MGM Mirage has announced that it's writing off approximately $1.3 billion (i.e., taking an "impairment charge") against CityCenter, with $348 million of that chalked up to falling real estate values. (Some $174 million of that will apparently be fobbed off on MGM's partners, bringing MGM's writeoff down to $1.1 billion.) The value of MGM's half-share of the project has been restated at $2.44 billion (a 31% decline). No word yet from Dubai World as to what it thinks its half of CityCenter is worth.

Kirk Kerkorian's Tracinda Corp. shook a rhetorical fist at Wall Street, stating in a press release that there is "substantial unrecognized value in MGM and CityCenter that is not reflected in the market value of MGM’s stock." It's nice to know that even mega-corporations can feel underappreciated.

Bottoming out? Air traffic into and out of Las Vegas was almost flat, year over year, -1.2% in September, helped by passenger-load increases -- and I don't mean those hefty people who take up two seats -- on nearly every domestic carrier not named US Airways (-26%). Considering that international traffic was -21%, this is augurs well for a return of domestic consumer confidence in Sin City. And, yes, flat is the new "up."

Pennsylvania: Rendell intervenes. Never accuse the Keystone State Lege of acting in haste. The table games bill is still mired in conference committe, prompting Gov. Ed Rendell (D) to wade into the fray. Rendell's magic number for the amount of revenue table games must yield in fees and taxes is $200 million. To get there, the guv believes the tax rate must be 16%. But he's closer to the GOP position, warning that the higher levies favored by Dems would "kill the golden goose" and deprive Little Johnny's school of needed funding. Meanwhile, Rivers Casino continues to disappoint, with the lowest revenue-per-slot in the state.

Finally, a taker! Out of left field, a contender has emerged for the orphaned casino license in Cherokee and Crawford counties in Kansas. You'll recall that it was awarded to Penn National Gaming, seemingly ages ago, but Penn -- spooked by nearby tribal competition -- all but spat on the license before leaving in a huff.

Enter Ozark Trail Gaming, a consortium of Kansas businessmen, offering to build a $225 million, 900-slot, 30-table casino. After some bad experiences with carpetbagger casino developers trying to dictate terms to the Sunflower State, you have to think the Kansas Lottery Board will look kindly upon this native-son effort.

ColSux loses again. A $41.5 million summary judgment has been slapped on Columbia Sussex for abrogating its purchase of the President riverboat in St. Louis (now the property of ColSux arch-foe Pinnacle Entertainment). Regulators for Missouri didn't like the looks of ColSux and its CEO, William J. Yung III (above). The latter pulled his license application and used that as an excuse to void the President purchase, but a federal district judge wasn't buying it.

The former President owners were also suing ColSux for jacking up parking rates for casino patrons by 560% (no, that is not a typo), a truly Yungian move. If poetic justice were served in this case, the court would award the ship to ColSux. Since the President's days on the water are numbered and Yung will licensed in Missouri only in his wildest dreams, trying to dispose of that near-worthless asset might be the aptest punishment of all.

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In case you've wondered whether Columbia Sussex's endgame in its interminably protracted -- and often preposterous -- negotiations with the Culinary Union was to provoke a strike at the Tropicana Las Vegas, the company's actions elsewhere leave little doubt. (I have it on good authority that ColSux had drawn up plans to drive the Culinary out, in the great Margaret Elardi/Paul Lowden tradition.)

Now those anti-union chickens have come home to roost. The 13,000-member Alaska chapter of the National Education Association has ripped up its contract with ColSux's Anchorage Hilton and calling for boycotts of all 71 ColSux-owned hotels. That'd include ...

... Las Vegas' own Westin Casuarina.

What a stroke of luck. At a time when Strip hotels are mostly just muddling through in terms of occupancy and convention bookings, William J. Yung III goes and pisses off one of the U.S.'s leading unions. Less bidness for him -- and more for everybody else!

Thanks, Bill. Keep up the good work. We could use non-casino hoteliers with your infallible reverse-Midas Touch. Would you alienate a few other major convention-holding bodies (especially ones who might like to convene in Vegas) while you're at it? It would really help your competitors speed up this economic-recovery thing.

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Tomorrow morning, I have scored some precious face time with Tropicana Las Vegas CEO Alex Yemenidjian. The ostensible topic of the media event is "Special Guest," er, Wayne Newton.

But screw that. Let's find out what else is going on at the Trop, particularly in terms of capital improvements, staffing, Let's Make a Deal tapings and all those deferred-maintenance issues Yemenidjian inherited from his predecessors.

So here's the idea: If you've got questions, submit them in the "Comments" section (or by e-mail at dmckee@huntingtonpress.com) and I'll use the best ones in my interview. I already had plenty of queries of my own but changed my mind and decided to try and get you guys (and gals) in on the fun.

So what's on your mind, Trop-wise?

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This is the sort of bottom-feeding move you'd expect from Columbia Sussex but not from Hyatt. Suffice it to say that if casino-hotels try this cheapjack number in Atlantic City, Detroit or Las Vegas, there will be holy hell to pay, especially the next time the collective-bargaining agreement is up for renewal. As it is, some hotels (*cough*Tropicana Las Vegas*cough*) have tried to operate with skeletal cleaning staffs and one shudders to imagine the consequences.

