Wow, I never thought we'd have our second installment so hard upon the first. But no sooner had S&G ticketed Resorts Atlantic City for a visit to Intensive Care comes word that it's going to miss a $10 million loan for which the casino-hotel itself is collateral. Could we actually see a casino shutdown before year's end?

Don't ask Colony Capital spokesman [sic] Owen Blicksilver, possessor of the World's Cushiest Job. Contacted by a reporter, Blicksilver did what he always does: "declined comment." Colony could conserve some much-needed capital if it'd replace Blicksilver with a tape loop that just utters, "No comment ... No comment ... No comment" anytime the phone rings.

The long-suffering Tropicana has had to make layoffs, its first of the year. And while its license denial was being litigated before the New Jersey Supreme Court, who should turn up like Banquo's Ghost (and every bit as welcome, I suspect) but Columbia Sussex CEO William J. Yung III. Irrevocable proxy or no, Yung still hovers far too close to Tropicana Entertainment for comfort. And TropEnt's recent spate of public statements have not come from CEO Scott Butera but from a PR agency on Yung's payroll. So much for the 'new, independent' TropEnt.

Butera's big goof. Meanwhile, the long-postponed Casino Aztar sale has definitively gone down the toilet. Butera had a deal in place but elected to renege, on the assumption he could get a better offer elsewhere. He received, in fact, zero offers. While he vacillated, credit markets went south and Eldorado Resorts' purchase loan rocketed from an 8% interest rate to a 19% one. Ouch!

So it's entirely possible that, even though it just received its Indiana gaming license, Eldorado would have found Casino Aztar too rich for its blood and bailed anyway. But had Butera and TropEnt's creditors stayed on the sidelines instead of booting the ball around, Eldorado would have had to face the state's wrath alone. Now it looks very much like TropEnt's grass-is-greener mentality helped scotch the deal, meaning Butera can queue up for a share of the blame, too. Evansville, Ind.'s mayor, Jonathan Weinzapfel didn't miss the opportunity to remind people that the casino has been doing better since TropEnt management was evicted last spring.

Our long Vegas nightmare is (temporarily) over. Tonight marks the last performance at The Mirage given by Danny F. Gans, whose giant, grinning visage (and even larger pair of biceps) dominates the Strip. Gans will return, sometime in the new year, in what used to be the Spamalot/Avenue Q theater at Wynn Las Vegas/Encore.

We hope he's able to use the slacktime to get some much-needed rest and recuperation from his grueling four-show-a-week regimen, which would have been the death of many a lesser performer. But not the redoubtable Gans. Nothing short of a five-day work week can stop him. Maybe he can even employ his sabbatical to conjure up impersonations of celebrities who postdate George Burns and H. Ross Perot.