I've watched at least four TEDtalk videos today. The web site on the Talks have links to several categories of talks. I like choosing from the videos grouped under most popular. Interestingly enough, my favorite videos were among the site favorites.
Before I started listening to the TEDtalk series I listened to a lotta Google videos on consciousness. Now most of those are on youtube, but there are a lot of free lectures and even college courses free over the internet. I like the idea of it, but lectures and powerpoint talks get to be all the same after a while.
I think the reason I am enjoying these TEDtalks are because the presenters are there to talk about what they're fired up about, but they are also very entertaining. For all practical purposes they are sometimes as funny as professional standup comedians, and why would they not be?
Early in life, however, the Baptist preachers who used to come around the circuit to preach at our local church. There was a distinct difference between the traveling preachers and the ministers. The evangelists were there to get people all riled up with hell's fire and brimstone. They weren't gonna be around to take the flak next week when the energy they stirred up dissipated in their absence. The ministers were.
I watched a video this afternoon that feature Malcolm Gladwell who authored the book I've been writing about since last fall called Blink. His talk was about spaghetti sauce and the research guy who invented "chunky" spaghetti sauce. Malcolm is not only a good writer, but he's a good orator too. A fine storyteller. Instead of telling the Jesus stories and passing the plate, he wrote his own stories and passed the plate. Got rich doing it. Thinks it was the cat's meow. No blame.
The only classes I liked in college were the ones that had good orators for teachers. Maybe one of the reasons I never got a degree was that I refused to take courses that had boring teachers. Sometime it took half a semester for me to figure that out. Hardly ever did I go through a formal process of dropping their classes, I just stopped going. I got a lotta "F's" that way.
On the other hand, I took as many courses as I could in Geography without changing majors because I liked the geography school's department head's lectures. He was very charismatic, and I learned an awful lot of geography without trying.
I knew from watching my parents that neither of them taught the topics they claimed expertise in. They both taught life and what they thought you oughta know about it to get ahead. I don't think I had much choice about looking for that sort of teacher wherever I went to school. Between five years worth of GI Bill money and two different full four year scholarships I took what I wanted and threw the rest away.
I'm paying for my selfishness, but it's been a good run. Rather than having learned to earn to consume I've learned to do without. I'm a natural miser. It was easy once I realized that nobody had a clue about why they did what they did. They just ate what they could keep down.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
