Sprawling Bally’s Las Vegas’s fate has been hanging in limbo ever since Harrah’s Entertainment vanquished Caesars Entertainment. (Feel free to insert your favorite “fall of the Roman empire” analogy here.) Harrah’s boss Gary Loveman has floated the possibility of imploding the blue-rinsed old gal, but Harrah’s likes to emphasize that no decision has been announced.

Which doesn’t mean that no decision has been made. Local outfit Penta Building Group’s latest press release, which states that Joel Delia II has been hired a assistant project manager with a particular focus on “the Bally’s project.” That announcement could mean anything but it came as a bit of a shock to Harrah’s when I called over there, so somebody at Penta appears to have let at least a very small cat out of the big … maybe even a lion. (Whoops, wrong corporate feline.)

Which reminds me that Bally’s Las Vegas will always be most famous as the site of the MGM Grand fire, in 1980. And speaking of MGM properties …

I keep hearing (and sometimes seeing) that the lower-end Strip casinos that MGM Mirage inherited from Circus Circus … er, Mandalay Resort Group were in pretty parlous shape when MGM was handed the keys. The last eight years have certainly not been kind to Luxor and new property chief Felix Rappaport appears to be faced with the same sort of turnaround project that he achieved at New York-New York. (Besides, you’ve got to like a guy who, for an official portrait, wore a neckite festooned with a pattern of little flyswatters.)

From what I hear, the erstwhile Circus Circus Enterprises was focusing its energies and cash on its shiny new Mandalay Bay and THEhotel and neglecting its older Strip casinos, including its namesake clown-themed, big-top casino, immortalized in prose by Hunter S. Thompson. Based on what I’ve seen, I believe it. MGM Mirage definitely has a lot of spiffing up to do … although I don’t know what to make of the repositioning of Excalibur as an adult playpen. The resident Business Press wit aptly summarized this racy reinvention of Camelot as “less Arthur, more Guinevere.”