The Slice: Call them secret spices

The health department might not agree.

But I’ve got a theory that disgusting-looking, grease-caked backyard grills that haven’t been cleaned down to the metal since Clinton was president produce the best burgers and steaks.

•Misspeaking: “I’ve been reading all the fractured phrases lately and can’t help but remember all the misquotes that came out of my own mother,” wrote Lynda Nutt of Post Falls. “One that kept me very confused as a child was when she would refer to ‘the cross-eyed bear.’ I think I was in college when I finally figured out that she’d been misspeaking the phrase ‘the cross I bear.’ ”

•Slice answers (swimming without corrective lenses): “I was swimming above the dam at Upriver, alone and without my glasses or contacts,” wrote city arts czarina Karen Mobley. “I swam into a family of young beavers. I was moving through the water comfortably with the beavers all around me when the frantic mother saw me, started slapping her tail wildly and swimming toward me.

“I can tell you, being that close to an angry mother beaver is not something you want to experience.

“Now I wear my old glasses, the ones my partner calls my ‘junior scientist glasses,’ when I swim and hope that I keep them on my face. Not glamorous, but I am less likely to encounter a beaver in defensive-mother mode.”

Another reader with vision issues, who asked that I not print his name, wrote “I don’t swim anymore after almost getting arrested for groping.”

•Listen up: Kerri York recently saw “Cocktails now hear” on a local bar’s reader board.

“What are they listening for?” she wondered.

Well, Kerri, I have three guesses.

They’re listening to hear a guy finally accept responsibility for the mess he’s made of his life.

They’re listening to hear someone express an original political opinion instead of just repeating some radio shouter’s small-minded rants.

And they’re listening to hear people admit that they’ve got no business driving.

•TimFest 2005: If you want help celebrate pub owner Tim O’Doherty’s 50th birthday and support the Vanessa Behan Crisis Nursery, call (509) 443-8181.

•Winners of Thursday’s quiz: Quite a few readers knew that “Swingers” was the 1996 movie in which attractive young women were referred to as “babies.”

But the first with the correct answer were Air Force Maj. Joe Pearson (5:10 a.m.), Alan Claus Anderson — a lawyer who reads The Slice online in Mission Woods, Kan., and Ernie Cox, who works for Key Tronic EMS.

You three are so money.

•Today’s Slice question: Do you, like Slice reader John Erp, rotate the pictures and gift-knickknacks on display in your home depending on who your houseguests are at that moment? (You know, to give visitors the impression that they are at the center of your lives.)