Borgata behaving badly; Headless body in topless car

On the “george” side of the ledger we find Bally’s Atlantic City, which is offering room rates starting at $29/night through February 28, albeit on “select nights.” Hey, it’s a terrific way to raise awareness of the new-look Bally’s. As for the Stiff of the Week, the winner is Borgata. Let our Atlantic City correspondent tell it: “MGM Borgata is getting cheaper by the day. [My wife] has reservations for a Christmas show this Wednesday night, but we now have a family night out scheduled. When she called MGM yesterday, she was told next week was ‘fully booked’ for comp tickets, and the host she spoke with told her to contact Ticketmaster to buy her own tickets. With 75,000++ tier points (my estimate is somewhere between $7 to $9 per point). She told the host the tickets were only $12 each (seems like a ‘high quality’ show), and she already had tickets for this week. Didn’t matter to them (she doesn’t have any assigned host at MGM).” Bad Borgata!

By the way, if the 100%+ higher PILOT payments at Resorts Atlantic City are the coup de grace for the Boardwalk’s oldest casino, it could redound to the benefit of Hard Rock Atlantic City. Our reporter says Hard Rock could pick up—among other things—a secure valet-parking garage in form of Resorts’ free-standing structure. “[Hard Rock’s] current valet parking garage is in the middle of the self-park garage, with no effective security between the areas. We’ve been there when people have reported items stolen from their cars on two separate occasions.” Joe Lupo, are you reading?

And if you are reading, sir, can you spare $500 for Boardwalk workers? Mayor Marty Small (D) wants to give $2,500 in Casino Reinvestment Development Authority money apiece to Boardwalk employees. Dissenting city council members wondered why the largesse wasn’t going to nurses and other hospital staff but Small was not to be deterred. In other news from the seaside, the average rate of home ownership was 27% and as low as 7% in one neighborhood. Holy property tax base, Batman! Lastly, Bart Blatstein still hasn’t built his Showboat water park but has collateralized one of his hotel towers against a loan, so maybe we’ll hear something soon.

Pop Warner mercy rules should have been invoked in last night’s 56-14 slaughter of the Washington Snyders by the Dallas Cowboys. Earlier, the Las Vegas Raiders kept their slender thread of a playoff hope alive by fulfilling bookmakers’ predictions and narrowly prevailing over the Denver Broncos in a must-win game and covering the spread. They’re all must-wins for the Silver & Black at this point, especially with the Indianapolis Colts and Los Angeles Chargers looming on the schedule. Meanwhile, if you’re getting fatigued with sports-betting commercials we have bad news. Adweek predicts “explosive growth” in the pesky things. Yes, that annoying woman from DraftKings will be yelling at you to “Make it rain” 24/7/365. Over the past year, $336 million was spent on TV ads alone and it’s only expected to increase. About the one thing that could curb this irritating trend is regulatory disapproval.

Does Las Vegas have its own Jeffrey Dahmer? A motorist pulled over by Las Vegas Metro outside The Rio turned out have a severed head in his automobile. Now only that, “Police report that several large coolers were located in the bed of the pickup [truck] and were found to contain human body parts,” sayeth Casino.org. The driver, Eric Holland, tried to hotfoot it away from the scene—understandably—and was tased into submission by Metro. What would someone be doing with body parts in coolers? Do we really want to know?

Finally, let’s see what Bellagio Gallery of Fine Arts is doing for Black History Month …