Other people's failure make me feel better

Irony Boy sent me a link to failblog. Oh how I laughed, particularly at "Satanism Fail". It's even better than Photoshop Disasters for mocking other people's mistakes.

Is it wrong that I enjoy laughing at things like this?

Road Trip Retrospective

10 unexpected yet totally memorable experiences
1. The view of Monument Valley from Muley Point
2. Seeing a white alligator in Hogle Zoo (Salt Lake City)
3. Eating chili polenta at the Red Rock Brewing Co (Salt Lake City)
4. Driving off-road through the Valley of the Gods
5. Watching wild humming birds in close up
6. Traveling along Route 66
7. Standing under Double Arch and looking up, and up.
8. Losing count of how many buffalo were in the herd we saw on Antelope Island
9. Driving over the Hoover Dam
10. Getting excited when a genuine Wild West style tumbleweed ‘tumbled’ across the road right in front of our car.


10 experiences I’d rather forget
1. Drinking prickly pear flavoured iced tea
2. Buying an out-of-date bottle of Diet Dr Pepper from a dodgy vending machine
3. Turning too soon when we were looking for Cracker Barrel and having to drive back down the freeway we’d just driven up
4. Some scary moments adjusting to driving in America
5. Making a fool of myself at an old-time petrol station in Williams, Arizona (“You, lift the handle up, Pardner!”)
6. Most of Las Vegas, especially…
7. The nicotine-heavy smoky smell of the distinctly unglamorous casinos
8. The unhelpful attitude of the Avis sales clerk at SLC airport
9. Having to unpack/repack overweight cases in SLC airport before we came home
10. Waiting for my cases to appear on the conveyor at Heathrow (they were the last ones of our group by a long way and I’ve got prior history of lost luggage!)

Best restaurant of the trip: Red Rock Brewing Co, Salt Lake City. So good, we broke our ‘no going back’ rule and ate there twice. In fact I'd fly back to SLC today just to eat dinner at the brewpub.

Worst restaurant of the trip: The other guys would no doubt say Taco Bell, but I thought the food at The Canyon Star restaurant attached to the Grand Hotel in Tusayan was mediocre, and the waiting staff were distinctly off. But at least we avoided the guy with the banjo! Cracker Barrel needs to get a decent vegetarian option onto its menu as well.

Best hotel of the trip: Metropolitan Inn, Salt Lake City. Right in the city centre, with a decent sized car park, a nice room, a pool, and free internet access in the lobby. Plus breakfast!

Worst hotel of the trip: Hmm, tough one. It’s probably gonna have to be The Stratosphere in Las Vegas. Our room looked out on a concrete wall, and was pretty small by American hotel room standards. The Strat would also have been better if there was some way of avoiding walking through the giant slot machine alley which was the casino.

Best driving experience of the trip: Rallying around mesas in the Valley of the Gods, listening to the gravel pinging off the car’s under-tray.

Worst driving experience: Escaping from the airport, and adjusting to life on the right hand side of the road. Sitting in traffic on the Las Vegas Strip was frustrating.

Biggest serendipity: Humming birds hovering outside the window as I ate a delicious egg salad sandwich at the Thunderbird Lodge. They were drinking sugar water from plastic feeders, and we could walk up to within inches of them, after we'd eaten. After the over-crowded and slightly artificial atmosphere at the Grand Canyon, and the bad-taste gaudiness and sleaze of Las Vegas, it was an unanticipated soul-refreshing moment.

Biggest disappointment: Las Vegas.

Lessons learned: Next time I wouldn’t bother leaving Utah. The Grand Canyon was less impressive than I thought it would be, and Vegas just felt sad.

Misc. Music Purchase

In addition to adding to my collection of Hip albums, while in the States I also bought the exclusive charity single by the Killers called Don't Shoot Me Santa.

It's probably the only Christmas-themed song which has a little break in it to sing about "the sweet Mojave rain". Otherwise it sounds very Killers-esque, although a gun-toting Santa reminds me of the Xmas Futurama episodes where Santa judges everyone to be naughty and sets out to kill them all using rockets, grenades and lasers.

