"I am telling you, I can feel the back of my skull!"




Ok....I know you are getting bored with these now. Detect Dan. Root out Rolf. They may have been a success but have a go at "Where's Woody?"




If you look closely you can see that I am on Telly. Savalas that is.




I showed this picture to my mum.....her response???" Where did you take that?" Oh dear!




The biggest binoculars in the World....I bet.......





Nice Shiners Kidda!!


Ok. So dates are a bit of a blur to me now. But I got to LA and Scotty met at the airport (LAX) sporting two award winning black eyes sustained from a game of basketball. I have frequently in the past made fun of Scott fro his large and distinguished nose, but even I was sad to see this monolith of nasal greatness in a swollen state. His eyes were turning a deep shade of yellow as the blackness was abating, but it did still look very severe! The upshot of this destruction was that his proboscis was full of the most spectacular bloody bogeys that mankind has ever witnessed. I am fully au fait with them as he insisted on showing me them every time that excavated one of these beauties from his nostril. Although sore, he mined like a Cornishman with a new order from Heinz.

Scott showed me to the hostel in LA’s less than salubrious Venice Beach district, and while almost on the beach, the lodgings were not to a standard of which I have enjoyed on the majority of my stay. Although we did have an en suite shower, it was little more than a coat rack as it didn’t work beyond a weak dribble. The view from the window was also less than inspiring although not as brutal as it could have been. This was just as well as the lack of curtains or blinds meant that we became very well accustomed to the view at any given hour of the day. This was a blessing as the sun tended to wake us at a reasonable hour and I suspected that our combined laziness would conspire to see us waste the majority of the days in bed sleeping off hangovers. This proved the case when we moved on to Las Vegas for my second visit. More about that later.

Although Venice was not the most beautiful area, the beach was expansive and entertaining. As beaches go, it was very nice and I know that Scott has some great moody photos of the life guard stations. It was, however, the oddballs that frequented the boardwalks that kept us entertained. It appears that in LA you can wear what you want, do what you want and nobody will bat an eye! This proved to our advantage when we mooched along the beach areas with clothes that were about 3 wears past their specified wash dates. Some of my socks were taking themselves for a stroll long before I awoke. We have developed the most accurate method of testing the suitability of pre worn clothes for subsequent outings using the little known technique of sniffing. If you are still standing after a deep lungful of pant aroma, then they are good to go. IT also helped when I managed one of my patented drunken topless commando rolls along the centre of the road. But the less said about that, the better I think. But I was unscathed.

We only had a few days in LA which saw us head to Hollywood. I won’t go on about it too much as it was a bit of an anticlimax. It is dead scruffy. Even the boulevards with the World famous stars on were a bit on the tatty side. It was during these few days in LA that Scott carefully led me down the road to coffee addiction. I know that previously in this blog I have mocked Red Watch York for their caffeine consumption, but Scott finds it physically impossible to pass a Costa Coffee or Starbucks without fuelling up on a Latte with extra shot. A shot. Of coffee. How have we allowed the word “shot” to be assigned to coffee? A shot is something that either a gun does or a tequila et al is consumed by. Not a bitter tasting hot beverage! “Shot” is far too cooler word to be applied to coffee! Coffee is there to be drunk when you want something inoffensive and easy to stomach, not something that can be ordered by “the shot!” I might have a howitzer of gingernuts to go with that. Or an annihilation of Garibaldi’s. A shot of coffee makes no sense and never will. As we caught the bus back from Hollywood to Venice, a drunken man threatened the bus driver with a cork screw while we were bored to the point of eating our own shoes by a local. I have never met such a boring man. Apart from me, he has to be the most inane person that God has ever blessed with life. He gave us the history of every municipal building that the bus happened to pass. Oh well….I expected LA to have its fair share of freaks but I wasn’t expecting one to be freakishly boring.

We hit a few bars and met some oddballs there too. Quite the opposite of boring man, we met someone who was so over the top that we had to escape him as he befriended us and began to tell his tall tales. His mate was a decent bloke but kept being told to shut up by “super interesting guy”. So we told some white lies and avoided them for the rest of our night in Santa Monica. If you cast your minds back to the New York section at the beginning of this blog, you might remember that I went to a comedy club called Gotham and saw a rather lewd guy as the headline act. (Just checked on that and I didn’t mention the comedian but I will finish my rather mundane anecdote regardless). While in the Circle Bar in Santa Monica I bumped into the same comedian. Can’t remember his name. Wish I hadn’t started that now. Forget I wrote it. Just move on to the next paragraph. I assure you that later there are better celeb stories. Well one anyway.

So, where to go after LA? I have to be honest and as long as you don’t tell Scott I will be. Shh! I didn’t like LA. It did have its good points, don’t get me wrong. Seeing him was the best and the laid back attitude to everything was a winner. BUT! It is just very scruffy and spread out. I know we weren’t staying in the best of areas but I can’t see that the more luxurious locales were that much better. So I was pushing in my subtle style for a move to somewhere more, well, clean. I loved my time in Vegas but Scott was not over impressed as he isn’t too much of a gambler and was struggling for someone to consume biblical amounts of beer with. Time for me to change his opinion! Cheap flights a-go-go to Vegas and we checked in to the Monte Carlo Hotel.

