JULIA GROSVENOR
Satirist
grosvejm@plu.edu
TEDxTacoma is coming to the Karen Hille Phillips Center at Pacific Lutheran University on Friday, April 22 from 7-9 p.m.. The topic for 2016 will be “Healthy Future,” and tickets are on sale now.
In the meantime, here are some topics for TED Talks that didn’t quite make the cut: “Love Yourself and Like My Selfie” by theatre major sophomore Jennifer Elchman insists she has discovered the key to complete happiness, and the first step is following her on Instagram.
“My theory is, the reason everyone can’t find joy in life is because they haven’t faved and tweeted all of my selfies, and deep down they know that makes them a bad person,” Elchman said.
Supposedly Elchman claims that even though she has been rejected from an official time slot, she will be showing up to the event and promoting her “Instabrand” to all the attendants in the audience.
“Martin Shkreli; Harbinger of the Apocalypse?” Not very many people are fond of the man who bought out a life saving AIDs medication only to drastically inflate the price. But Earl Pimley, who is a guy who sort of just hangs around campus a lot, believes there’s more to this raging social media antagonist than meets the eye. Apparently, Pimley discovered that Martin Shkreli is an anagram for “Limn Earth Risk.”
“Limn is a weird word that means to depict or illuminate, so that actually means something—that Marin’s place in the limelight means we’re all in trouble,” Pimley said.
“College is Stupid” by former student Colter Barques reportedly proposed this topic after he failed all of his classes in Fall Term and his merit based scholarship was taken away. The contents of the talk are unknown because he never submitted a manuscript and his audition tape was footage of him looking at his phone for 20 minutes.
“Don’t Go Green, Hippies” It is a common theme for Ted Talks to focus on sustainability. However, business professor Wilson Druff has a message in the exact opposite direction. He doesn’t believe that depleting resources and climate change are not problems, but he thinks that trying to solve them in the present is not the most strategic choice.
“People keep telling me we’ve got to keep the environment healthy for future generations, but I mean, have you seen future generations? These Gen Z’s and Millennials have it way too easy! They don’t know how to do anything for themselves. The only way to ensure the environment gets fixed is to make things so bad that these kids have to get off their butts and iPhones and actually do some work,” Druff said.
He then spends the majority of the talk listing easy ways to waste energy and resources.
