If you eat at your hotel dining room while in Reno or Las Vegas, you can't help being in the middle of a casino. Every Nevada hotel has restaurants intermingled with first floor casinos, making it unnecessary for guests to ever leave the premises.

So it was that while finishing a cup of coffee at the Lodge Buffet I got to eavesdrop on the casual dinner conversations of a man and a woman. The two were discussing their mutual love of playing one-armed bandits slot machines. They praised the slots for being relatively inexpensive. They spoke of how relaxing the casino was to the point of hypnotizing. They liked that they could put their minds in neutral and "play," since gambling required no great intellectual ability (or athletic agility) on the part of the "player."

Both parties whole-hea…