Min Jung Kim’s Neighborhood

Neighborhood dispute

"This would be so much more satisfying online! 'Sensitive thugs, y'all need blogs.' Or Second Life, or something."

I went to the laundromat last night after work. They've got Wi-Fi now (good!); you have to hunt down an attendant for the password (bad!); there are no power outlets so you can always be chargin' (ugly!).

A guy waiting for his clothes to dry had an Ovation acoustic guitar with him. I saw him patting his pockets down in search of a pick. I remembered seeing one at the bottom of my laundry basket, so I rooted around, found it and handed it to him. He thanked me and began to play.

I had a shaker/thunderstick in my car's trunk (because that's where all my percussion instruments have been hiding out since this summer's CampCamps), so I went and got it and played along. He was kind enough to pass the guitar off after a little while.

We made 40 cents. That would've covered seven minutes' worth of dryer time. We gave it to a man who'd walked in and was asking people for change.

[...] The adviser said that he had heard from a source in Iran that the Revolutionary Guards have been telling religious leaders that they can stand up to an American attack. "The Guards are claiming that they can infiltrate American security," the adviser said. "They are bragging that they have spray-painted an American warship—to signal the Americans that they can get close to them." (I was told by the former senior intelligence official that there was an unexplained incident, this spring, in which an American warship was spray-painted with a bull's-eye while docked in Qatar, which may have been the source of the boasts.) [...]