Australian feminists (female and male!) to have a look around, comment, and help it grow up big and strong. Together we can make it happen!
In other news, the sun just came out.
People who engage with a TV show online before they see it on television are more likely to become loyal viewers of that program and encourage others to watch as well, according to a new study.
It turns out that a woman’s physical appearance is the most powerful predictor of the occupational status of the man she marries. A woman’s appearance is more significant than her intelligence, her level of education or even her original socioeconomic status in determining the mate she will marry.
Psychologist David M. Buss, after researching ten thousand people across thirty-seven countries. Quoted in the book The Dark Side of Man by Michael P. Ghiglieri. (via jackieheartsb)
Fortunately, this book was published nearly 10 years ago, but wow - that’s just depressing.
And actually, the more I think about it, the less I think it is true. I mean, how else do you explain all those silicon valley marriages?
