The Slice: A few ways to avoid the madness

There’s always the possibility that you don’t want to talk about college basketball.

But what do you do when confronted with someone who does? Well, you can borrow from the arts.

“I prefer not to.” — “Bartleby, the Scrivener”

“Que?” — “Fawlty Towers”

“Say no more.” — “Monty Python”

“Please don’t speak.” — “Bullets Over Broadway”

“Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.” — “Gone With the Wind”

“Great moments in show and tell: Back around 1995, Joan Williams was teaching kindergarten at a West Valley school.

A kid named Cody marched up to the front of the class with his backpack. From that he extracted an extra large resealable plastic bag. In that clear container was a large portion of a deer leg. It was quite obviously fresh.

Several of his classmates were horrified.

Cody had hardly begun his hunting story when the stunned Williams emphatically instructed him to put the bag back in his pack.

The little boy was disappointed, but perhaps he learned something about the importance of knowing your audience.

“Slice answers (discovering that you needed corrective lenses): Peggy Coffey got glasses when she was in fourth or fifth grade. “I realized I couldn’t see well when my sister was able to read the sign for vacation Bible school on the side of Hillyard Baptist Church. But what I really remember was being surprised that the world had sharp edges. I’d always assumed it was fuzzy.”

Beth Guthmiller used to repeatedly ask her teacher if she could go to the restroom, so she could walk up by the blackboard and read what was written on it.

Joan Tracy realized she needed glasses when, at age 22, she flunked the vision test that was part of obtaining a driver’s license in Montana.

“I knew I needed glasses when a friend — I use the term loosely now — gave me a 5X magnification makeup mirror for a birthday gift and I saw all the lines and wrinkles in my face,” wrote Pam Pierson.

Joan Jensen was 10 and visiting relatives. Her aunt opened a kitchen cupboard and asked her which cereal she wanted. “I could not read any of the box labels,” she wrote.

Joyce Mann mentioned to a postal clerk that she liked a series of lighthouse stamps but she added that they really ought to identify the location of each. “I was shocked to discover that the fuzzy black border at the bottom of the stamps was actually teeny tiny letters.”

And a friend told about sitting on a front porch with her parents when she was about 9. Her mom commented on an airplane flying overhead. “What plane?” said my friend.

“Today’s Slice question: How many of those who talk about planting vegetable gardens actually follow through?