But a drag queen who keeps the full beard, just that much more fabulous:

 

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I’ve been cursed with this photography thing so I’m always on the look out for people to photograph, obviously.  Now when you are in a buffet hall at a casino, you need to be kind of let’s say discrete about this so people don’t get angry at you.  So I threw my trusty 50mm lens on the camera and put the through the screen view on my camera and picked an isolated location to try to get something in that hall.

I knew there was some kind of interesting shot in that place and I got one:

I know.  It is kind of dark.  I tried to bring out the shadows and I did to a degree but not too much.  I hope its a good photo.

 

You know when you visit a place and it is just kind of more and more and more around every turn?  A casino would be just that sort of a place, I guess.

The Foxwoods Casino, which I visited today, is just such a place.  Now I went there when I was about 16 years old, when it had just opened.  It was kind of interesting because it was the first casino of its kind to open anywhere on the east coast.  I don’t really remember what it looked like so many years ago but I can tell they have gone way upscale with it because THE countess Luanne De Lesseps of Litchfield was going to be visiting.  The Countess De Lesseps!!!!!!

OK enough jokes.  Luanne, if you read this blog (and you totally do), I want you to know that you are my favorite thing on the Real Housewives of New York City and I would so go back to Foxwoods just to hear your opinions on manners.  And about hooking up with sorta French pirates that look like Johnny Depp!!!!

Anyway, the casino.  The inside favors would I would call a more is more approach.  Like “hey, we don’t have enough architectural or decorative elements.  We needs like 9,000 more, immediately.  They also seem to favor atriums and curves, but we’ll get to that in a little while.

First things first, the more is more is more.  Let’s start with the Hard Rock Cafe.  I am a person who loves clutter and filling every conceivable space in your house with as much junk as humanly possible, so this arrangement fills my heart with joy:

A beehive of activity if I ever saw one.  The outside all did not disappoint:

The fanciest Dunkin Donuts I’ve ever seen:

Fish.  Just fish.  Giant fish:

Curving kind of lines here at the buffet:

So, to the casino aspect of things.  Actually, those areas were the most kind of uninteresting, design wise.  I was however tempted to throw a quarter into one of those machines.  To not receive a quarter back:

A restaurant with another really interesting, over the top kind of design:

I gotta say that the trip to the casino was quite nice.

Downtown Crossing and Chinatown early on a Saturday morning.  There is nothing like it:

The ridiculousness of Boston’s weather came to the fore again this week when the wild blew so hard that it actually knocked over the statue from in front of the Old City Hall, I mean Ruth Chris steakhouse in downtown.

Mr. Franklin is currently indisposed, but he shall return soon:

The Greenway is full of monsters now, I guess:

Well, when I first moved to Boston, I thought there was nothing around here to photograph.  Absolutely nothing.  How many photo of Faneuil Hall was I going to take?  More importantly, did I even want to take any of photos of Faneuil Hall anyway?

Then after a while, I started photographing the shadows and the light here.  Boston has had the opposite effect on me as a city.  Every other place I have ever lived, I’ve found that the place was beautiful to me when I first saw it and then it became more mundane and run down.  Boston I’ve had the opposite feeling.  Boston gets more beautiful as I look at it more.

Anyway, I don’t find myself taking too many view shots of Boston anyway.  I like photographing the people.  Like these two.  I mean can they get any cuter???

And these view shots, with people in them:

Sometimes I look at what other photographers do with their pictures.  There are legions of photographers out there who just photograph pretty scenes with the razor sharp clarity that you can get with all cameras these days.  The pictures are of course technically perfect, but lacking in soul.

Now I’ve been known to snap a pretty picture here and there myself, but I keep thinking to myself now how much more I like to photograph people and activity.  My compositions might be a bit messy at times, not technically perfect all the time, but to me photographs need life, not technical perfection.

Behold my glorious mess:

But I photograph them anyway.  I interestinged this one up a little bit, I think:

Every hot weather locale I visit seems to sell these tacky little Christmas ornaments with Santa Claus doing all kinds of un-Santa like things.  In Florida, he’s walking an alligator or blowing into a conch shell.  In the Cayman Islands, he’s wearing his turtle costume or riding the back of a dinosaur.

Years and years ago, a friend told me that Santa Claus is actually Danish because he’s from the North Pole, the North Pole is connected to Greenland and Greenland is part of Denmark, so he’s Danish.  That makes total sense.  Whiskey tango foxtrot he does during his down time, on his island sojourns is another story entirely.

Santa, do you need some help?: