When you blink your eyes...

I've been listening to Velvet Ungeround - Loaded a lot recently. I've been able to get into it a lot quicker than the other 2 VU albums I have, Velvet Ungeround and Nico and White Light/White Heat. Those are excellent albums, it just took me several listens to get into them.

I've also been listening to Joy Division's - Closer quite often. It was something that also took me awhile to absorb but once I finally did I really appreciate it. For the last week or 2 I've been listening to the track "Colony" frequently. Its just a great sound of beautiful pain, sadness and agony. Listening to Joy Division all the time for me is not good, however, it can tend to make me feel depressed. That's why I need to offset it with something like Hall and Oates to cleanse the pallette if you will.

I went to my usual music spot, Guest Room Records in Norman, yesterday and picked up 3 new albums. The Cure - The Head on the Door; Pretty Girls Make Graves - The New Romance; and Loretta Lynn - Van Lear Rose.

So far I've listened to the Loretta Lynn album a couple times all the way through and I think it definitely lives up to the hype. At times I can hear the White Stripes sound coming through with Jack White's influence. But its true country with some noticeable tinges of rock on a few tracks.

I've got an exciting trip to England to the Reading music festival planned for late August. My friend said today he's getting plane tickets for only $300 a piece round trip, but they are stand by. I think it will be worth the hassle for that price. I am really looking forward to it.

I've put up the rest of the Las Vegas photos. I think they turned out pretty well. As always, I wish I'd gotten more of the things I'd seen but you can't get everything.

I spent last week visiting Las Vegas for the first time. I stayed at the Paris hotel which was pretty nice. Since it was for work my expenses were all paid for which was a big bonus. All I had to pay for was gambling and alcoholic beverages. The good thing is when you are gambling the alcoholic beverages are free so that is another plus.

The first day I was really tired and I didn't like Las Vegas on my first impression because everything seemed very fake. As the week went on and I experienced what it was really about I grew to like it there. On Thursday I took a nap from 6pm-midnight, when I woke up I decided to get my camera out and walk the strip. I ended up walking all the way from Paris to Binion's in the old downtown casino district. I left 12:30AM and got to Binion's at about 3:30AM. I just looked it up on yahoo maps and its over 6 miles. It was an exciting journey passed many new and old casinos, drug dealers, prostitutes, miniature wedding chapels, and drunken pedestrians. I saw the world championship of poker going on inside Binion's when I got there for a few minutes which was cool. I took a taxi back because I was exhausted and already felt lucky to not have been stabbed.

I'm trying out setting up my own blog. I've been doing some work to try to integrate the blog template into the current interface of my site as close as possible. So far it seems to be working pretty well, still have a bit of tweaking to go until I'm satisfied. I thought about writing my own blog application in php but I decided I didn't have the time to spend on it right now so I'm using the one by 'blogger'.

I plan on using this as a spot to talk about music and movies as well as complain about everything.