Photos

This is the Christmas window display in the Apple store on Regent Street, where I spent much too long drooling over £300 headphones last night.  Boy they're good.  Coldplay was on in the store, so I stuck on a pair of Bose Quiet Comfort 3s, turned on noise reduction and bam... no more background drivel.

I'm afraid I don't really get the tree-on-a-stick.  Maybe having just a snowman isn't enough to say "It's Christmas, buy more stuff".  And isn't that Tommy Cooper's hat?

Tesco have been giving away a free box of mince pies with every grocery delivery lately.  A nice little bonus for sure, but these may well be the sweetest mince pies of the season.  A very nice, completely unexpected freebie from Virgin Trains no less! Pies, cheese and booze.  The perfect combination.

 And yes it does indeed say:

 It's better if I keep that out of context, don't you think...

T-21 baby!

And like twenty something shopping days to Christmas, if you care about that.

If I had a Las Vegas advent calendar, it would definitely need to have a picture of a cactus dressed up in Christmas lights.  I would have said this even before hearing about just what they do to the Ethel M cactus garden.  As if cacti aren't cool enough.  The chocolate factory is cack but I'll definitely be going back to get a camera full of pictures of lit up desert plants.  Meantime, and seeing as how Santa will have been and gone by the time I can post one of my own, here's a shot from the Las Vegas Review Journal.

Megan Edwards has a couple more:
http://www.meganedwards.com/Vegasland/Ethel-M-Holiday-Lights.htm

The pedantry that must have done into making this sign, when it would clearly be much more effective just to go with the Americanized spelling...

Remember when the Internet was flaunted as the marketplace of the future, offering lower overheads to traders and allowing them to pass these savings onto consumers.  Stuff costing less online is one of the main reasons, besides porn, that the Internet has become so great.

It's not just Ticketmaster that seem to have forgotten this vision though, with their convenience charge (charged per ticket - clearly its more convenient when you buy several), building facility charge (think I might use the spa after the support act...) and of course the "if we can't charge you over the odds to mail your ticket, you still have to pay to pick it up" charge.  First class stamp - two quid.  Collect from box office - two quid.  You now even have the option to print your own ticket for some events.  Two quid.

The auctioneers selling off the remains of the Stardust also charge a premium for buying online.  The auction fees are 10% if you buy on site, or 13% if you buy online.  Who am I to question the logic behind this?  I'm actually more concerned with the logistics of actually buying, storing and bringing home something as wonderous as this:

The auction starts a week on Friday at 11am PST.  That's 7pm over here - and can you think of a more perfect Friday night in than phoning for a curry and watching the sale of thousands of pieces of memorabilia from a classic Vegas casino?

Well yeah, you're right.  I do need to get out more.

It's difficult to capture the sheer beauty of a leaky can of expandable filler in a two-dimensional photograph.  But here we go.  Probably the only highlight from my weekend of draughtproofing.

It was obvious the Stardust's days were numbered a few years ago, when they were making a big deal out of its 45th anniversary.  It was never going to make it to the big five-oh.  As another legendary Las Vegas hotel shuts its doors today, I feel like I should be writing a little bit about what I remember about the place.

Unfortunately, that is very little.  The fact I have a players card (below) doesn't necessarily mean I played there.  I have a whole bunch of players cards from all kinds of casinos I've been to just once.  And why not?  I vaguely remember some cashback promotion at the Stardust for cycling your money through video poker that they never actually coughed the rebate on, and I'm pretty sure that was the only time we'd been there until this summer. 

In August the end was very much in sight, although nobody quite knew when.  Today's closing is ahead of schedule, because most of the staff have already moved on to new jobs and there was little point in keeping it open.  The gift shop sold merchandise bearing the dates 1958-2006, although it was still such tat that all all I ended up buying was an energy drink.  We just stayed long enough to win two silver strikes, both the same one as usual.

We never got to see Wayne Newton there or make a bet in the daddy of all sportsbooks.  Which, for people like me who missed the first fourty years of the Stardust, are pretty much the only things I can really say I know about it.  Oh, and it still did look pretty cool at night.  I do hope they leave the lights on until it finally falls over.

The Stardust will be be imploded to make way for Echelon Place, due to open in 2010.

The similarities between Las Vegas and Blackpool are much stronger than I first thought. Let's look at the evidence...

So I know I'm a bit slow with this one, because whilst Sky+ is diligently taping tonight's NFL games for me, I'm still watching last week's Monday Night Football from the DVD I made to watch on the train.  Once I'm actually used to travelling at 7am I'll probably be able to watch things, but I'm not sure whether that will be before the football season is over or not.

Anyway, I was actually not paying much attention whilst I was playing a fixed limit Hold'em tournament on Empire Poker that I'd started by accident (but actually ended up finishing 20th from over 1300) and ordering myself a new cellphone all at the same time.  But somehow I was drawn to this caption which flashed up for all of about half a second.

I'm not sure what information the caption guy hadn't been bothered to type yet, but the game was effectively over so he could well have gone home early leaving someone else to fill in the gaps.  Jacksonville were kneeling on the 1 yard line to run out the clock giving a final score of PIT 0 - 9 JAX.  Apparently the first time a Monday Night Football game had ever seen a single figure total score, and only the 5th time in history a defending championship team had failed to score at all.

I know I really wasn't paying much attention so why do these really quite useless facts stick with me even now?

As if the word (?) spork wasn't funny enough... this gem is courtesy of Tesco.

... or I will make sure they can't sleep tonight, says Harrah's Entertainment.

How freaking scary is this thing, at the Rio's Masquerade in the Sky show? You have to see the eyes move for the full horror, but it's still pretty grotesque in this snapshot.

 

World's largest picture of Tony Braxton on the side of a building.

First let's replicate some classic European architecture.

Then let's use it as a giant advertising pole.

 The Venetian apparently has a new show...