In a few hours I will be getting on a flight bound for the UK. It’s just a short trip to see the folks and to perform my duties as the best man’s speech for a friend’s wedding. That’s right. Not the best man, just the speech. Our return flight will be during the daytime, but I doubt I will see anything as spectacular as this. For more aerial views, check out Russian pilot Leha’s website. (Via Metafilter.)

Within one block of our apartment in Prospect Heights are three laundries. Being creatures of habit we stick to the same laundry regardless of whether clothes go missing or emerge charged with static electricity.

But it’s not just habit. We really like the Chinese couple who work at the laundry. They don’t speak much English other than to say “Hello, how are you?” “Okay, seven o’clock?” and “How your wife?” They arrived in New York around three years ago, about the same time as me.

The other week at about 6pm I saw a small crowd gathered outside the laundry. Inside, about eight or nine police officers crowded into the tight space. Some were wearing protective masks as they sprayed for fingerprints. The laundry had been robbed at gunpoint at about 6pm on Flatbush Avenue, one of the busiest roads in Brooklyn.

A couple of days later Sofie and I popped in with a box of chocolates. Apparently the husband had been in Chinatown leaving his wife alone in the laundry. A man came into the store with a gun. He took money. And to make sure the man’s wife couldn’t call the police he ripped the phone out of the wall and stole the couple’s cell phone.

When we took our washing in the other day—about ten days after the robbery—the man’s wife wasn’t there. “Very scared,” said the man, shaking his head. I don’t think she will be back again.

When the Moshiach comes he will be very well dressed.

New York blogs have recently been abuzz about the activities of the splasher, a cretin who is going around the city throwing paint over street art and posting pseudointellectual notices nearby.

The story made it into the New York Times this weekend, where Alex Mindlin reported that the splasher has been defacing New York’s street art for more than a year.

So far, most reported attacks have been in Williamsburg and SoHo, but they have been in the Prospect Heights neighborhood too. This one is on the corner of Dean Street and Flatbush Avenue.

Here, a Gothamist reader puts the above vandalism in context:

The image that you destroyed above is of a woman that is involved in a TRUE struggle for autonomy and liberation from Capital. This portrait made of a woman who lives in Oaxaca is being used to raise consciousness about the uprising and movement of the APPO, (Popular Assembly for the People of Oaxaca). Some prints of this were recently returned to the women in their villages, and pasted up (I dare you to travel there and splash paint on them) The point is that you as a viewer reduce the image to be something to consumed and not something of beauty or of something to learn from. YOU decontextualize them and make them into nothing. Just like your actions have become. I look forward to the further attention your actions will recieve from the history makers at the NY Times this sunday, it will be YOU, and your actions that will be turned into just another movement. And consumed you are, one dollar an issue,read online for free or at a coffee shop.

You piss me off, you insult true revolutionaries working for self-determination that suffer real consequences. And you do it all within the safety of your home, in front of the computer, or at night on the street with a bucket of oops paint.

I find no integrity in your actions.

This is the last time I waste breath reacting to your senseless acts, because you just upped the ante.

-k

Could Mickey and his pals above the entrance to the Fifth Avenue Disney store do with a bath? Or have they always looked like that?