Thursday, July 27, 2017

A last-ditch, last-minute source for Table Topics questions - inspirational quotations and posters generated by a web robot

Suppose the club member who was going to handle the Table Topics (impromptu speaking) portion of your Toastmasters club meeting had to cancel at the last minute. Perhaps she had a sick or injured child to attend. Where can you almost instantly get a half-dozen questions to use?

Just go to the InspiroBot web site, point to the Generate button and click. Do that 20 or 30 times. Then look through the batch of inspirational posters, download the best half-dozen as jpg files, and load them into a PowerPoint presentation. You’re done preparing! Now just ask each participant to explain a quote.  

20 quotations InspiroBot generated for me are:

1]   “How would the world look if lawyers would just be the solution and not the problem?”

2]   “Maybe opportunities are opportunities because you’re losing it?”

3]   “Make everybody feel freakishly significant.”

4]   “You cannot have ice without a feeling.”

5}   “An erotic thought is never alone.”

6]   “Viruses have the potential to generate ambiguity.”

7]   “Loneliness is not to begin, but to imagine the unexaminable.”

8]   “Understand that you are creative. Understand that you are impressive. Understand that you are special.”

9]   “They can make you get rich, but they cannot make you build a pyramid.”

10] “How would the world look if each individual would begin to confront hypocrisy?”

11] “Royals become royals because of the money.”

12] “Everyone you know will secretly become the grand delusion.”

13] “Dancing without opportunity is like civil war without a home.”

14] Home Office is just another word for Fallout Shelter.”

15] “What seems smart to a lady, seems unsmart to an actor.”

16] “What if secret messages can be sorrows if we just think outside the box?”

17] “Drug your secrets.”

18] “The world is real.”

19] “Get lucky. Drink milk.”


20] “What is so insane about encouraging an honest person to be a burglar?”






































 Four examples of posters from #5, #8, #17, and #19 are shown above. #8 employs the Rule of Three, and looks particularly impressive. If you swap the word order for #20,  recaption, and crop (as shown below), you get what might be a teen-age romance follow-up to those silly Got Milk? ads from a couple decades ago.





























I saw InspiroBot mentioned in a LinkedIn Pulse article by Lou Bilancia on July 16, 2017 titled Al - Barba Tenus Sapientes - It’s “A” artificial, but I find nothing “I.” He’d posted it in one of the Failure Analysis groups that I read. You can find the quote Lou used for his title discussed in an August 26, 2016 article at Mental Floss by Paul Anthony Jones titled 20 Latin Phrases You Should Be Using. 


Update July 28, 2017
If you’re in a huge hurry, you could just write down those quotations.

But if you put the poster images into PowerPoint, you also could cheat by adding text boxes with bogus but plausible sounding sources like the following four (or even ask if those sources were real):

21] Talk loud in public and be human - Theodore Roosevelt?

22] With incredible lusts come incredible questions - Spiderman?

23] Drugs are designed to improve your life - Hunter S. Thompson?

24] If you are the dumbest person in the building, try finding another building - Jim Carrey?

 


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