The Slice: Less sun for more voice?

Let’s start with a question.

Would you accept fewer sunny days in exchange for more local voters taking your view of things?

Let’s move on.

Here’s one for parents: What was your goal when you set about selecting names for your children?

Slice answers: “To have a long, happy marriage the key is to communicate with each other,” wrote Bill Kaufman. “Having been married for 50 years before my wife died, this worked for us. We had many bumpy years, but when we really started talking to each other, with no holds barred, things smoothed out.”

Beth Bowlin, married 43 years, passed along the four A’s: Attention, Acceptance, Approval and Affection.

Why the Mariners did not consider Randy Guidinger for the role of closer: “Because of my recent rotator cuff surgery on my right shoulder (I’m a righty), which included tacking my biceps back on the bone with a couple of screws and shaving some bone. Oh, and the surgery on my right knee (my push-off leg) to repair my meniscus. Other than this, they would be lucky to have me.”

By the way, Randy is 62.

The Slice would recommend that he work on his knuckleball, but many teams are reluctant to use such specialists in the ninth.

April 1968: Mike Carlson was a Spokane newspaper delivery boy back when the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed. He normally scanned the headlines while preparing his papers for delivery. But on that occasion, he sat on the steps of a Lutheran church and read the entire news story.

Your chance to win a coveted reporter’s notebook: Just phone the Slice number this weekend and leave a message in which you do your best impression of Darrin Stephens’ mother calling to her husband in “Bewitched.”

“Frank!”

Today’s Slice question (recycled from The Slice column that ran on this date in 1995): How would your family have fared crossing the West in a covered wagon?

(Readers responding 20 years ago speculated that it would not have gone well, and 1995 was back before most portable digital devices were on the scene.)