A Cosmopolitan by any other name …

… is still a long way from completion. A silly lawsuit has been settled, an extremely cosmetic change of name has been agreed upon (meaning that Cosmo The Casino is the de facto winner over Cosmo The Mag). We’re told to expect an opening in the vicinity of all-important New Year’s Eve … which gives owner Deutsche Bank eight months to find Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas a management company and get it approved. Hilton Hotels is all well and good but it’s been out of gaming a while now. It does, however, have a powerful brand name and a huge customer base … no small consideration when you have 2,995 rooms to fill.

The Cosmo, incidentally, has a Lamont Cranston-like ability to cloud men’s minds. On at least four occasions, I have heard people — including Robin Leach — ask, “Where’s the Cosmopolitan?” — whilst looking directly at it. Truly, I have never witnessed a like phenomenon in all my life. Maybe we’re all subconsciously trying to wish it out of existence.

Terrible idea in Atlantic City. Or, more accurately, in Trenton. According to LVA‘s news page, New Jersey lawmakers are tinkering with a proposal to reduce the mandatory minimum number of hotel rooms per casino from 500 to 200, on the premise that this could birth four new casinos. So, instead of more Borgatas, lawmakers are incentivizing the creation of a bunch of Aliante Stations by the sea. Does this abandoning the city’s brief destination-resort phase in favor of sleepy little “boutique” casinos as the East Coast attraction cedes preeminence to Philadelphia?

Sigh. A salient problem for Atlantic City has been a lack of critical mass in terms of hotel rooms. This has been generally agreed upon since at least the mid-Nineties, although it has never been more than sporadically addressed. Without more hotel rooms, the city has no prayer of being a magnet for major conventions and like events — and if you don’t believe me, you ought to believe Prof. David G. Schwartz, who can forget more about Atlantic City than most of us will ever know. This proposed downsizing of Boardwalk casinos, if enacted, could easily seal Atlantic City’s fate as a day-trip destination for hardc0re players … a business model that hasn’t been working out so well lately.

Stripiquette. As in “Strip etiquette”; upon the stroke of 11 a.m. yesterday, Bellagio fired up its fountain show with Whitney Houston‘s take-no-prisoners rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” What’s the appropriate response? Should pedestrians stop in their tracks and doff their caps? Should al fresco diners at Planet Hollywood‘s Cabo Wabo stand up? (None did.) And, when the performance in question reaches its unduly protracted conclusion, whose responsibility is it to shout, “Play ball!”?

Whatever the answer(s), it’s still the best free spectacle in town, especially now that the fountains have been augmented so they shoot 450 feet into the air. No one expected Aria to try to outdo Bellagio in this respect but the pee-pee spurts of its Lumia fountain are such an underwhelming effort, one wants to ask Aria parents Jim Murren and Bobby Baldwin, “Why bother?”