Presentation Titles: subtlety vs exhortative ad copy

Spicing up a PowerPoint…

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Ted: Title slide. "Better presentations." Too weak.

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Edward: I agree. How about some alliteration? "Powerful presentations."

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Ted: Still no power. How about a metaphor? “Supercharge your delivery.”

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Edward: Ha. Souping up a pizza scooter?

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Ted: "Inspirational performances"?

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Edward: Still sounds like ad copy for consumers instead targeting academics. “Buy now while stocks last” sort of thing. Exhortative. Even extortionist?

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Ted: Maybe academics sometimes need a bit of ad copy exhortation.

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Voice-over

In the end a compromise is reached. "Mastering the art of professional presenting." Understated upskilling : “mastering the art.” Maintaining the dignity of a “profession.”

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Symbolism of bread and wine

Post Christmas...

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Cathy: Did you attend a church service?

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Angela: We did, at a small church on a hill, established in the 1850s. Elegant small wooden structure, not so many people, but a service led by a vicar who tries to make the comments contemporary, and provides meals for the needy.

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Cathy: Do you go to church often?

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Angela: At Christmas I try to reconnect with the attempts my mother made to instill piety in us. Father thought that was a worthy way for Sunday to be spent, but he wasn't as committed to the endeavor as my mother.

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Cathy: Do you take communion?

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Take, eat this wafer
as a symbol of my body

Angela: Where the priest gives out bread saying “Take, eat, this is my body.”

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Cathy: Followed by “Drink, this is my blood.” Catholics believe the bread and wine become his body and blood. Do you?

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Angela: Nominally, I suppose I am Anglican but unlike many, I regard it only as a metaphor, as a symbol.

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Cathy: Pragmatism?

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Angela: Linguistics in a scientific age.

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Voice-over

“Take, eat, this is My body” (Matthew 26:26). Then He passed the cup to them saying, “Drink from it, all of you, for this is My blood” (Matthew 26:27-28). Now, a wafer symbolizes the bread, and grape juice symbolizes the wine.

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Trump as a Mad Max metaphor: Immortan Joe and the War Boys

A mere movie villain?

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Immortan Donald

George: Oh, that it were only so. But he’s not. He’s one of the Mad Max antiheroes like Immortan Joe. Trump's White House is a chaotically choreographed political satire. Unfortunately, in the real world.

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Bill: There’s also something ominous about the gum-chewing, bull-necked supporters who cheer him on. Like an army of Caucasian Kim Jong Un clones clinging to a string of broken promises. Like the War Boys in Mad Max. Their support is hardly waning. He lies outrageously. And he can because his supporters know little of politics or economics. Groupthink. Did you see this picture in The Economist? You are what you drive.

You are what you drive...

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George: And you become what you drive.

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Bill: Of course, none of them will look in the mirror and see themselves as most of the rest of the world views them.

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Voice-over

The Economist Special Report on America Divided might help Trump supporters feel like they are winning. But the choice of photographs profiling those supporters is a clever underlying subplot identifying “Just who ARE these people?”

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