Rheinredner

My home is my castle – English club meeting 03.06.10

Dear fellow Toastmasters,

this evening was in English under the theme “my home is my castle”
which is another way to explain the British courtesy (“the showing of
politeness in one’s attitude and behavior toward others”). If my home
is my castle then your home is your castle … and it is only polite
not to invade it.

We had three guests: Uli, Anne and Hanna.

As warmup we heard the word of the evening from Hanna Rose – it was
romance, the “most misunderstood word at all”. Sarahs’ tip of the
evening was to shop up at the meeting even when you are under the
weather as it is at least but most likely better than staying home in
misery. Carsten presented the joke of the evening and some thoughts on
its selection.

Ark presented CC Project 8 and showed us his home country
Lithuania, spanning from most unexpected dunes to statistics. This was
also the final project to complete the CC! Congratulations!!

Christian Block used the 4th speech from the “Entertaining Speaker”
manual for a dramatic talk with the title “The lord of a castle in
trouble”. If you want to know how he saved the castle and why it was
made of the cheapest Chinese plastic – ask him!

Thomas Rose shared his thoughts on leaders by position and leaders in
practice in the Educational Session “When the cake speaks …”. This
was speech number 10 on “Values and Leadership” from the “Leadership
excellence series”.

Annette presented a table topic session centered around
situations we might know but we definitely would not want to
experience … Christan Ba explained his neighbor how he saved his
newspaper and told him “not to work to much”. Out guest Uli as a drunk
bike rider got sober when he talked to the police. Anne, also a guest, is
member of an undercover part of Deutsche Bahn who undertake test-rides
without tickets. And Florian found a very convincing way to tell
somebody that his shoes need some polish.

The speeches were evaluated by Dirk, Christian S
(with an interesting application of his job experiences as TV
engineer: “first we pull down the sound and look only at the
picture …”) and Adrienne (for the table topics).

Ah-Counter Dirk experienced two extremes (either virtually
none or quite a few fillwords). And timer Sarah had to state
that some of the speakers were above limit.

Christan Ba shared his observations on our use of language as
grammarian and feedback for the remaining roles were given by Florian
Harms as general evaluator.

Last but not least the best speeches were elected – or determined
because competitors were over time – based on the ballots collected by
Adrienne:

Word of the evening went to Annette,
best evaluation went to Dirk,
best table topic went to Christian and finally the
best prepared speech went to Christian Bl.

Who was also “rewarded” by offering him the opportunity to write a
short summary of his speech as teaser for the website so that Google
will love us.

Great evening, looking forward to this Thursday! Thanks to all for
coming and participating!

Cheers, Carsten