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The Slice: Try to avoid acting like a vulture

Bloomsday eve is one of those days on Spokane’s calendar when our city comes in for a little extra scrutiny because we have a lot of visitors.

That’s fine. Nothing to worry about. Once people can be persuaded to come here, Spokane usually sells itself.

But assuming you want out-of-towners to think well of the Lilac City, there are a few things you can do this weekend to help polish the old hometown’s image.

On, second thought, you don’t need a condescending lecture from me. Just be yourself and smile.

Unless, of course, you do a lot of public spitting, swearing, urinating, scrotum-scratching, flipping-off, ogling, littering and glowering. In that case, try to act like someone else.

Just wondering: Has a neighbor kid you know slightly but don’t see often ever grown up so fast that you did not recognize him or her at first?

Mixed marriages: Sherry Hutchison is originally from Atlanta. Her husband is a Spokane native. She recalled a story from the mid-1970s.

“We were students at Eastern,” she wrote. “I was tired of winter and after a particularly heavy overnight snowfall, I announced it was insane and inhumane to expect people to make it out to Cheney and I was taking a Snow Day. My husband said they NEVER cancelled classes.”

That’s nuts, she suggested.

As it happened, on that day, there was so much snow that school administrators did call off classes for the first time in ages.

Said Hutchison, “Sometimes it takes a person from the South to know when to surrender to winter.”

To remember how to spell “Spokane”: Say “please” or kindness and neighborliness evaporate.

Slice answer: If you were the only woman on Earth, what man would you summon to be your starter companion? “My knee-jerk answer was Brad Pitt,” wrote Lynn Winkler. “But then I changed my mind. I sure don’t want to be compared to Angelina Jolie.”

Today’s Slice question: When Inland Northwest residents who did not go to college lie about that on résumés or whatever, what school do they most often claim to have attended?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Heard from a rural reader whose family names adopted cats after characters in the old HBO series “Deadwood.”

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