For a wedding present, our friends Matt and Trish gave us a trip to their home in Las Vegas and carted us all around town for the weekend. It was an action-packed vacation, full of gambling and drinking and kittens and guns and nightclubs and sharks and casinos and magic. Speaking of magic, we saw Penn & Teller on Saturday night and both Erica and Matt got to go on stage for different tricks. So cool.

Some small Vegas observations:

It's nothing new, I know, to talk about the unreality of Vegas, but it was still astonishing to be at places with actual things -- the Stratosphere, which is actually tall, and the Shark Reef at Mandalay Bay, which has actual sharks -- and on your way in they take your picture against a green screen so that on the way out they can sell you a picture for yourself superimposed against a picture of the place you just were.

There were ads all over town announcing that David Hasselhoff would be appearing in The Producers, and all featuring just him in a tuxedo. We had a long debate over whether he would be the Zero Mostel/Nathan Lane producer or the Gene Wilder/Matthew Broderick producer. We eventually decided that by putting him alone on the ads, they were trying to tell us that he was such a powerhouse actor that he would be playing *both* parts. (We were wrong -- he'll be playing the cross-dressing director.)

Cliches come to life: at the airport leaving Vegas, two girls were sitting behind me and going through their digital cameras deleting the pictures of the boys they had kissed over the weekend.