Word: slotted
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Even in the unpredictable Soviet Union, television viewers must be astonished by a new program on one of the two state-run channels. Last week, in a Sunday time slot following the evening news, Metropolitan Pitirim, head of the publishing department of the Russian Orthodox Church, appeared on the screen garbed in clerical robes and holding prayer beads. For ten minutes, Pitirim spoke soothingly about the need to set aside daily troubles in order to help others and contemplate the meaning of life. The priest also worked in discreet mentions of Jesus Christ and the Bible...
...point of perversity. Thirty-three million people visit the city every year, and each day 1,300 tour buses clog the streets. But since 1976 the local population has shrunk 20%, to about 35,000, and residents continue to flee to the suburbs. There are 18,103 slot machines, but no car washes, no movie theaters and only one supermarket. And on Mother's Day, people could not get to church because the Tour de Trump, a bicycle race, blocked the roads that morning...
...explanation for the casinos' failure to live up to their civic responsibilities is that only five out of twelve posted a profit last year. Overall, the casinos earned just $14.7 million after expenses in 1988, a meager return on the $2.73 billion that gamblers lost in the slot machines and at the tables, according to Marvin Roffman, a casino analyst with Philadelphia's Janney Montgomery Scott. The reason is the debt the casinos have taken on in the past three years, much of it through junk bonds, either to fight off takeovers or engineer them. Atlantic City's casinos have...
...after row of slot machines, women stand quietly in the aisles, holding plastic cups full of coins that blacken their hands, eating morsels buried in their purses and pulling levers hour after hour, as if at work in a stamping factory. Most are elderly, but their backs are straight, and their eyes are hypnotically fixed on the spinning fruit as the winning coins hit the metal troughs in twos and tens and -- rarely -- jackpot hemorrhages...
Though she definitely does not qualify as a high roller, Painton could hardly have reported and written our story on one of America's gambling capitals without sampling a bit of the action. Estimated slot-machine losses in the course of two evenings: $50. But Painton did taste one of the luxuries the casinos lavish on their best customers. With all its regular rooms occupied, Bally's Grand Casino Hotel one evening assigned her to a suite with a Jacuzzi and a TV hidden in a marble plinth. Unhappily, the upgrade did not result in a night of rest. Explains...