I finally saw Stealth. It’s a really bad movie and I feel I need to review the hour that I saw in an attempt to come to terms with loss of the hour I spent watching it. In that hour I got to see all sorts of cliche’s like the tech who doesn’t believe in the project getting replaced, hot shot pilots disobeying commands and falling in love with his wingwoman, hot shot pilots getting too close to bad guys and dying and my favorite the hot shot pilot who can pick up chicks even though he doesn’t speak their language, airplanes crashing into canyon walls.

One of the things that was definitely missing was action. It was like watching Gulf War 1. Good guys see bad guys, good guys fly over bad guys and drop bombs, bad guys die. They’re might have some anti aircraft fire but this was just a lame ass attempt to add action which just didn’t seem real. You’re not supposed to be able to shoot at a stealth fighter from the ground. It’s supposed to be about 10 miles in the sky. Not 100 foot from the ground.

There was also a pathetic body count. Summer blockbusters are supposed to have counts into the millions just look at independance day and the day after tomorrow. I counted 20. They kept on making it sound like more by saying “100 out of 100″ but it was only 20.

Imagine you are in Sally Longs, back in the good old days when the old juke box was there. Now take out the picture of the “12 Apostles” and replace it with leprechauns. Make it a little bit smaller and you’ve got Murphy’s, my new favorite Bar in Salt Lake City. The crowd is a little rough according to the G-Man but it’s just some bikers and stuff. Just like Sally’s.

Anyway one night while I was enjoying a drink this guy started talking to me about Tool as I was wearing my Tool hoody. He was disapointed with the tool album. Although there were good songs on the album there was a lot of fun which just didn’t seem right. He then went on to tell me his theory about how 10000 days is actually some form of decoy.

He said the album itself is littered with lots of clues. The track Viginti Tres which is latin for 23, a number which has a significant occult significance, which corresponds to hexagram 23 of the “I Ching”, P’o, which translates as splitting apart. There’s the song name right in two. Some of the tracks have been split apart such as Wings and Blame Hoffman/Rosetta Stoned (this isn’t anything new as Lateralus has Parabol/Parabola). Also a number of songs sound like they should be on other albums, for example “The Pot” sounds like it belongs on Undertow. In order to fool pirates Tool spent a year recording a decoy album. Is 10000 days that album?

Then he told me that Tool have recorded every concert that they have ever performed and the only live tracks they’ve released are on Opiate and Salival. He believes that Tool plan on releasing a live album in the near future and not only that but on the 6th of June they are going to start playing brand new songs that nobody has ever heard before and then are going to release them on a new live album.

Of course it’s more than likely that this is all the wishful thinking of a dissatisfied Tool fan. Personally I doubt it. I had a hard time coming up with evidence to back up the theory. During the course of my investigation I found a couple of rumours. One of which involved a release on the 6th of June but it seems likely that this will be a DVD single of Vicarious similiar to the Parabola and Lateralus ones they released earlier, but who knows with Tool?

So I got back from my little trip down south to Zion National Park and Las Vegas. I’m going to talk about Vegas in this post because, let’s face it, Vegas is way cooler that trees, desert, mountains and hiking. Don’t worry though I will get back to Zion’s as I have a few stories from there.

The first thing that hits you about Vegas when you are around 20 miles from the place is that it is in the middle of the desert. A lot of people know this and they are probably saying how obvious that is but until you see it. A city on the horizon surrounded by absolutely nothing do you realize just how strange it is.

The second thing to hit you are the billboards. After passing a few billboards for Jay’s Adult Shop and the Adult Superstore which is open 24 hours do you realise just why exactly it is called Sin City.

As we were only in Vegas for a day and night we didn’t get to see a whole lot of it. We did get to see the important part’s though. Those being the Casino’s.

We visited the Bellagio, Ceasar’s Palace, the Flamingo, the MGM Grand and New York, NewYork. To be honest there isn’t much of a difference between the actual casino’s. If all you want is gambling then one casino is the same as the next. The draw these day’s is the spectacle.

The Bellagio is more of a supermarket for the Ultra Rich. It is filled with designer stores and staying there cost’s a small fortune on the weekend. Ceasar’s Palace has the whole ancient Rome thing going on and is covered in marble. It also has centurions who will pose for pictures. The Flamingo has a very tropical feel to it with plastic pink flamingo’s hiding in bushes all over the place. New York, New York is like a miniature Manhatten and has one of the coolest roller-coasters in the city (loads of casino’s have roller-coasters).

