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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

The Slice If You Can Dig It, You Belong

That clicking sound you’ve been hearing is the mental noise created as thousands of Spokane-area residents make the seasonal switch from being normal people to being lost souls obsessed with vegetable gardens.

You know you’ve become a Spokane cliche when: “You see Dan Kleckner in a store and think it’s comparable to a Mel Gibson sighting,” said Elizabeth Noble.

Visiting Glacier National Park: “As long as we stayed within the confines of the park, we could more or less forget about what surrounded it, a wasteland of keno parlors, cherry stands and dolorous-looking attractions with names like Big Sky Water Slide.” - from a travel story in last Sunday’s New York Times

Slice answer: “I don’t know if the witch of the Northwest would be a good witch or a bad witch,” wrote Sandpoint’s Susan Bates-Harbuck. “But I’m sure that dumping a bucket of water on her would have no effect.”

New Lilac City slogan: “You’re here, get used to it.”

You know there’s no hope for our culture: When Oprah asks actors questions about topics such as tornadoes or space travel, as if they actually know something.

Grappling with the big questions: Preschooler Brendan Bowman was asked to name a reason he loved his mother. So he thought about it for a moment. Then he spoke up. “I love my mommy because when I say I want to wrestle, she wrestles.”

Nicknames for Spokane’s air: “Mud.” - Shari Gump

“Chewy.” - Jeff Brown

“Silly (self-inflicted lung-lacerating yuck).” - Sean O’Hare

Horizons: “I used to sit in the barn and milk the cows and look out through the barn doors and see the aura of lights above Spokane, which was some forty miles distant, and know that people were not milking cows in Spokane.” - the late artist Edward Kienholz, quoted from an old interview, in The New Yorker

Just wondering: Does this area have more than its share of human mood-rings? You know, people whose fragile emotional makeup prevents them from being happy if it’s cloudy.

Today’s Slice question: What’s your favorite/least favorite locally produced TV commercial?

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Drawing

MEMO: The Slice appears Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098.

The Slice appears Monday, Tuesday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098.