Bobcaygeon - or - music makes the abstract concrete

One of the benefits of a trip to America is getting hold of stuff you can’t get hold of over here. One of the things I most wanted to find on our recent road trip were CDs by a Canadian band called The Tragically Hip.

So, a couple of record stores in Salt Lake City later, I had managed to locate three albums, plus ‘Yer Favourites’, which has 38 songs spread over two CDs. I’ve been listening to them a lot since I got home. One of the songs I’m loving is Bobcaygeon, which includes a line about seeing the constellations ‘reveal themselves one star at a time’.

It’s a mellow song, and when I hear it, it reminds me of sitting on the edge of the desert at the back of The Desert Rose Inn in Bluff. Cathy and I were swaying on a double swing looking out into the darkness. Above us the sky was full of stars. It’s always full of stars, but it’s only when you get out into the desert that you realise it, because there’s no Earth-bound light to drown them out.

(Incidentally, I think that’s why religions seem to start in the wildernesses of the world - because only there can you look up and see out into the cosmos, and appreciate the vastness and the grandeur, and your own place in it.)

We swung slowly in the desert’s cool night air and watched the constellations glittering far above us. Then from nowhere a bright orange shooting star flared and died in an amber streak across the heavens; a picture show by the universe just for us, it felt.

A Scriptural tour around the USA

Utah is known as Mormon central, but it took a bit of getting used to finding the Book of Mormon sitting in the drawer of the bedside cabinet in the hotel room. For what it’s worth, here’s my road trip record of holy books…

Holiday Inn, SLC - Gideons Bible; Book of Mormon
Sleep Inn, Moab - Gideons Bible; Book of Mormon
Desert Rose Inn, Bluff - Book of Mormon, The Qu’ran (!)
Grand Hotel, Tusayan - Gideons Bible (this hotel was in Arizona so no BoM)
Stratosphere, Las Vagas - Gideons Bible with a gold cover (probably because it’s Vegas!)
Circle D, Escalante - nowt
Metropolitan, SLC - Gideons Bible

Jetlag Bloglag

Regular visitors to this blog will realise I've been backdating posts since I came back, but that's all stopped now. I have loads more to write about Utah and several photos I'd like to stick up, but I'll do that as time goes on.

We flew back on the Saturday, landed on the Sunday and I was back in work on Monday. I didn't feel the jetlag too bad this time, possibly because I was thrown straight back into a normalish routine.

I spent most of last week prepping desperately for the imminent youth weekend away in Pembroke. The sun came out on Saturday when we were all on the beach and I managed to get burnt on the back of my legs (ow!). It seems a bit stupid that after two weeks in nonstop sunshine, including several days out in the desert, I managed to get sunburned on a beach in Wales. Cathy says it's because she wasn't there to look after me, so it's all her fault really...

Buffalo Point

Last day in Utah and we went out to Antelope Island nature reserve in the Great Salt Lake. At Buffalo Point we saw a buffalo. Here's me pointing at him.



Later we saw quite a few more, and closer up too. In fact, we had to wait while they crossed the road. I counted about 300 or so in the herd we saw, but there may well have been more (600 live on the island).

Bison Crossing



Buffalo Herd

Kung Fu Panda on IMAX

If you haven't see a trailer for this latest animation from Dreamworks, it's about a Panda who dreams of becoming as a Kung Fu master, which you've got to admit is a funny premise. Add in the vocal talents of Jack Black as Po the Panda and the film sounds like it's going to be good.

In fact, it's more than good. It's brilliant. The animation is superb, and being in a place where they have an IMAX cinema, we took the opportunity to watch it on IMAX, which made the animation even better. The characters do actually have some character, partly because of the impressive acting talent bringing them to life - Dustin Hoffman particularly stands out as the rodent-type thing who trains Po (he might be a red panda, or some kind of squirrel, I'm not sure).

I'm not going to spoil the story by explaining it for you beyond what I've already said. There's a bad guy, and an interesting moral about the 'secret ingredient' of success. But really you have to go see it.

