It’s Friday. Another week has come and gone, and it is time to clearout the lunchtime links again..
- To Their Credit. The LA Times continued its series on “Buy Here, Pay Here” car lots with articles on how Wall Street is behind the lots and how the urban poor especially depend on their cars to stay employed, with few other options to buy them. The second part of the series was particularly scary when it noted that:
Buy Here Pay Here is also being boosted by one of the sophisticated financial strategies that drove the nation’s recent housing boom and bust: securitization. Loans on decade-old clunkers are being bundled into securities, just as subprime mortgages were a few years ago. In the last two years, investors have bought more than $15 billion in subprime auto securities.
In other words, we have people looking to make money doing it at the expense of the working class, reaping the benefits of unwise loans and poor regulation. Will we never learn? This is the reason people are planning to flee their banks on November 5, and that Guy Fawkes masks are selling like, um, hotcakes.
- Images of Women. I’m really growing to admire and respect Mayim Bialik. Oldsters may remember her from “Blossom“; nowadays, she stars as Amy Farrah Fowler on “Big Bang Theory“. Not only does she play a molecular biologist with a PhD; she is one in real life (i.e., she has a PhD in Molecular Biology). She also practices traditional Judaism, which embraces modesty (rare, in Hollywood), and does her best to follow those practices, be it in her choice of Emmy attire or her attire on the TV sitcom. I mention this all because she wrote an interesting article about a W magazine photo shoot that glorifies torture of women. As she writes:
Don’t tell me I am taking this too seriously; I have been accused of being “too serious” since I was about 10 years old, so that doesn’t deter me anymore. This is serious. The statistics of physical and sexual abuse, rape, imprisonment, and sexual trafficking of women and girls in this country (in your very own cities, friends) and all over the world should offend us and disturb us greatly. If nothing else, it should not be acceptable for women and girls to be sold as prostitutes anywhere. Nowhere. Never.
I wish Ai Weiwei could have made his political statement in a way that didn’t place women at the center of a prism of the combination of torture, imprisonment, abuse and titillation. If any good comes out of this photo shoot, maybe it will be in making someone somewhere speak out against this kind of obscene excuse for art.
I agree with Mayim, and I feel there is no excuse for pictures that sexualize torture.
- That Flashy Girl. Speaking of flashy girls…. Mental Floss has an interesting piece on how Fran Drescher’s series, “The Nanny“, has been redone in various countries. I particularly enjoyed watching the opening sequences, which I felt was the best part of the series. Speaking of opening sequences, the LA Times is asking people to vote on which 1970-1989 show has the best opening sequence.
- Yum. Yum. I was really pleased today to read that Steak and Shake, a midwest burger chain, may be coming to SoCal. Steak and Shake (and Ted Drewes) are treats whenever I visit St. Louis; it would be lovely to have them out here.
- Forewarned. Next week is a national wide test of the Emergency Broadcast System (November 9). It is only a test.
