That was quick. Scarcely had a posted a query regarding the difficulty of finding an out-of-town newspaper in Las Vegas than back came the following response:

"Tell the good folks that you can buy newspapers from the stand out front of Egg And I. We found it a year ago and eat all our breakfasts there whenever we fly into Vegas. If they don't know about this small locals restaurant, they are missing a real treat."

On the subject of eggs, Liz Benston gets a rare, behind-the-scenes look at how the Riviera is making ends meet. Solutions run the gamut from mechanizing the check-in process and centralizing F&B purchases to requiring execs to make do with fewer techno toys. Some moves were unsurprising (layoffs) while others were counterintuitive (reducing the number of slots) but effective.

But the one really off-putting economy is the Riviera's new reliance on Quick Cuisine, a staple of the military mess hall, in its first-ever deployment along the Vegas Strip. Unlike the Bass-o-Matic, it doesn't slice or dice, but the Quick Cuisine "can create and dispense sauces of varying thicknesses and serving sizes, including gravy for a turkey sandwich, spicy tomato sauce for a platter of spaghetti and industrial-sized servings of eggs and oatmeal. Using a process similar to freeze-drying, the manufacturer reduces homemade foods to powders that are reconstituted when they’re mixed with water heated to more than 200 degrees."

Powdered eggs? Blech! Whatever things I'm doing at the Riviera in the future, eating there won't be among them.

Casino Jack strikes again. Yet another Washington lobbyist discovers that his association with Jack Abramoff has toxic consequences.

Dave Schwartz elaborates on his denunciation of Pinnacle Entertainment (see "Comments"). The -- pardon the pun -- money quote is: "The way I see it, this guy is paying his taxes and providing some kind of economic life for the city. More importantly, it’s his store. The wonderful thing about America is that if he doesn’t want to sell it, he doesn’t have to."

Amen to that.

Speaking of Pinnacle, its Atlantic City project is on hold for at least one more year. But if they company has already sunk $400 million into the former Atlantic City Sands site, I'm thinking it's a better-than-50/50 shot they'll move forward on the project. If the city council was amenable to selling Bader Field (which could hold as many as five casinos) starting at $800 million, expecting to garner half that amount by flipping one casino site would seem awfully optimistic.