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Reader Kerr_Mudgeon writes, re the case of a Columbia Sussex executive who was the victim of age discrimination:

She was 67 years old, for gosh sake! She should have taken her token (socialist) Social Security checks and gone on (fascist) Medicare, then waited for the inevitable pounding on her door by a (union) thug from (communist) ACORN who insisted on reading her (nonexistent) rights from the Death Book prior to making an appointment for her to stand before the (mandatory) Death Panel which would have assigned her to the most efficient (statist) queue for her to Take The Pill in order to eliminate Obama's $multi-trillion budget deficit - even though he's intentionally destroying the US economy in order to make himself Dictator of the World because he hates everybody and everything that is good = American (of which he is not one). As a matter of fact, if Jesus's will were in effect in this wicked world, she would not have been able to file her vicious law suit, because Tort Reform would have stopped any shady Trial Lawyers from taking her frivolous case!!!

Reader Jinx asks if I really thought X Burlesque was "awful." No, "awful" would be Anthony Cools' Ooh-la-la, thankfully deceased, although Cools threatens periodically to bring it back somewhere else (read: Tropicana). However, the only specifics I can remember of X were that it was hosted by the late Pudgy on the night I saw it and that the dancers were some of the most "augmented" I've seen on the Strip. At least Crazy Girls has two or three memorable numbers and a comfier showroom.

"Tired and boring," though, is the perfect description of Crazy Horse Paris. It's a depersonalization of the female form, like getting trapped in a Helmut Newton photo album. I don't think the astrology segment is in there anymore or, if it is, it's become thoroughly forgettable.

Thanks to reader Jeff in OKC for his shout-out to one of the truly great ladies of the silver screen, Stella Stevens. They don't make dames like her anymore (Christina Hendricks of Mad Men excepted) and, for your pleasure, here's the opening of Las Vegas Lady -- a festival of vintage Glitter Gulch neon.

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Our good buddies at Columbia Sussex, who still maintain toeholds in the Las Vegas and Lake Tahoe markets, continue to make friends in time-honored fashion. For instance, with dicta like:

"Fire the old lady in sales." (A more detailed version of the story is here.)

Yup, sounds like the ColSux we know and love. No matter how outstanding Charlotte Thomas' performance was, she committed the unspeakable crimes of earning a living wage and, worse still, being old. Now, it's a well-established fact that ColSux owner and CEO William J. Yung III is no spring chicken himself. I wonder how he'd feel if the bankers who underwrote his multibillion-dollar buying spree in 2006 said, "Fire the old duffer in the executive suite"?

Companies that fire talented people -- like a woman of a certain age who doubled sales -- just to save a few grand on the bottom line and have some more-nubile faces around the office deserve to fail. And, with that kind of thinking, they inevitably will.

(If nothing else, this saga will give one a renewed appreciation of why Faust, given the choice of sundry temptations, chose to be young again. Bill Yung probably had his name on a "cut sheet.")

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 ... largely the same as the old boss. Tropicana Entertainment's diligent efforts to get back into the Tropicana Atlantic City have finally paid off. Thus (nearly) ends a prolonged interregnum during which no clearly superior alternativves emerged. Well ... there was an extended flirtation with Cordish Gaming but butterfingered trustee Justice Gary Stein fumbled that away.

Since Carl Icahn's stealthy buy-up of TropEnt stock extinguished Columbia Sussex CEO William J. Yung III's ownership rights, the era of Attila the Yung has finally ended. Also, getting Stein out and private ownership back in is a transition that can't happen soon enough.

On the downside, Trop property prexy Mark Giannantonio (a Yung appointee) remains at the helm. Also, TropEnt CEO Scott Butera and his lieutenants did an undistinguished job of running the Tropicana Las Vegas before selling it to Onex Corp. They still have a lot to prove in Atlantic City.

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"I have been pleasantly surprised by the tremendous reservoir of good will that exists in our work force ... Considering how previous administrators have neglected the property, neglected the operations and neglected the employees, it was very refreshing to find that despite all that neglect so much pride and passion can be harnessed. And regardless of what happened in the past, I am keenly aware that change can be scary for many of our team members. But change also irrigates the human condition." -- Tropicana Las Vegas CEO Alex Yemenidjian, on the future of the property.

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If you're looking for a bargain on the Strip, what about buying the Tropicana Las Vegas? The Las Vegas Review-Journal found that Onex Corp. got $440 million worth of equity (or a 61% share) for a Filene's Basement price of $137 million. That would make the "street value" of the whole Trop $228 million, or $6.7 million an acre -- a fifth of what Wall Street valued it at the peak of the Aztar Corp. feeding frenzy. Columbia Sussex won, Pinnacle Entertainment lost ... and Pinnacle wound up being the lucky one, as ColSux toppled under insupportable debt.

The Trop's "paper" value would put it in the Treasure Island class, at $733 million. But you'd need an electron microscope to find the Trop's recent EBITDA, so nobody's going to pay Phil Ruffin-sized dollars for the place now. New owner Onex is a private equity firm that dabbles in real estate and sundry other industries. However, unlike some recent bunglers in the casino industry, Onex had the smarts to hire Alex Yemenidjian to head up its casino efforts, first in Illinois and now on the Strip. Compared to those private equity confreres who bought into the industry at its apogee, Onex's Trop move looks downright brilliant.

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"As a result of [Tropicana Entertainment's] continued use of the Tropicana marks in interstate commerce, the Tropicana marks have achieved fame and notoriety and are associated in the minds of consumers nationwide with a consistent level of high-quality casino, entertainment and hotel and restaurant services." -- from court filings by Tropicana Entertainment, proud owner of the Tropicana Express in Laughlin, proprietor of the Horizon in Lake Tahoe (above) and evicted operator of the Tropicana Atlantic City. Uh, yeah, that "notoriety" part is right on the money. TropEnt is suing the Tropicana Las Vegas to enjoin it from using the "Tropicana" name.

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