The Slice: Summer can stink sometimes

Even Spokane’s most ardent lovers of summer have to admit that there’s at least one great thing about winter.

When it’s bitterly cold, the garbage barrel doesn’t smell.

Let’s move on.

Suddenly a guide appeared: Jim McArthur, who lives in a neighborhood recently hemmed in by road repaving, was out watering a tree in his front yard when a woman in her car pulled up and asked, “How do I get out?”

He was about to suggest a couple of options. But another woman had observed this cry for help and she called out from her own car, “Follow me!”

After the fact, McArthur realized he had witnessed a rare Spokane appearance of a Flatlands Sherpa.

Slice answer: Willene Wick doesn’t have a bike rack or kayak carrier on her car. But now that she drives a Subaru she sort of feels like her readiness for outdoor activities is implied. And therefore, she does not feel like an outsider in outdoors-loving Spokane.

Of course, that’s a bit of a charade, she admits. “I don’t like to perspire.”

“Silence of the Lambs” school of marketing: Linda Fabrizius glanced at a newspaper ad for a self-storage facility and thought it said that new customers would receive 50 percent discounts “with autopsy.”

But before she had time to speculate about just what exactly they expected people to be storing there, Fabrizius realized it said “autopay.”

From the mailbag: “I wonder how many more times I have to stand in line either in front of you, behind you or next to you at the grocery store before you realize that I’m the one who has contributed to The Slice for nearly 13 years,” wrote a reader who, well, like she said.

In a subsequent exchange of correspondence, it was noted that we have never actually met.

“I will say hello next time,” she wrote back. “I just feel like you should know me.”

Today’s Slice question: Did watermelon taste better long ago?