Why does a holiday weekend suck? Because it means that instead of having to dig through three days' worth of the Las Vegas Review-Journal on Monday (a depressing task under the best of circumstances), a Tuesday start means at least four days of windfall from what Hugh Jackson calls "the dead tree of record" through which one must cut brush. Solution? Chop it up into Insta-Blog fodder! Like ...

Horse dies at South Point, in front of 500 undoubtedly traumatized spectators. Leaving aside the equine tragedy, if South Point can only rustle up 500 attendees for a Friday-night event, its equestrian center may be even more of a gold-plated albatross than was originally thought.

Gulf Coast casinos ordered to close. Good grief, has common sense taken a leave of absence down there? Why was Mississippi required to force the issue?

Monte Carlo not up to code, says Clark County. Whereupon neither the county nor MGM Mirage takes responsibility for remediating the situation, each putting the onus on the other.

Wall Street comes around. The Street has a manic-depressive attitude toward gaming stocks and is coming out of its latest episode of depression. Even so, some of these stocks look ridiculously undervalued, especially Las Vegas Sands, which The Street used to think was worth three times as much.

Speaking of Sands, there's confidence and then there's foolhardiness. Then again, given the company's genius at protracting litigation to superhuman lengths, its sanguine attitude may be born of experience.

Somnolent editors awake from nap, find that Nevada's economic model isn't working, call for more of the same, go back to sleep. (BTW, here's one of those "Nevada Democrats" the editorial reflexively derides.)

First Nevada Palace fell and now the Gold Spike is half-renovated. We're going to have to come up with a new shorthand for "bottom-of-the-barrel casino" now that we won't have the Spike to kick around anymore. Stephen Siegel has done more with the place than his predecessors, absentee owners Tamares Group, accomplished in three years (unless you count the offerings they took out, like table games).

Still, Siegel's being a wee bit charitable when he says "most people underestimate the Gold Spike." Stephen, it is impossible to underestimate the Spike, the only Nevada casino for which I would have used "vile" as a description, back in its Tamares days.

Comment threads in newspapers can be a very mixed blessing, but much of the back-and-forth that follows this story about electronic poker at Excalibur is well worth reading, as it provides a great deal of hard information and a player's-eye perspective on the experiment.