Ask the Slot Expert: Buffets? Just say no

Question: We never eat at buffets.

Have you ever seen the way people pick over the food, get close to the food and cough, sneeze and wheeze in the line?

No thanks.

Answer: Close to the food? I've been to buffets where the sneeze guards made it nearly impossible to get to the victuals. One salad bar had an array of salad toppings in a 6x3 grid of containers sunken into crushed ice. The sneeze guard left only about a four-inch gap underneath it. To get something from the back row you (well, at least I) had to crouch down so the tongs were going in nearly level. If you stood normally, the tongs went in at an angle and you could just barely get to the middle row. Even with the tongs level, it required a great deal of dexterity to grab a black olive from the back row and hold on to it as you withdrew the tongs. Many back row items never made it to a plate. The containers in the front two rows contained a melange of what was supposed to be in them and what fell in them.

The sneeze guards for the hot food were much easier to deal with. I guess the heat kills anything nasty that gets on the food, so hot food doesn't need as much protection. As I moved up the ranks from buffet novice to experienced buffeter, I learned to dig deep in the chafing dish to get the food at the bottom. It's hotter than the food at the top. Plus the food at the top is sometimes dried out.

How do you feel about people taking half of something, like a Chicken Parm? On the one hand, you shouldn't take food that you have no intention of eating. But on the other hand, would you take something that somebody else cut? No one ever took the half donut left in the box on donut day at work. It seems to me that these half servings just sit in the tray waiting to be taken away when the tray is replaced.

I ate lunch at one buffet when it had a Chicken Parm action station. Your parm was freshly prepared. It doesn't take long to cook a thin chicken cutlet. Then the cook topped it with a handful of mozzarella that he grabbed from an industrial-size bag of pre-shredded mozzarella.

That cheese was very dry and did not melt well. The cooking shows are right. Don't buy pre-shredded cheese.

Well, you still don't have many options for Las Vegas buffets. Off strip you better plan on eating at the food court or coffee shop. On the strip, if your casino doesn't have a buffet, there's one a casino or two away, but it may not be serving the meal you want and you won't want to pay the price.

Question: I hit for pretty well the whole screen of prime time ladies in my beer slot game then host shut down machine do I still get those prime spins

Answer: Does anyone know which slot machine this reader is referring to? I thought it might be WMS' Bier Haus, but it's pretty clear that the Bavarian beauty featured on the machine is named Heidi.

In any case, are you sure it was a host that shut down the machine? In Las Vegas, hosts have authority over comps (and long-time visitors and residents tell me that the hosts' authority over writing comps has been steadily decreasing over time), but hosts have no authority over slot floor operations. Hosts cannot shut down machines. They don't have the necessary keys to shut down a machine.

A few years ago, one of my regular casinos upgraded the slot club software in its machines. The upgrade required replacing a flash memory card in the machine. I mentioned to one of the slot techs that I hadn't used a flash memory card for years. I switched to SD cards a long time ago. I realize though that this is the technology that was tested and approved, so this is what will be used until a new generation of hardware and software is tested and approved.

One of the features in the upgrade was the ability to play promotional games on the machine. The first time it ran a promotional game there were still a few kinks in the system. I was playing NSU on my favorite machine. The promotional game was triggered and it appeared in the slot club panel on the left side of the display. Then my machine locked up.

The slot floorperson who came to my rescue determined that they would have to reboot my machine. She couldn't do it, so she radioed for her supervisor to come with her magic key that would enable them to reboot the machine.

I think there are some details that you left out of your question. Did you have to forfeit any credits you had on the machine?

If a machine reboots in the middle of a game, it will resume where it left off after it comes back up. I've never seen a casino shut down a machine in mid-play, but if it did, I think the machine will resume where it was when it is turned on again. Because you weren't there when the machine was restarted, you don't get those spins.

There's been much talk the past few weeks about breakthrough infections. This is an example where science terminology collides with colloquial meaning.

The word breakthrough connotes an impervious barrier that something was unexpectedly able to penetrate, like if the Big Bad Wolf had been able to blow down the third little pig's house of brick. The word gives the impression that the vaccine gives complete protection against infection.

Doctors and scientists have been saying since the beginning that no vaccine is 100% effective. Remember when they said they would be happy with a vaccine that had about 35% efficacy? They've also said that the goal of the vaccine is to decrease hospitalizations and deaths.

Vaccinated people will get infected. It's expected. The fact that vaccinated people still get infected doesn't show that the vaccine doesn't work. The milder severity of those infections and the relative rarity of hospitalizations and deaths compared with the unvaccinated, on the contrary, shows how well the vaccines work.

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