Toastmaster Video

Pop Quiz: Who is our Toastmaster, Michael Jon Khandelwal? Make your choice below:

1. Once one of the world’s premier primate behavioral scientists, Michael abandoned his award-winning work with monkeys, after a slight incident in the lab, for a new career in the entertainment industry. After directing a series of films (each one, inexplicably, in Spanish with German subtitles) and writing a well received coffee table book about hats, he decided to devote his creative energies to writing poetry about outhouses in southeastern West Virginia.
2. Michael has more than 26 years experience working as a content management specialist, with expertise managing and operating the iMIS and many other large content management systems, specializing in content development and re-structuring, fileserver maintenance, website redesign, style guideline creation, taxonomy, template and component creation, and website analysis and evaluation.
3. Exiled from Albania with his brother, Robin Welch, after a bloodless coup, Michael spends most of his time at a bar in Norfolk called Plaza del Sol, where, due to an injury that impedes long-term memory formation, he asks the workers to daily demonstrate the industrial dishwasher. That contraption fascinates him—the different tubes of brightly colored liquids, the big levers reminiscent of the Enterprise’s engine room (pre-reboot), and the spitting steam that makes sounds similar to the ones in The Hunt for Red October right when the bad Russian sub fires a missile at the defecting Russian sub and Alec Baldwin hadn’t started taking steroids yet.
4. Michael Khandelwal is an award-winning writer and teacher. He contributes editorials, profiles, and feature articles to Coastal Virginia Magazine (formerly Hampton Roads Magazine), teaches poetry and fiction for the Hampton Roads-area literary center, The Muse Writers Center (for which he is a founder and serves as Executive Director), is a past web content management specialist for The American Council on Education, and is the past President of the 2008 Electoral College of Virginia.
5. Having studied under pioneering drinker, Robin Welch, Michael made his mark at MarsCon years ago while stumbling through the halls after a freakish Scotch-in-the-hot-tub incident. Now, he is ready to offer his unique perspective on the art of drinking at a convention as this year’s Toastmaster. Often in possession of a very large and quite friendly drink, he’s happy to make one for you, too. You can find him at the Opening Ceremonies, Con-Suite, and at many room parties, as well as in the hotel lobby where he enjoys challenging LARPers to beer-chugging contests. Please offer him a drink.