It has been noted before, by many people, that I bear a resemblance to Jack Black. (This was especially true a couple of years ago when Shallow Hal came out). Unfortunately, it would seem the resemblance includes when Jack Black is a cartoon panda, because Cathy reckons I still looked like him. Bizarrely there was a wise old turtle character who really reminded me of my Grandad, especially when he smiled and his wrinkles all bunched up.

So, if you go see it - let me know if you think I do actually look like Po. I'd appreciate your opinion.

Jongudmund's rating: 10/10

And finally, to end this review on a note to sicken British-based readers of this blog, going to see an IMAX film in America cost us less than going to see a regular film back home...

Real Salt Lake v San Jose Earthquakes - Major League Soccer match report

I didn't know Utah had a Major League Soccer Team until I picked up a fixture list in a shop. And then I found out Real Salt Lake (twinned with Real Madrid no less!) were playing tonight. Well, you have to go, don't you.

US soccer is quite different to British soccer. For one thing the atmosphere is nicer. There were several families with very small children. I was a bit worried there would be no chanting, but there was a small "ultra'' section and everyone booed the ref when necessary. And, of course, Americans know how to do sports. There was a 'pre-match carnival' on the Olympic plaza for an hour before the game. We got a free programme, and the catering was great. There were numerous concession options on the concourse - we settled on Pizza Hut - and not a dodgy meat pie in sight.

The game began with a 'team tunnel' greeting the players, composed of about 60 kids, in addition to the 22 mascots. Leo the Lion roared onto the pitch riding a quad-trike. (At half time he came on in the scoop of a digger!) We all stood to sing the national anthem. And then the game kicked off, about 5 minutes after it was due to start.

Being honest, both these teams would be eaten alive in the football league over here. Technically the game was very good. Slick passing on an astroturf pitch, good ball control, and good positional play. However, despite the good build up play, neither team seemed to have a cutting edge in the final third. Things seemed to go to pot in shooting range, which is why the game ended up 0-0.

To be fair though, Real did score a perfectly good goal, which was then disallowed. It's the first time I've ever seen a score go up on a scoreboard, then get taken off again. This prompted the crowd to heartily boo the officials and chant "You suck, ref!" A minute later Real hit the post, further adding to the sense of injustice, and they had a couple of chances when it seemed harder to miss than score, yet they managed to. San Jose were happy to hang on for a draw, having been a man down since just before half time, but for Real this was definitely 2 points dropped, rather than 1 point gained.

On the Trax back to our hotel, we got talking to two guys who were very interested in our opinion of the game, as Brits. When they found out we were from Wales, one of them said how he'd spent a year in Blackwood, and a year in Neath - I'm guessing on a Mormon mission trip. He even put on a class Valleys accent to prove it. I told him he must have done something really bad to have been sent to Blackwood...

Back to Salt Lake via Bryce Canyon

After a long road trip yesterday to Escalante where we drove through Zion National Park, we had another mammoth trip today returning to Salt Lake City, but first we saw the sights of Bryce Canyon. And what sights they were.

Bryce is full of 'hoodoos', naturally carved red sandstone pillars and fins, in such a quantity, they become eye-boggling. We didn't have time to hike down among them, which must be amazing, so we travelled the rim trail, stopping every so often to look down on a new vista of knobbly rocks.

A Native American legend related to Bryce Canyon has it that the spirit god Coyote turned the inhabitants to stone on account of their wickedness. The white discoverer, Bryce, a Mormon pioneer farmer described it as "a hell of a place to lose a cow". I'm happy to believe both of those stories, having seen the place.

We didn't see any coyotes, but we were chuffed to see a Utah Prairie Dog on the rim trail. He stopped and posed for photos for us, which was cool, as apparently they're quite rare. However the privileged feelings didn't last long. An hour or so later, we were eating our dinner in a tourist trap restaurant and there was one running around inside the restaurant eating fallen bits of food. There's nothing like finding out endangered animals are considered rodent pests to take the shine off seeing them in the wild.