Life After Death by PowerPoint

I came across this video over at Preacher's Pen and I just had to share it. I hope you find it as funny as I do.

Bladder-based Decision Making Study Wins Prize

It's that time of the year again, the Ig Nobel prizes were awarded last night on the campus of Harvard University. These prizes attempt to highlight the legitimate activity going on in the world that is too weird, marginal or funny to ever win a Nobel prize (the winners of which will be announced next week). So, this year some of the highlight winners are:

Peter Snyder, a professor of Neurology at Brown University was a part of the team of researchers that won the prize for medicine for their groundbreaking study of how the need to urinate affects decision making and higher cognitive function. According to the study, the greater the need to urinate, the more difficult it is to focus on anything else. Said Snyder, in summary of his magnum opus, "When you gotta pee, you gotta pee."

Also winning the Ig Nobel peace prize was the may of Vilnius, Lithuania, Arturas Zuokas, who addressed the vexing problem of illegally parked luxury cars blocking bicycle lanes. His solution: run them over with a tank. Problem solved, prize won.

Types of Facebook Users

Stereotypes can be fun sometimes. But only when they aren't intended to offend anyone. I'm not wanting to give offense, just look at some of the ways that people can be stereotyped on Facebook. Just so you know, several of these apply to me, so I'm not trying to be unfair or mean, just observant.

Game-Booker - She only posts about her current needs in FarmCityMafiaVille. Your correspondence is comprised of requests to play the game with her.

Omni-Booker - He tells you everything that he's doing from morning to night. "I woke up with lines on my face." "We were out of cereal for breakfast." "There's bad traffic on the 5 today."

TMI-Booker - She shares way too much information online in public: "I had some runny poo today, I wonder if it's because of all the bran muffins."

LOL-Booker - He thinks that the abbreviation for Laugh Out Loud is a punctuation mark. "The dog is wet and smells LOL" "My hamster just died LOL"

Cause-Booker - She believe strongly in a lot of different causes - and every one of them shows up in the status updates. You don't know where she lives, but you know her top 22 charities.

Spouse-Booker - His updates all center around how much he loves his spouse. They have the added benefit of being an emetic.

Link-Booker - She shares links with you. Every link. All the time. Instead of status updates you get links to videos, websites and Groupons.

Statistical Guilt-Booker - He reposts the status about people who have cancer, diabetes, ugly kittens or excess phlegm then adds the barb that if you don't repost it as your status you're one of the 97% who don't care enough.

Photo-Booker - Rather than status updates, she takes pictures of everything she does and posts them on Facebook. Often she's using her mobile phone so the pictures are coming in as the action is happening.

Food-Booker - Every post he makes is somehow related to food. Food he just ate, food he's about to eat or food he just bought. Extra bonus if this is also the TMI-Booker and you get to hear the final fate of the food.

Quote-Booker - She shares quotes that inspire her. But none of her own words. Or she might share her favorite quotes from TV shows (without regard to the fact that she's watching the show live and ruining it for people with DVR or Hulu).

Baby-Booker - Every status update consists of minute detail about the progress of a baby. "Horatio just had his first poo." "Cyrano is sleeping for 3.783 hours at a stretch now."

Blog-Booker - She only posts statuses that are also links to her blog posts. Who would do such a thing?

Ego-Booker - His posts are all about self-promotion. His new project. His new website. His new album. His new article. It's all about him.

Vague-Booker - Her posts are never quite clear what they mean and usually prompt at least one comment asking what's going on. Vague-Bookers can also be Passive-Aggressive-Bookers.

Twitter-Booker - He posts to Facebook through Twitter so all the status updates are littered with Twitter-bit like hash-tags and at-replies. "Totally just saw @jtw78 at #pbl11 #sweet"

What other stereotypes have you come across?

Special thanks to my friends for helping me to come up with this list (via a status update on Facebook no less): Arwen, Spencer, Rebecca Marie, Morgan, Rich, Ryan, Ben. You guys rock.

Humor Online

Funny stuff is funny. Deep, I know. What we don't want to do is scour all humor from our world. Laughter is healthy and it connects people together. But humor can also be used to hurt people. Bullies use humor as a weapon to destroy.

Scientist, Peter McGraw, think's he's cracked the humor code.

Philosophers had pondered this sort of question for millennia, long before anyone thought to examine it in a lab. Plato, Aristotle, and Thomas Hobbes posited the superiority theory of humor, which states that we find the misfortune of others amusing. Sigmund Freud espoused the relief theory, which states that comedy is a way for people to release suppressed thoughts and emotions safely. Incongruity theory, associated with Immanuel Kant, suggests that jokes happen when people notice the disconnect between their expectations and the actual payoff.

But in the end, none of the theories alone could account for all the types of humor out there (especially Sarah Silverman). McGraw came up with the idea that humor is benign violation. He uses the example of tickling, if you tickle yourself you're not violating anything since you know it's coming. If a stranger in a trench-coat tickles you it's not benign, just creepy. But if your friend tickles you, it's both benign and a violation at the same time.

Making jokes about people have been off limits for most professional ministers. You can't make fun of people because someone might get offended. That's not a bad rule to follow in preaching and public speaking. But when it comes to developing relationship online, eschewing humor is (or would be for me) like cutting off your left arm and replacing it with a jellyfish. It's not helping anyone.

