The Slice: Don’t be a dope while riding hills

The keys to pretending that you are in the Tour de France is to avoid having little kids pass you going up a hill or looking so beat while resting at a corner that motorists stop and ask if you need assistance.

OK, let’s move on.

•Ticked off: North Idaho’s Ray Jobes has a friend who was on a camping trip. She noticed a tick on her dog’s head. That was dealt with.

Then it appeared that there was another one dug into the canine’s belly.

“Long, careful pulling and tugging could not dislodge the tick,” wrote Jobes.

A warmed twig from the campfire was gently pressed against the spot. That just made the dog squirm.

Finally another member of the camping party, a city-slicker as it happens, had a question about the protuberance on the dog’s belly. “Aren’t those the dog’s teats?” he asked.

Uh, yes. Actually.

Next case.

Let’s just blame it on the poor light.

•In praise of older bakers: One of Lisa Giegel’s younger co-workers, a 30-year-old guy, was trying to describe his enthusiasm for the culinary chops of women who have been in the kitchen a time or two.

“I love potlucks with …” he said, before stalling out as he tried to come up with the right words.

Finally, he finished his sentence: “… established women.”

Hmmm. Well, you know what he meant. He was trying to offer a sincere compliment without sounding sexist, ageist or whatever. He didn’t want to appear to be defining the women in terms of their cooking skills.

Someone at the gathering declared that perhaps “experienced” would be a better word.

But others feared that sounded like a description of women with a certain kind of past.

Maybe that guy should have just said, “These are great muffins – thanks!”

•Just wondering: Do you think there might be a few grains of beach sand from, say, 1998, still on or in your body?

•Word power: Here are a few seldom-used descriptions of swimsuits: disruptive, hardscrabble, overwrought, underachieving, secular, libertarian, Hillyardesque, blunt, ballistic, deluded, latent, murmuring, thermonuclear.

•Nicknames given to students by Spokane sixth-grade teachers include: Meatstick and Bobo.

(My source is a kid who was called Bulldog.)

•Today’s Slice question: Do certain women assume that, in certain situations, guys in sunglasses are ogling them?