As I said yesterday, not all carnie games are unwinnable. I avoided playing those things until we were on the way out and we came across the age-old classic carnival basketball game. All you had to do is get one regulation-sized basketball into a nonregulation-sized hoop. Three balls for five dollars. We all know how this game goes. I watched as numerous guys walked up thinking they had the touch… at least one guy dropped $50 to assuage his ego. I knew this thing was almost impossible, but given that I hadn’t played a game all night, I thought I’d go at it. Five dollars to the girl attending the game, three balls to me. I grabbed the first one, took a look at the net while bouncing the ball free-throw style and, after another short look, fired the first one off. BOOM! DONE! The girl working the thing was caught a bit off-guard and did something of a double-take as she sauntered off to get my stuffed dinosaur. I love destroying peoples’ expectations. She let me shoot the last two basketballs, but 1) it would have garnered me nothing and 2) I missed them both. Haha.

Getting tired of me titling each post “San Genarro…” yet? These were some of the prizes available for winning the carnival games. There were plenty of games there that simply could not be won. The physics precluded it, but the guys running the booth certainly made it look easy. In particular there were a couple variants of a game whose object was to bounce a small basketball off a backboard angled away from the player at 45 degrees and have it land in a basket below. From the player’s distance, making that happen was practically impossible. I want to use literally impossible here, but there may have been a single certain spot and a single certain about of top spin that may have made the game winnable. But it would have cost me a shitload to figure that out. So I just let my friend fail a few times as we discussed the physics of it all. (As you’ll see tomorrow, not all games were unwinnable. :-) Fuckin’ carnies.

Italian sausage was pretty popular at the latest San Genarro Feast. Ya’ know, I think I’ve known that sausage comes all coiled up (pork inside pig intestines… coiling that thing up makes sense) but I guess I’ve never really seen that way. Interesting.

Similar perspective as the previous picture… this time everything is a-twirlin’. Lengthened exposure and lowered ISO to get a comfortable balance of motion to digital noise.

I wish there were no people in this photo. Dusk, lights on, no people… would have been kinda creepy. So put your imaginations to work with this one, folks. It makes the photo a bit better.

Jennifer at San Genarro. Quick snap, slightly blurry, but happy girl. That makes for a good picture.

Standard carnival swings. Not much more to say about it, I suppose.

Twice a year or so some organization puts on the San Genarro Feast, a mini festival meant to celebrate Italian culture. Well, far from REALLY celebrating the food and culture of Italy, San Genarro really just allows local vendors to setup booths, cook some food and serve a large collection of people. There wasn’t much of a schedule of events or even entertainers really. Yes, there were plenty of Italian food… pizza, cannolis, sausage, pasta and so on… but there was also southern shrimp, BBQ and vendors selling unrelated crap. But whatever, right? It was fun. And this was the first picture I took that night.

I recently began training to pilot the MQ-9 Reaper, an improved version of the MQ-1B Predator I was flying before. The Reaper’s primary mission is close air support and thus carries a greater load of armaments. Laser-guided bombs and missiles and, in the future, GPS guided weapons. This picture is of my sensor operator Andrew taken one night down on Fremont Street while he and I were hanging out. White balance correction, slight saturation enhancement, cosmetic adjustments and some sharpening.

Bellagio again, this time from another angle. See the building immediately to the left of Bellagio’s main tower? That is a second tower of hotel rooms and offices added to meet demand. I mention it now because, if you look at the previous image I took, it is conspicuously missing. Photoshop magic.