The Slice: Ever been unfriended from a 3-on-3 team?

People don’t talk about it much.

Maybe it’s just too sensitive of a subject.

But there’s a certain amount of tension surrounding who gets invited to play on your Hoopfest team and who doesn’t.

Let’s move on.

Repurposing the S-R: Liberty Lake’s John Loucks shared this.

“Every Sunday evening, I select four sections of The Spokesman-Review, and I place them in a waste basket beside the piano in the study. Later in the evening and at various times through the week, I spread these papers on the floor between a chair and the piano, and the paper catches the spit from the tuning slides on my trumpet when I practice.

“When I am finished practicing, I place the papers on top of the waste basket so they will dry out for the next practice session. I have found this usage of old copies protects the carpet from getting wet and stinky and also keeps my beloved wife of many years from going ballistic. I use the papers for one week, and then I change them out the next Sunday.”

Rathdrum’s Kandi Burnham offered this.

“Every morning while reading the S-R, my husband sneezes (maybe it’s the ink?). The newspaper has become the best sneeze guard around.”

Slice answer: “By far my worst job was when I was 16 years old,” wrote Kent Hull.

I’m betting you will think his was worse than your worst job.

Anyway, Kent’s mother found him a position in a chicken processing plant in Boise. It was 1963.

“My job entailed placing the recently throat-cut chickens in a vat of hot water for five minutes, then into an automatic plucking machine.”

Then he had to remove them and pull their heads off.

“The head went into a tub and the chicken was tossed through a window onto a long table surrounded by women who manually eviscerated them and put them into troughs full of ice water.”

They processed about 5,000 fryers a day. But on Thursday, they handled the “stewing chickens,” which were older. It was tougher to pull the heads off those birds. Kent dreaded Thursdays.

“I worked there all summer and was paid $8 a day. Enough to buy my own school clothes for the year.”

It was a character builder, as they say.

“I never forgot the calluses between my thumb and forefinger, from de-heading chickens. Or the smell.”

Today’s Slice question: What’s something you might see in downtown Spokane that you probably won’t see anywhere else in the Inland Northwest?

Write The Slice at P. O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. What turned you into a hugger?