The Lucky Donut

The small brown door on the right is actually for a refridgerator, and there's a coffee maker too.

The Strip view is somewhat obscured by the big-ass television.

The view is best at night when everything is lit up, but it was pretty spectacular at sunrise (and a bit easier to take pictures of through a dirty window too). I have a panoramic view of the mountains, and can see the Strip from half of Caesars to Stratosphere as well as Downtown in the distance.

In Philadelphia airport, in a fast food joint I'd never heard of before, which had an impossibly small menu, I was given a choice that I'd never been offered before.

At Chick-Fil-A (I'm still saying it out loud even now, the name bothers me so much) I had the number two combo, which in retrospect I wish I'd ordered by name. It's a chargrilled chicken sandwich.

The other choices were a not-so-chargrilled chicken sandwich, or chicken nuggets (which I have to assume is the meat from a sandwich chopped into small pieces). That's it.

When I ordered iced tea for my drink, the lady asked me: "Sweet or unsweet".

I thought my American vocab was getting pretty strong, but is "unsweet" really a word? Unsweetened, sure, but can you just throw "un" in front of any adjective like that and hope it works? I guess they can't call it "sour" or "bitter" or nobody would drink it, and a burger bar calling a soft drink "dry" would be a little too pretentious. What the hell. I unsweeted right back at her to confirm my choice.

So not only had I never heard that word before, I've also never even thought of this before. I don't know whether iced tea is normally sweetened. I guess it quite possibly is as this one was pretty, err, dry. I've definitely never had to make that decision before though.

I watched Supersize Me recently in an attempt to scare me off the diet of fast food that's going to be all too easy to succumb to when I'm in Vegas by myself for a week.

The film pointed out just how many spoonfuls of sugar there are in every extra large soda, it was like 50 or something stupid, nearly a full bag probably. I'm not a fan of sugary drinks anyway, usually choosing Diet Coke whether or not I care about what I consume on any given day, but I did think that iced tea was another sugar-free option. Now I really don't know.

Anyway, I've made a fairly healthy start to the trip (if you discount the picture above, which was very nice) - I've already bought a bunch of bananas for breakfasts!

The over/under on how long it lasts is 2 days.

I saw that Claire had set one of her classes a maths homework on quadratic equations, which she'd abbreviated to "Factorising Quads".

My immediate thought was "that'll be two pairs then".

Sleep time now.  Got to be up before 7am to catch a plane

A big thank you to all my backers for the tournaments I'm going to play in Las Vegas over the next week.  Between them they have 33% of my action.

The team list looks like this: Chris, Dan, Dave, David, Gareth, Geoff, Monty, Neil, Paul, Rich... and Sidge makes eleven.

Eleven oughta do it, don't you think?

Oh wait, that's not quite right...

EDIT: There's always one isn't there?  :) Vij called me while I was at the airport and said he'd take 5%, although he'd totally forgotten about it and was calling about something completely different.  He remembered when he was deafened by an announcement in the terminal.  ty Vij.

I'm writing some bi-weekly articles about poker in Las Vegas for Poker News to coincide with their World Series of Poker live coverage. 

If I actually manage to stick to the schedule while I'm off chasing the action next week, there'll be a new one every Monday and Friday.

Here are the first three articles in the UKPN Vegas Guide:

Are You Heading to Las Vegas for the World Series of Poker?

Where to Play Cash Poker in Las Vegas

The Low Down on Low Limit