Photographer Ryan Beckman

Here's a nice fellow I had the pleasure of knowing back in my NJ days and now he's taking lots of really cool pictures. And all this time I thought he was only into candid photography... enjoy the work of Ryan Beckman.

Vacation pt. 1: Vegas!

Our trip began up in Las Vegas where Ms Goat completed her set of Beatlesfests (NY, Chicago, west coast) begun long ago. We stayed at The Excalibur and they provided less than royal treatment tho the location was better than we've had before. Tho one can't stop whilst strolling through a casino, there are lots of lights to keep the baby distracted and plenty of opportunities to make jokes like 'I'm putting her on 47 red!' to gawkers.

At the fest I met Pete Best and babygoat met Denny Laine; it was a little weird to have many attendees ask if we were 'starting her out young', almost a tacit admission that they were in a cult. There was some live music there, too, with Laurence Juber putting on a fine display of technique in his solo guitar recreations of Beatles tunes and a cover band called Liverpool doing a good reproduction of the entire Sgt. Pepper's album (probably the only time I'll ever see Within You Without You live). On the down side, The Pete Best Band was not remarkable except for having two drummers (weird for a band led by a drummer) and Peter and Gordon should have stayed retired.

While there, I had a tune from the Diamonds Are Forever soundtrack stuck in my head, a bopping number called The Whyte House (2.2 M mp3) that is played during a casino scene; John Barry is the man. Gandhi was again excellent food and we've yet to find a casino buffet there that's truly vegetarian friendly tho we hardly starved. I didn't do as well on the slots this time but I was glad to see that Slotsky was still around: I'm very amused to see a slot machine named after a socialist revolutionary.

Back

Been out of town for a bit, investigating reports of delicious goat activity in Texas and Louisiana. Stay tuned for 'travels with a babygoat'...