Baseball and beef jerky

These are things I only experience when I go to America, but that there should be more of over here. Actually, I'm sure you can find jerky in Britain if you know where to look, I'll have to check it out.

Still, I'm back now. Today was a getting-over-jetlag day (I hate overnight flights, they completely destroy my internal clock), tomorrow is officially the start of whatever I'm going to do with myself for the next couple of unemployed months. I haven't really decided yet, but it's going to be fun.

Las Vegas was completely awesome, if I really need to point that out. It's changed a bit since the last time I was there, with a couple of new hotel/casinos on the Strip which look much too stylish and contemporary to fit in around there, so I don't think they'll last long, but the basic grooviness of Vegas is still very much there. I saw the Cirque du Soleil's "O" for the second time, and it's still completely amazing. There's also a really great magician called Dirk Arthur, who performs in the shabbiest and nastiest casino in town, but has a very close-up and intimate act full of completely impossible magic tricks with minimal equipment and special effects and only a handful of lions and tigers appearing out of nowhere (that's the Las Vegas equivalent of pulling a rabbit out of a hat - no magic show is complete without at least one real tiger). It's not a spectacle like David Copperfield or Siegfried and Roy (who I saw back in 2002, before they retired), but it's somehow even more cool because it looks real rather than like a showbiz performance.

Also, it was baking hot! As I might have mentioned before, whenever I go to America, I always get the hottest weather - everyone told me that it was unseasonably warm all of a sudden, even by Las Vegas standards. Charlotte, North Carolina, where I changed planes en route, was also extremely hot, but in the humid kind of way that you don't get in Vegas. And it's been scorching hot back here today, too! Summer's here!