Happy Birthday Mr. Snuffleupagus
The older I get, the more I realize I'm turning into my mother, a woman who has been known throughout my life to launch into a full waterworks display faster than you can say emotionally manipulative Internet chain letter. Case in point, the drive to Midlothian yesterday. I was listening to NPR and Renee Montagne mentioned that it was the fortieth birthday of the seminal children's show Sesame Street, and I got a little emotional. I got to thinking what a groundbreaking show it was and how, for generations of poor rural kids in pre-Internet days, it was our first exposure to multiculturalism. I thought about how brave the producers had been to push the envelope and insist o

HelLMS
The more I've come to understand my new job and all it entails, the more I've come to realize that there is little, if anything, new under the sun. Case in point: the Commonwealth of Virginia's LMS or HelLMS, as I've come to think of it. LMS stands for the Learning Management System, and it is at once the bane of my existence; the source of all budget shortfalls in the great state of Virginia; the weapon of mass destruction smoking gun from Iraq and the underlying reason for the Republican sweep into office last week. Its connection with global warming has not yet been proven. About a year before I arrived at the Virginia Department of Emergency Management to begin my new j

The Korean Experience
For the past couple of weeks, I've run headlong up against the realization that, for all my railing against the homogenization of the world community, global diversity is alive and well. The boys from Seoul left for home Friday and with them, my previous assumptions about the shrinking world and internet-induced culture cloning. For each of the past three years, Emergency Management personnel from the Republic of Korea have made the long trip to Virginia for a training exchange program of sorts. I say "of sorts," because the Commonwealth has yet to actually send anyone to Korea to complete the exchange and, given the austerity of the current budgetary climate, probably

Jimmy's Right
Last week, Jimmy Carter drew fire from the right over statements that the more viruluent strains of criticism toward Barack Obama were based in latent racism. He was particularly critical of Joe Wilson's "You lie" outburst, and of email strings that continue to be circulated by conservative interest groups that compare Obama to, alternately, an animal and Adolf Hitler. Since I have the misfortune of having a new boss who is fascinated with conservative talk programming, I am force fed Fox News Network and Rush Limbaugh in stereo most days. Somehow, by the time those talking heads finished spinning their revisions of his comments, Carter had said that any disagreement with the President's po