The skin care and beauty product company Dove has been doing some rather incredible marketing of late with their Campaign for Real Beauty. I’ve blogged before about their evolution video which shows the make-up and Photoshop process a model goes through.
Now they have a second video, called Onslaught, which puts the barrage of sexually charged media images in the context of an elementary school aged girl. The ending message is ‘talk to your daughter before the industry does.’
A while back I blogged about the Jena 6 story, a supposed explosion of racism in Jena, La. where nooses were hung, things spiraled out of control and six black students were charged with attempted murder.
Today kottke.org pointed to a Louisiana pastor, Eddie Thompson who is trying to dispel some of the myths in the media. Like, um, the entire case. Here are three corrections Thompson offered that stood out from more than a dozen:
Another ad from a 1930s newspaper, this time encouraging the malnourished ladies to take Kelp-a-Malt tablets to put on 5 pounds of firm flesh. This would be the pre-Twiggy days when people liked a little meat on their women. But not too much. That didn’t work either.
Bizarre. I always thought anything pre-1950 was so much more straight-laced, bathing suits that looked like wet suits and the like (at least mainstream stuff you’d find in a newspaper). Apparentlynot. (Though I suppose these sorts of ads might be just like today’s ads for L.A. Weight Loss and the what not that look just as creepy.)
Last week a seven-alarm fire ripped through an abandonded warehouse and spread into a Philadelphia neighborhood, displacing eight families, forcing 100 to evacuate and requiring 175 firefighters to keep it under control. One of the houses destroyed belonged to the Simple Way community center and was home to a number of neighborhood initiatives, micro-businesses and two community members–Jesce Walz and Shane Claiborne (Claiborne is the author of The Irresistible Revolution and a speaker at the Foursquare NextGen Summit ’07). Check out this video for an overview of what happened.
Claiborne and Walz lost everything they own (sounds like Claiborne managed to save his laptop), yet it doesn’t seem to phase them:
“The most valuable things in life you can’t buy, sell or steal,” he said. “People ask, ‘How does it feel to lose everything?’ I say, ‘I wouldn’t know. Everybody survived.’ ” (The Philadelphia Inquirer)
The community is trying to rebuild and find hope in loss, setting up funds to help rebuild the Simple Way and to help neighborhood families. They’re also pushing the city to turn the destroyed warehouse–which had been labeled a fire hazard and has been abandonded for over 20 years, yet city officials never acted on it–into a community park. The economic disparity evident here reminds me of Object Orange in Detroit.
In September 2006, a group of African American high school students in Jena, Louisiana, asked the school for permission to sit beneath a “whites only” shade tree. There was an unwritten rule that blacks couldn’t sit beneath the tree. The school said they didn’t care where students sat. The next day, students arrived at school to see three nooses (in school colors) hanging from the tree.
The boys who hung the nooses were suspended from school for a few days. The school administration chalked it up as a harmless prank, but Jena’s black population didn’t take it so lightly. Fights and unrest started breaking out at school. The District Attorney, Reed Walters, was called in to directly address black students at the school and told them all he could “end their life with a stroke of the pen.” (from While Seated via Kottke, more from the BBC)
And it went down hill from there. Fights errupted, someone tried to burn down the school and then a white student was injured and six black students were charged with attempted murder. The trial is starting now and is beginning to draw attention.
This sounds like something from the 1960s. Ridiculous.
You could just call it the river of garbage–check out the incredibly polluted Citarum River in Indonesia, clogged with the garbage and waste of more than 9 million people and 500 factories. That picture is a guy in a boat in the river–you can’t even see the water.
Bono has said that poverty is a justice issue, and I think this kind of pollution is likewise a justice issue. (link via kottke.org)
“Today, we live in a world that tolerates extreme poverty much like racism was tolerated 50+ years ago. We can all become people determined to do something to change the world. We can speak up, we can volunteer and we can give. Ending extreme poverty will take money, political and moral will, and a shift in our value system. When enough ordinary people embrace these issues, things will begin to change.
OK, this is a bit bizarre, but bear with me. A Wet Wipe Revolution is arguing that toilet paper should be replaced with wet wipes for a more sanitary… um… existance. They argue in the original post (with 75+ comments) that you don’t wash your dirty dishes with dry paper towels, so why does that work for… um… wiping your butt (perhaps awkward is a better description than bizarre).
The average American uses between 100 and 176 gallons of water per day. About half of that goes down the toilet. The average African family uses 5 gallons of water per day. More than one billion people lack access to clean drinking water.
Suddenly something so mundane like washing your hands or taking a shower seems like an incredibly extravagent thing to do, reserved only for the very wealthy. And if you can do those things in your own home, you are very wealthy.
I’m a long way from one of those crunchy environmentalists, but simple concepts like conservation seem like really good ideas, environmentally, economically and even biblically. Water is not an unlimited resource and some argue that it will become this century’s oil.
