PowerPoint on BBC Radio Scotland

I'm about to be interviewed about PowerPoint on the BBC Radio Scotland Business Show.

You should be able to listen again on BBC iPlayer HERE - about 11 minutes in after end of the news and discussion of Scottish pub business.

This particular feature was prompted by two recent posts on the BBC website:

• Problems with Power Point
• PowerPoint Highs and Lows

PREVIOUS POSTS ON POWERPOINT INCLUDE:
• PowerPoint program on BBC Radio 4
• BBC Television News slideshow quiz
• How NOT to use PowerPoint
• If Bill Gates doesn’t read bullet points from PowerPoint slides …
• An imaginative innovation in a PowerPoint presentation
• PowerPoint presentation continues to dominate BBC News – courtesy Robert Peston (again)
• Slidomania contaminates another BBC channel
• There’s nothing wrong with PowerPoint – until there’s an audience
• BBC Television News: produced by of for morons?
• PowerPoint comes to church

And there's much more on visual aids in my books!

Joe Biden's moving tribute to Edward Kennedy

Of the all the tributes to Edward Kennedy I've heard over the past couple of days, the one that stood out for me came from Vice-president Joe Biden (full text HERE and full video HERE).

A bit long, maybe, but there were moments of genuine sincerity that could perhaps only have been said by someone who’d lost a wife and child in a road accident and knew from his own experience the importance of support from friends and relations when you’re struggling to come to terms with such trauma.

Interestingly, two of the most quoted passages from Biden’s speech came from the following short sequence – one was a simple piece of imagery - “he was kind of like an anchor” - and the other a reasserted contrast “it was never about him. It was always about you. It was never about him.”

There were other neat rhetorical flourishes as well, such as the opening three-part list in which the third item contrasted with the first two, another neat contrast and the anecdotes about Kennedy phoning him every day and arranging for doctors from Massachusetts to turn up out of the blue and about what Kennedy’s wife had said to him near the end (another contrast)

But, as I've so often said and written in the past, seeing a speaker exhibiting such technical skill in no way diminishes either the sincerity or the positive impact conveyed by his message.

BIDEN:

I literally would not be standing here were it not for Teddy Kennedy,
(1) not figuratively,
(2) this is not hyperbole
(3) but literally.



He was there -- he stood with me when my wife and daughter were killed in an accident. He was on the phone with me literally every day in the hospital, my two children were attempting, and, God willing, God thankfully survived very serious injuries.

I'd turn around and there would be some specialist from Massachusetts, a doc I never even asked for, literally sitting in the room with me.

(A) You know, it's not just me that he affected like that.
(B) It's hundreds upon hundreds of people.

I was talking to Vicki this morning and she said - she said,

(A) “He was ready to go, Joe,
(B) “but we were not ready to let him go."

He's left a great void in our public life and a hole in the hearts of millions of Americans and hundreds of us who were affected by his personal touch throughout our lives.

People like me, who came to rely on him.

He was kind of like an anchor.

And unlike many important people in my 38 years I've had the privilege of knowing, the unique thing about Teddy was

(A) it was never about him.
(B) It was always about you.
(A) It was never about him.




RELATED POSTS:
• The enduring challenge and importance of funeral orations
• Gordon Brown's model example of how to express condolences

(And, on the rhetorical techniques mentioned here, type 'rhetoric' into the search box at the top of the page for similar examples from Barack Obama and other famous speakers).

The Banksy exhibition at Bristol Museum

Having announced the Banksy exhibition at Bristol Museum on the blog at the beginning of June, I'm now feeling guilty that I didn't go earlier, not just because I'd have liked to have gone again, but also because I'd have been strongly recommending everyone else to go too.

The show ends in a few days time, but you can get a flavour of it by typing 'Banksy' into YouTube, where quite a lot of it can now be seen.

There are also links to other videos towards the end of the one below, which includes some of the exhibits I was most taken with, like the picture of a river with water running out of it because it had been hung at an angle, the gleaner who had left the painting to sit on the frame for a smoke and the fish fingers swimming around in a goldfish bowl.

What doesn't come across in the videos I've watched so far was a clever piece of marketing for Bristol Museum. Apart from the rooms dedicated to Banksy's work, the artist had also deposited other items at unpredictable points around the rest of the museum. To see them, you had to go around looking for where they'd been hidden in all the permanent collections, and I'm sure that many people will, like me, return when the exhibition is over and the queues have subsided to take a closer look at (what I learnt today) is a very fine museum.

If you're curious to know more about Banksy, you can look HERE. There's also a rview of the exhibition in the Daily Telegraph, and the Mail on Sunday even claims to have uncovered his real identity.

We also managed to get in without queuing at all and did so in a manner that I think Banksy would have approved of. However, as a tribute to his success at secrecy, I have no intention of revealing how we did it.