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The Slice: Hide your clothes, your boots and your motorcycle

I was thinking about how I miss the Lyons Avenue Cinema on the North Side.

It wasn’t really anything special, I guess. Just another something-plex that closed years ago. But I liked going to movies there.

I remember seeing “Terminator 2” there in the summer of 1991. The place was packed, but everyone around me behaved and had a good time.

Not really expecting anything, I did a Google search on “Lyons Cinema”/“Spokane.”

Imagine my surprise when I saw a map showing how to get to that theater. And there was a phone number.

Huh?

Thinking that perhaps I had somehow managed to travel back in time, I called the number.

That connected me with a recording at The Spokesman-Review.

Yes, The Spokesman-Review.

Conspiracy buffs, make of this what you will. But it wouldn’t surprise me if Spokane is home to a rift in the space/time continuum. That would explain a few things.

Maybe another terminator is coming and we’d all better sit up and act right.

•Lyrical Spokane: As you know, The Slice likes to keep track of references to Spokane showing up in songs. And thanks to alert readers Rick Olsen and Gem Magnuson in North Idaho, there’s another one to report.

Storied guitarist and composer Ry Cooder mentions the Lilac City on his new disc, “I, Flathead: The Songs of Kash Buk and the Klowns.”

It’s in a song called “My Dwarf is Getting Tired.”

Here’s the passage in question:

Forty years of motel rooms, cigarettes and magazines

From Spokane clear down to Bakersfield

You might have seen us on the highway so many times before

But my dwarf is getting tired and my fat man just won’t travel anymore

Fair question: Who makes the Inland Northwest’s best corn dogs?

I’m sorry: But I just can’t see beach volleyball as an Olympic sport.

Sunday Slice quiz: Identify Robert Saucier.

One reader submitting the correct answer will receive a coveted reporter’s notebook.

Help me out here: Am I seeing more bicyclists in and around Spokane because I’m now more aware of them, or because there are more of them?

Slice answers: Lots of readers recalled growing up in households that subscribed to Life magazine or The Saturday Evening Post. But Sharon Pearson remembered that her family took Look. “It was practically all pictures,” she recalled. “I loved it.”

Today’s Slice question: What did a grade-school teacher confiscate from you and did you ever get it back?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098; e-mail pault@spokesman.com. Sorry if I didn’t call you back. I haven’t quite mastered the new phone system and have accidentally killed several messages recently.

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