The Slice: The Corps of Discovery had a longer trip home

Please discuss among yourselves.

The biggest difference between your family’s camping trips and the Lewis and Clark expedition is… A) The Corps of Discovery probably whined more. B) We see fewer bears. C) We smell better. Maybe. D) We have better cooking equipment. E) Other.

Just wondering: Would a picture of you reading the paper in your typical breakfast attire make for a good S-R promotion?

Today’s kite story: Once, while in his 30s, Jeff Nadeau attached a kite to about half a mile of high-test fishing line wrapped around a coffee can. “My wife and I went to Shadle Park on a fine windy day to send the kite the highest it could go on that long tether. The wind sucked the kite skyward, the coffee can spinning like a dervish as the string spooled off following the kite aloft.”

At some point, an airliner flew overhead. It seemed to Nadeau as if the jet was not all that far from his kite. “I shuddered to think what would happen if a plane sucked the kite into an engine, so we began reeling in the kite as fast as we could.”

Bringing it back down proved difficult. “It was taking forever,” Nadeau recalled. “I decided to try to land it like a big marlin by running ahead to pull the kite to the ground while my wife furiously wound up the slack line.”

Eventually they succeeded. The kite has never flown again.

But Nadeau still has it, and the half mile of fishing line wrapped around the coffee can. And he has his most cherished memory of that day.

“No planes crashed.”

Watch your language: Bill Mahaney empathized with the reader who did not appreciate “graduated high school.”

“It is, of course, not grammatically possible to ‘graduate high school’ because whatever subject you use does not have the ability to ‘graduate’ anything. Schools graduate students, not the other way around.”

Today’s Slice question: What particular brand of perpetually dyspeptic online troll drives you away from seriously considering posting comments on Web content?