Culley's Continental Drift: Brasil's A Beach!

Culley's Continental Drift: Brasil's A Beach!

Is It Easier to Be a Black Politician than a Women Politician

In this years 2008 Democratic Presidential primary much has been made as to the race and gender of the major candidates. In fact it could be argued that the race and gender is what has propelled both Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton into front runner status in the first place. Though recently there has been discussion as to whether or not Hillary has hit the proverbial glass ceiling, while Obama continues to climb. So is it easier to be a black politician for president than a women. If we were looking at a women with less than one term in the U.S. Senate who was in her 40's , would she be taken as seriously as Barack has been taken? Of course conjecture is always just that , mixed with biases and opinions but I have a suspicion that there are almost no women in this country that would be getting the same reception. The threshold for women is much higher. A younger women with limited Barack-like experience would have to deal even more so with the issues of her physical appearance, her clothes, her hair. In polite society we do not speak of race but we still speak of appearances. It is only Hillary's age that has spared her the open criticism of appearance. It is never an issue for a man -regardless of race- unless you are wearing womens clothing. So the judgment starts off right from the appearance and heads downward from there

Coming to Terms with Being Not Young

See, I can't even say the real word - old - in the title, so how can I ever come terms with the actual process. Hey, I am not really that old. I really am just age challenged. How can I tell that this is true? Because I actually had to search on how and what a blog is. Most of the kids in the world see blogs as part of their world. But in my world not so much. Most of the kids on the internet have never known the world without the internet.
Now that VCR's are going away there will be some who can not relate to the following story but not so long ago the following was true in most households with parents over 35. Walk into any living room where there was an over 35 person who owned a vcr (because there were lots who did not own one) and low and behold there was a flashing light. The great flashing light on the VCR was the clock that was constantly flashing because the owners could not figure out how to get it to stop. It would bug me to no end that this would happen to my parents. Whenever I visited their house I would immediately walk over to the VCR, go through the menu and set the time. Time it took to set = 60 seconds. Why was it that my parents could not figure it out? Why was it when I visited another older friend that he had placed tape over the flashing time clock? I would go through the directions with them, show them, write it down for them yet still I would come over and there it would be flashing.
It turned out that it really was a generational thing. Trying to understand an electronic menu was an abstract idea that had no history for them. This simple task was so outside of their experience growing up that they had never developed the neural pathways that made this action second nature to my generation.
Well the internet is now the VCR clock for my generation. And I am refusing to put tape over the flashing clock and pretend it is not flashing. I am going to make those neural pathways surge and connect whether they like it or not. And this blog is my first step. So come along for the ride -that is assuming I have started down the right path. After all this really could be just a flashing VCR clock and I am too old to see it