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The Slice: ‘Merchant of Venice’ proved tough to digest

Lars Neises noted that in addition to people who can’t spell, there are those who stumble when reading.

Back in 1959, when he was in his 10th grade English class, Lars was called on to read aloud from Shakespeare’s “The Merchant of Venice.”

At the conclusion of the passage, he read a sentence that ended “… thou speakest, ’mong other things I shall digest it.”

All was going well until he pronounced “digest” as “dig-est.”

As if suddenly there was a beatnik in the play.

“The entire class broke into laughter. It took me a while to realize my error. Can thou dig it?”

Today’s band name: Jim Jenkins is a well regarded house painter now. But back in the mid-’60s, he was the drummer for a Spokane band called Al Herbert and the Marijuana Trash.

The name was a takeoff on Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass. But the band was no joke. They had a lot of primo gigs, from country clubs and the Ridpath to dances and Carl Maxey’s backyard birthday party.

Do you remember the Marijuana Trash?

North and South: “Reading (Monday’s) article about a change in airport flight patterns for a month or so and potential noise complaints from South Hill residents, I wondered how they might have reacted to decades of un-muffled, armed B-52 bombers flying low on their North Side approach to Fairchild – so low they sometimes cast a dark shadow as they passed over,” wrote Mike Wirt. “Our little Shadle area house shook and conversations were momentarily drowned out. Guess it’s all a matter of perspective, huh?”

Memories of folk medicine: “My grandfather carried a horse chestnut in his pocket to help his rheumatism,” wrote Janet Lake.

There’s something to be said for frontier justice: “There was a kid in my neighborhood when I was in high school who urinated in his squirt gun and called it his ‘pee shooter,’ ” wrote Mike Storms. “This cute trick got him beat up.”

Today’s Slice question: How did you feel when the remodeling was over?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. Quite a few readers realized Monday’s allusion to The Boomtown Rats would have been prompted by their song “I Don’t Like Mondays.”

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