Balls of Brass: Sweet Baby Jesus... Vegas.

Finally shaking off the Vegas hangover, so I guess I'll give my thoughts on Sin City.

Avoid it like the plague.

Let me rephrase that: If you don't have at least 10 stacks ($10,000 USD) you would happily put into a paper shredder, Vegas isn't the city for you.

Maybe I'm exaggerating, but fun in Sin City certainly isn't cheap. And by fun I mean misery.

Maybe we fucked up (okay, we definitely fucked up). Maybe not hangover bad, but between four college students we managed to squander over 5 grand. Yeah, that's an average of a thousand a day. The sad part is, we didn't even have money to lose the last two days. It was literally all we could do to get home.

That being said, Vegas is exciting. Aaaand by exciting I mean dirtier than a 2 cent hooker with more STD's than brain cells.

From the moment you arrive a haze of sex and debauchery hits you like a Charles Barkley tee shot. Sounds great, right? Not really. Most of your time on the streets is spent fending off hoards of illegal immigrants armed with stacks of call girl cards as tall as the MGM Grand. If you manage to ignore that aspect, you'll still be confronted by the sleaziest, slimiest club promoters on the planet promising sex and grandeur at their shit strip club filled with more c-section scars than ass cheeks (don't ask me how it's possible--it just is).

I'm sure you're asking, "But it's Vegas! There had to be some redeeming qualities, right?"

The answer? Not really. Unless by redeeming you mean unbelievably disappointing, and in that case, yes. There were plenty of "redeeming" qualities.

The Pawn Stars pawn shop, for instance. You know, the trendy show about a family owned Vegas pawn shop where ridiculously rare and valuable, as well as just plain ridiculous, items are brought in and sold by your everyday street walker? Yeah. That place blows. There never fails to be 80 or so Pawn Stars fan boys (well, mostly old women) waiting in line to get into the crackerjack box sized store only to realize the coolest shit in there is a t-shirt depicting Chumlee as Scarface (That one is actually a lot funnier--and cheaper--than the legit version. You're welcome.). They only had like three items from the show in the store, and needless to say, none of those sandbagging pawn star bastards were anywhere to be found. Fuckers.

Taken by yours truly.

In all seriousness, though, Vegas was a decently cool experience. If nothing else, it was worth seeing. I guess the biggest problem I had with it was that from the second you arrived you just felt like a sucker. Like you were had. So you can imagine what we felt like by the end of the trip. Probably a good bit like Allen when he realized the drugs he bought from the straight shooter at the liquor store were roofies instead of ecstasy. Definitely not what I expected.

The drug dealer at the liquor store wasn't a good guy

Anyway, without further ado, I'll reluctantly post my pictures from the trip. I say reluctantly because the pictures make it seem 1000 times better than the reality of it. Oh well.