I think we're all pretty clear on the violation part of humor. We need to violate a social norm, an expectation or even the rules of grammar in some unexpected way. What we need to do is create more benign space for humor to happen. Jokes that are racist or sexist are only seen as funny when the teller feels safe and disconnected from the object of the joke. Being vulnerable with people keeps us from feeling safe telling offensive jokes, they stop being funny. But, then as the vulnerability increases and we learn to trust each other more, we can expand our humor palette.

When we've done the work to develop the relationship and the shared vulnerability, then we can really laugh with each other. We know that the jokes are benign rather than just being violations.

How do you create space for humor?

Charts and Graphs are Necessary

Where would we be without the wisdom of Stephen Colbert? He helps us understand why charts and graphs are essential to every good speech.

The power of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s speech wouldn't have been as great without his Venn diagram.

Franklin Roosevelt inspired a nation by showing, in bar graph form, the challenges facing the nation.


Thank you Stephen, for setting us straight.

April Fools (was yesterday)

In case you didn't catch it, my post yesterday about preaching being outlawed in California was a joke. Preaching is still as legal as ever in the US.

To tie this in to preaching a bit, preachers need to have more fun. There, I said it. Preachers have gotten this reputation for being boring, stuffy, and self-righteous. Think of Reverend Lovejoy from "The Simpsons" he's all of those things and more.

Preaching doesn't have to be the domain of the boring scholar. We can have fun and connect with people through humor while maintaining our scholarship and focus on the Word. The two are not mutually exclusive.

Bored to Death . . . Literally?

Slashdot reports about a new study that links boredom to death. I was going to read it, but it's long and I don't want to risk it.

A study conducted by researchers at University College London shows that boredom can kill you. The researchers found that people who reported feeling a great deal of boredom were 37 per cent more likely to have died by the end of the study. Martin Shipley, who co-wrote the report said, "The findings on heart disease show there was sufficient evidence to say there is a link with boredom."

I don't know that this means your sermon might be lethal, but maybe we should try to spice things up . . . just a bit.

Be Careful Little Slides What you Show

Just like with everything else, it's important to check your slides before you project them (or show them on TV). You may not use everything that you learned in math class, but basic adding is kind of important.

Mustached Americans

Apparently Mustached Americans earn 8.2% more than their non-Mustached counterparts, but they also tend to save less of that money (11% compared to 14%).

About AMI

The American Mustache Institute, the bravest organization in the history of mankind behind only the U.S. Military and the post-Jim Henson Muppets, is the world’s only facial hair advocacy and research organization, with more than 700 global chapters. AMI battles negative stereotypes and discrimination against Mustached Americans. Based in St. Louis due to the presence of the world’s largest mustache – the Gateway Arch – the organization is committed to recapturing the mustache’s glory years of the 1970s, when there existed a climate of acceptance, understanding, and flavor saving for people of Mustached American descent.

Why do I share that with you? Because it's funny! Sometimes humor can make a point more powerfully than any other emotion. I wonder if Jesus was chuckling when he talked about the camel going through the eye of a needle. One thing, though. Humor has to be contextual. Don't just tell a joke to tell a joke and then move in a completely unrelated direction. Rather, make sure your humor relates to your topic. In this case, if you were preaching about equality or financial stewardship, this could be a good humorous example.

Know your Memes

So if you watched The Office recently, you saw Dwight rock a sweet t-shirt with three wolves howling at the moon. But, did you know that it is an internet meme found on Amazon.com reviews?

Later on, during the wedding people start dancing down the isle which is a direct take off of a Youtube video of an actual wedding.

The whole show was filled with memes, and that kind of referential humor is a huge component in the communication of younger people.




Some churches are using the memes to their advantage:



How are you going to address this?

Emotions are Powerful for Communication

And humor is a great emotion to use to connect with people and get your point across.

The church you know

The website The Church you Know spoofs the PSA's on TV and gives a satirical take on some church themes. This one on attendance makes me laugh a lot.

Cacophoty

This is a repost from my other blog:






I have been doing some research on the use of PowerPoint (specifically in sermons since that's my field). Ok, more to the point - I have seen some pretty bad PowerPoint presentations and been prompted to not be "that guy." So I think I've come up with a new word (or neologism for all you nerds out there).

My new word is: cacophoty n. (ka-KA-foe-tee)An image, moving or still, that is jarring and discordant; visual dissonance. As in: That PowerPoint slide was filled with clip art and bright, conflicting colors - it is a cacophoty.

So it's pretty much a rip off of the pre-existing word: cacophony. I applied my stupendous Greek skills and broke down the work into it's parts: caca (evil, bad) and phony (sound, voice). Then I just replaced 'phony' with 'photy' (light). I know, I know, you are amazed at the breadth and depth of my linguistic knowledge.

So go and use this new word - spread it around the globe. I don't really care if I get credit for it, I just think it would be cool to be watching the news in a couple years and hear them use my word.

Oh, and don't have cacophotous PowerPoints they make me want to scoop out my eyeballs with a soupspoon.

How NOT to use PowerPoint

Thanks to Cal Habig for this link.

What if Abe used PowerPoint?

This is a great example of why people hate PowerPoint.

Gettysburg address

View more presentations from fatuousplatitudes.

Thanks to Dave Barr for pointing this out to me.