I spent a lot of time in the MGM Grand, mostly gambling on Roulette, Poker, Black Jack and slots.

Roulette is a fun game. $100 dollars got me a couple of hours of nail biting fun. The minimum bet for the game I was playing was $10 on the inside and on the outside. The inside refers to the area with the numbers from 1 to 36. The great thing about this is that with a $10 minimum it was possible to bet to place 10 different $1 bets which paid off 35/1. Funnily enough it wasn’t that rare to lose that much money which made the game a lot of fun. Unfortunately Lady Luck wasn’t with me on that one so I didn’t come away up.

After the roulette I decided to try my hand at a 60 sit and go poker tournament. This was a ten man tournament with a $60 buy in and no rebuy’s. We got $800 dollars in play chips and the blinds started out at 25/50. For those that don’t know what the hell I’m talking about this was a very high pressure game. Of course I played brutally as I have been known to do in games and was the first out. I played the game all wrong and in hindsight I realise I didn’t really know what I was doing.

Feeling a little disgusted at myself for calling all in with an ace high (I was beaten by ace king with another king on the river) I did what I felt was my best course of action. I went and lost money on the slots. Slots in vegas are fun. It’s possible to win back 90% of your money in a slot machine but it requires something like a hundred dollars to do so. I didn’t play with a hundred dollars so I lost that fairly quickly.

After the slots I met up with every body and we hit the buffet. The buffet is quite pricy at $30 but if you come hungry you can more than make up for that. I didn’t but I had a slap up meal of all sorts of meat, veg and sushi anyway.

After the meal I played a little Blackjack with the other guys. I’m not a big fan of blackjack as it is a tough game to win at when you know what your doing and almost impossible when you don’t. With that in mind it wasn’t all that surprising that I lost another $60 at that.

With what I felt like was enough money lost and the other’s feeling the same way (although not all of us finished down) we decided to head back to our hotel. On the way back (in fact all day) we avoided many of the flyer hander outers and gazed at the many lights illuminating the strip. We also got to see the Bellagios’ fountain which erupts water in time to music. Oceans 11 doesn’t do it justice at all. Before hitting the hay a few of us went to the pool in the hotel and had a swim.

The next morning we went to Circus-Circus the 70’s circus themed hotel which has no Clowns in the morning and hit the breakfast buffet. After sausages, sausage patties, scrambled egg’s, croissant’s, bacon, biscuits and gravy and a whole load of juice I was full enough to enjoy the 5 hour ride home without having to worry about food.

Then my time travel device worked. Right this minute that this is visible, I am travelling a car/van to Zions National Park. There I shall be walking a great distance, through water and up mountains to look over cliffs. It will be brown like the desert and I expect to get thirsty in the 100 degree heat. In fact it is going to get so hot on friday it has been recommended that we soak all my clothes before we head out.

After Zions I continue my pilgrimage to that most unholy place known to as Las Vegas to the layman and as that place I married that chick to the minister in charge of keeping it real.

I shall be careful to not lose my shirt in vegas but I can’t guarantee it. My shirt is hawaiin and from what I hear, it here may be swallowed up by the carpet. But fear not, I shall not go shirtless as I have many a T-Shirt.

The first time I saw a Bible Traxer I was mildly shocked and very intrigued. I couldn’t help staring. Here was a guy in the middle of a Tram, completely oblivious to the rest of the world, reading the bible.

Reading the bible really isn’t that big a thing. I read genesis when I was younger. I read the abridged version in the religion book so I read it in the bible to get a rounder picture of the story. It was pretty good so I kept going for a while. The deceptively thin pages wore on my patience. I’d read 20 - 30 pages and they would only be a few milimeters thick. I like to see some progress. I had other books that needed reading so read them I did. I know mike read revelations and I do plan to read that as it sounds very entertaining.

So if I’ve read the bible (not all of it) and my brother has read the bible (again not all of it) what was so strange about this.

Maybe it was the underlined paragraphs and little liner notes. I think it got me thinking about a story I heard about an old aquaintance who was known as AAA. AAA was living in Ireland and his mother would send him books. Apparently said books would contain underlined sections and notes in the liner. These notes contained the battiest interpretations that were possible. And AAA loved them.

I wondered if this bible with it’s underlined passages contained the same crazy interpretations. Or maybe the guy was just studying the book to get really good quotes for telling people right before shooting them.