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The Slice: Life without the lake? We’ve got you covered

If you live here and never go near the water, sooner or later you will be asked to explain yourself.

Some people, after all, cannot comprehend resisting the lure of lake life.

So what do you say?

Nobody likes a grouch. So you might want to avoid “None of your business” or “Can you not imagine that someone might make lifestyle choices that are not identical to yours?”

“I’m poor” doesn’t really work either.

But don’t worry. The Slice wouldn’t leave you in the lurch.

Here are some prepackaged answers, for your convenience.

“I don’t like getting sand in my you know.”

“I’m still trying to get water out of my ear from 1989.”

“Fishing hooks have a thing against me.”

“Last time I was on a boat, some goateed guy drinking beer tried to sound like a pirate for four hours.”

“With the economic uncertainty in Europe right now, I think it’s better to stay on dry land.”

“The sight of me in a swimsuit causes people to become embarrassingly aroused.”

“My idea of water that’s not too cold differs from the opinions of everyone I know.”

“I’m a part-time burglar and that’s my busy season.”

“Bugs.”

“I prefer easy access to a real bathroom.”

“I have troubling visions of ‘Jaws’ and ‘Das Boot’.”

“I can’t get with apparel that doesn’t have pockets.”

“Still trying to get over some things I saw during a 2009 skinny dipping outbreak.”

Higher education: Mike Storms was watching TV and happened onto a documentary of sorts on pizza. “It caused me to flash back to my GU days in the late ’60s,” he wrote. “We’d buy a cheap grocery store pizza and toppings for it. One time the crust was like cardboard. Turns out the frozen pizza was on a cardboard disk and bound to it on cooking. Oh well, good source of fiber.”

If you have trouble believing that, I would guess that you are too young to remember what frozen pizzas tasted like in that era. A cardboard crust might have improved some of them.

Today’s Slice question: How many people read both the Journal of Business and the Inlander?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Stretching Independence Day into a long weekend will take some doing this year.

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