Now I think that Monte Carlo is see to be a better standard of hotel than the Excaliber from my earlier visit. In fact there is very little to choose between them. All very comfortable and great fun. Although I have to admit that I do enjoy the themes of the other hotels. How do you make a theme for Monte Carlo? Park big boats along side the hotel? Have young, beautiful and loaded people swanning around? I can guarantee that the beautiful people were missing in action! The same lever of fat people with the comical addition of stacks of cowboys as the rodeo was in town! I wanted a cowboy hat but couldn’t bring myself to lower my standards to look like one of these ten gallon morons! The worst outcome of the rodeo, apart from the more expensive rates, was that the majority of the bars had country music playing. My dad is a fan of country music and I ridicule him for it. No person should ever be in such a mental state they actively encourage these miserable crooners. Dwight Yoakam…..Travis Tritt….Garth Brooks……Buddy Jewel…….Clint Black…….Waylon Jennings? Need I say more? Do their names not speak volumes? The women are just as bad. I ask you…..would you buy a record by Suzy Bogguss? And Amber Dotson sounds like a 1970’s Japanese car and no one needs them. The one thing that they all have in common is that they sing songs that are so incredibly miserable that you could play one at a children’s party that involved balloons and clowns and the kids would still be irreparably damaged despite years of teenage therapy. With the lovely sunshine and fresh air, cowboys should be the happiest fools that ever lived. Not singing about one of their brothers that drowned trying to rescue his 37 school friends that were trapped when the “rickety ole bridge” collapsed and the bus plunged into the Mighty Grasp of the “Ole Lady” river in 1957. I bet that didn’t even happen but you can’t convince these miserable bastards to sing about anything less than their mothers own suicide. I understand that some people need to be looking on the black side of life for their livelihoods. Undertakers do. Mortuary workers perhaps shouldn’t be grinning and wearing their hats at jaunty angles. But a singer? You have the opportunity to sing about anything, ANYTHING in the whole beautiful world, both true and fabricated! Some people are just not suited to their line of work. The role of a drugs mule should perhaps not be recommended by the school careers advisor to someone suffering from IBS, for example. (That is copyright by the way as it could be my first groundbreaking screenplay.) But a country singer can sing about anything. But no. My dog left me to go start a family with my wife seems to be a more attractive option to Hank McBisonstretcher and his chums. Well, don’t pollute my ears with your depressing dirge thank you. I am still trying to get the sound of the throttled infant out.

While in Vegas Scott became addicted to black jack and loved it. It became increasingly difficult to get him away from the tables but I think he was “up” on the whole experience so no harm done! We had a number of beers and I noticed how Scott manages to save money. While you are playing the tables, you can ask the cocktail waitress to fetch you a drink of any nature for the princely sum of $1. Scott had read in a book that you can get away with $1 per round and proceeded to do this, whereas I think that $1 each for a $5 bottle of corona is more than fair! He just won’t listen! We did manage to get to a bar called Tangerine for a party where the finals for a bikini contest were being held, but I won’t go into that as he hasn’t mentioned it to his friend Lyndsey, who might not appreciate us perving at thongs etc! While queuing to get into Tangerine we befriended Keith who insisted on buying us our first round on his expenses credit card! Top bloke eh? We thought so until he never left our side and then failed to buy another drink all night! Not that we were blinded by bikinis, but we only realised this when questioning how we had both managed to spend a million dollars each that night. We also drank at a bar in MGM Grand where I bumped into my old mate Chad Kroeger again. He nagged us to let him hang out with us, but we made it a rule that no bearded men were aloud to bring down our smooth rating. Sorry Chad. Next time maybe if you lose the ferret. In keeping with my celebrity spotting nature, in the airport as we left Vegas he pointed out Mr Universe who was boarding a plane to somewhere or other. Not my idea of a celebrity but I know Scott has loads of “men’s health” magazines where he can stare for hours at muscley men in underpants.

That’s about it for Vegas I think. Although I am amused about the M&M’s shop and how low grade Americans rush to go there! Would English people crawl over themselves to get to the Kit Kat shop? I don’t think so. The chocolate sells well but I can never see how the name of a chocolate brand becomes a brand in itself! We used to make fun of kids who wore product branded clothes at my school. You just know that their Mums made them wear them as they were “perfectly good t-shirts”. Mums might be full of good economic sense, but wearing a Tampax t-shirt can never be cool. Mum, that goes for buying 17 gallon drums of shampoo and decanting them into “proper” shampoo bottles. What else for this section of the catch up? Had a second disastrous haircut that cost a fortune. Had to trail around Las Vegas while Scott found a suitably expensive moisturiser. I make do with Stork SB margarine. As a moisturiser you understand. Wish I hadn’t begun that sentence now. Got visions of Last Tango in Paris. Oh and Scott tried to book me a low fat meal on the plane to New York. Did I mention that the Big Apple was my next destination? I will do that in the next catch up and begin to try and describe Scott’s inability to remain tidy in any given space. I will however whisper at the end of this that it is great to see him and I finally admit that travelling with him is better than going it alone. Shhhhh! Even though we tend to get really drunk and don’t wake up until mid afternoon. I have probably missed out loads but I will have a chin wag with Scott and see if there is anything that you need to know about. New York next…hold onto your hats.