Used to be California/LA led the nation in bank robberies, with 357 in 2006 alone.  Perhaps Point Break’s Presidential bank robbery team (that’s Patrick Swayze as Bodhi as Ronald Reagan) wasn’t such a fantasy.

We’re still up there with these desperate people (A former policeman and Little League coach known as the “Polite Bank Robber?” The 180 pound ‘Starlet Bandit’ in movie star sunglasses? A father/son bank robbery team, anyone?) but there’s more people robbin’ with a pen and a calculator these days.

According to the LA Times Peter Hong,

“The FBI’s annual mortgage fraud review says L.A. leads in mortgage fraud, measured by reports from the agency’s field offices.

“The Los Angeles field office received 9,971 “suspicious activity reports” in 2008; second-place Miami had 5,155. The report says fraud schemes include builders offering secret incentives to home buyers, such as falsely inflating a purchase price to make it appear as if a buyer has made a down payment when none was made. If the home forecloses, there is no home equity for the lender to recover.

Other schemes the report identifies are scams in which a group uses a straw buyer to intentionally default on a mortgage, then buys the property at a discount from the lender through a short sale; and foreclosure rescue schemes in which perpetrators offer to help a borrower in foreclosure and surreptitiously take over the deed to the property.”

We may not have a football team–but hey, we’re number one!

Unlike many other religions, Jews don’t proselytize, which is why there are only about 14 million Jews in the world.  However, ’sincere converts’ can be and are accepted as Jews, with a long list from Ruth the Moabite to soul singer Jackie Wilson, Ivanka Trump, Elizabeth Taylor, Marilyn Monroe, Connie Chung, and Campbell Brown, but of course I like Elizabeth Banks best.

Often, the conversion process requires up to a year of study with a rabbi, immersion in a mikva for women or circumcision for men, and many other signs of  dedication.  Lindsay Lohan seems to understand the importance of sincerity in conversion; asked if she was converting, she said “I’m trying.”

Does Britney, who wears a Jewish star in the picture below, understand?

But if she become Jewish, she would be far from the blackest of black sheep.  I’m not even talking Tom Arnold here.  Historically the worst would be Nero, who supposedly converted to Judaism to avoid God’s wrath, but Liberian dictator Charles Taylor can certainly give him a run for his money.

As his ‘friends’ send him off, the whitewash  cover-up continues for this great man.

ABC News: Ethics Riots in China Leave 156 Dead

Ethics, ethnics, (they’re talking about Moslem Uighurs, an ethnic minority) who cares as long as it passes the spellcheck?

The long-time home of the Jackson family on Hayvenhurst Avenue is less than a mile from the Encinoman family compound, so my son and I went over there last week.  We had to abandon our vehicle, as despite California’s $14 billion dollar budget shortfall,  LA police and parking agents are manning several roadblocks outside Gelson’s. 

I hope to post pictures later this week.  However, visiting the florid floral display and signs saying sayonara to the Gloved/Loved One, I can say that just as the Republicans have a base, Michael Jackson did/does too.    It’s about the exact opposite of the Republicans, though, as MJ’s base is composed of women, black people and gays.

“Bank owned home!” screamed the sign.  I turned the Mustang up the street and joined dozens of other lookie-loos staring at the (mostly) empty Studio City house.

The search for a REO has become the new status symbol.  It’s also pornographic in the voyeuristic allure of going through  a very recently vacated home and staring at the left behind possessions of the former owners, while fantasizing about their lives and what brought them to this.  Sometimes its pretty clear; the Tarzana house I looked at last week turned out to have a $596,000 mortgage–and a $251,000 second! The banks were still fighting over what they would recover while the moving truck came.  

The Studio City house (at least with REOs realtors dispense with calling them ‘homes’) seemed to not only satisfy people’s pornographic fantasies of the absolute lowest price, but may have belonged to porn people as well, judging (and I’m not judging) by the framed 8×10 theatre cards of “Desire” and the like, showing a pair getting down.  (Perhaps the home’s female owner?)

At least they managed to break out of the Canoga Park/Van Nuys porn ghetto, before they crashed back down to earth. 

I found a Guess watch in the yard and thought of putting it in my pocket.  My son said, “I wouldn’t touch anything here.”  He’s smarter than me, and it also seemed like bad karma to swipe abandoned foreclosed possessions, so I left the watch, the porno placards and a burned copy of The Joy of Sex sitting there.

Balboa Park in Encino was packed this morning.  No special events; just mothers, children, families, single women, groups, you name it.

Not really the homeless, either; their recreational vehicles were parked in the lot across the street, camping out for the 77th consecutive day.

Jogging around the park, I counted over 200 people before 9:45AM.  I don’t think they were going to work, either. 

It was the reserve army of the unemployed, on the march  jogging strolling biking dog walking fishing.

In a company designed to defy gravity and send hundreds of passengers hurtling at 500 miles per hour 30,000 feet over the Atlantic Ocean, it’s never a good idea not to pay your employees.

Similarly, Terminator Salvation or no, I’d be a little leery of riding the roller coasters at the bankrupt amusement park.

Here are three headlines from June 11 (today) and June 10, 2009. The first two are from NBCLosAngeles.com, the third from the San Jose Mercury News.

Skelton near Tahoe is man missing since 2006

The usually profoundly boring “The Politics of Culture” on KCRW got a lot more interesting today, as artist Ed Moses used the word “bullshit” in response to a question posed by the indecipherable Edward Goldman and station queen/dragon lady Ruth Seymour. “I used to say 98% of everything is bullshit,” was his exact, on-air quote, which KCRW seemed to like so much that they podcast it unedited.

The irony, of course, is that Sandra Tsing Lo got fired for saying a magic word, possibly threatening the station’s license with the wrath of the FCC, according to mama Ruth.  Perhaps Seymour should have fired herself?