Not long ago, the Boston Globe sent a reporter to the Strip and this is some of what Matt Viser saw, from a story in Tuesday's edition ...

At 8:30 on Wednesday night at the Venetian, 18 of 36 card tables had not a single gambler sitting at it, leaving dealers with little to do. Inside the Palace Court Slots in Caesars Palace, there were two gamblers at about 100 machines.

At the Bellagio, where "Karma Chameleon" played lightly over the speakers, entire rows were empty, which some gamblers insist is because the casinos are stingy.

"I've never seen the slots so tight," said Roy Morey, 71, a retiree from Tucson who for the first time in 10 years wasn't planning to spring for show tickets. "Normally I'd gamble until 11 at night. Now we're finishing at 8 and going back to the room. We're just not winning."

One group of tourists walked along Las Vegas Boulevard last week lugging a bag of pretzels and five boxes of cereal from CVS back to their hotel, so they wouldn't have to eat out as much.

The guy standing outside Caesars Palace handing out passes to "exclusive" nightclubs has noticed the downturn: Tim Rusling used to make $5,000 a month working three days a week, and now he's making half the pay for twice the work. He said he also has lowered his standards, and he's handing the free passes to marginally attractive people he would have previously ignored.

When "marginally attractive" people are allowed into Strip nightclubs, you know true desperation has set into Sin City.

The jumping-off point for the story is Massachusett's on-again/off-again/on-again flirtation with casino gambling. Sheldon Adelson makes some noises about a megaresort where the Massachusetts Turnpike meets I-495. But who's he kidding? Not even himself. He concedes: "Will we do a slot parlor? Yeah. But we don't think that's in the best interest of the state of Massachusetts."

At least it's in the best interest of Las Vegas Sands ... which might be lucky if it can afford merely a slot parlor right now, bleeding money as it is in every direction. Remember, Adelson can't even finish his Sands Bethlehem project, which will enjoy a quintessentially Adelsonian soft opening in May, with the rest of it coming online Lord knows when.

"One has to wonder whether or not Massachusetts has let this train pass them by," says MGM Mirage's Alan Feldman on the Bay State's failed try at casino legalization last year. He may well be right, but that's far more of a reflection on the implosion of hyper-leveraged gaming corporations than on Massachusetts.

To put in another way, had suitors LV Sands and Harrah's Entertainment obtained the casino concessions they were pursuing a year ago, what are the odds those projects would have been shelved or outright canceled by now? It's a metaphysical certainty.