When I picked up the latest LVA and read that Xtreme Magic was getting ashcanned by the Tropicana Las Vegas, effective April 2, I began to wonder if CEO Scott Butera's promised new-look Trop was ever going to manifest itself. Because, whether the place was run by Columbia Sussex or Tropicana Entertainment, management had evinced three basic strategies: 1) subtract, 2) subtract again and 3) subtract some more.

However, the Great Amenity Massacre has finally come to a halt. The former Comedy Stop will become the new den of "Pitbull of Comedy" Bobby Slayton, making a step up for Hooters Casino Hotel. I've not seen Slayton in action but people whose opinion I trust say he's very good. He should give the Trop a much-needed infusion of personality. Welcome to the Strip, sir.

A colleague also informs me that the much-traveled Soprano's Last Supper will alight at the Trop, too. Surely this isn't the long-hinted-at successor to Folies Bergere? Say it ain't so, Scott!

In a break with tradition, neither of the two Arizona Charlie's hotels is taking bookings past May. Goldman Sachs' third wholly-owned Vegas casino, the Stratosphere, is continuing to accept reservations into the summer months, however.

Mehtinks the hotel-closings virus is spreading from Primm and Mesquite. Besides, with so much downward pressure on hotel rates even at the top-notch off-Strip hotels, the customers who'd normally gravitate to AZ Charlie's can afford to "trade up."

Liar, liar, pants afire: Remember the hotel room-tax increase, Nevada's "fuck you" to its tourism base? Seems that Gov. Jim Gibbons was for it on at least 10 occasions before he was against it. (Or maybe he was against it, then for it, then against it again).

Of course, Midnight Jim can always wriggle out of this on the technicality that he never said he'd actually, physically sign the bill. Also, his staff issued a bizarre locution that the guv was against "putting new taxes directly on the people." So does that mean he's in favor of indirectly instituting new taxes? And how, precisely? (Well, actually we know, at least as it concerns gaming: Accelerate tax collections on bad markers and tax comped meals.)

Considering that reality and Jim Gibbons normally intersect to form a null set, it's probably just another sample of the meaningless verbiage Nevadans have come to know and love. It'd go right down there with "stirring up the bottom of the bathtub," of which no one was ever able to make sense.

Update: At least Gibbons has the virtue of providing amusement, unlike the disgraceful and equally spineless Lege, whose fiddling while Nevada burns is too depressing to contemplate more than briefly.