Beat everyone else to the holidays
You might want to start planning now to stretch your 2008 long weekends.
Independence Day is exactly 26 weeks from today. Yes, a Friday.
So sign up now to also be off on that Thursday before or the Monday after.
•Behind enemy lines: Long before his team made the NFL playoffs, Slice reader and transplanted Virginian William Hall had several choruses of “Hail to the Redskins” on his phone-answering recording.
•Name game: Coeur d’Alene’s Cindy Little attended a New Year’s Eve poker party. There were 11 people at this gathering.
From that lineup, there were two Karens, two Debbies, two Mikes and two Cindys.
“Can you guess the age group of these folks?” she wrote.
Sounds like baby boomers to me. (Notice that all of those names can be spelled without five minutes of Q-and-A.)
•Furry retirement community: “I want to know if any of your readers have as many elderly pets as me,” wrote Dawni Jensen.
She has a 17 1/2-year-old cat, a 15 1/2-year-old cat, a 13-year-old golden retriever and a 13-year-old goldfish.
“In addition, and completely unrelated to my geriatric ward for pets, I have a 19-year-old can of creamed corn in the back of my cupboard,” she wrote.
I wonder what the can of corn is named.
•Sidewalk sharing, continued: Spokane’s Bob Strong, 58, weighed in.
“When one of these uncultured, uncivilized barbarians clogs the sidewalk, and I am on the ‘right’ (correct) side, I stop several feet ahead of them and stand my ground,” he wrote. “I plant my feet and silently dare them to invade ‘my turf.’ I stand with my feet shoulder-width apart – not a ‘wide stance,’ if you know what I mean – and glare at them with a burning stare that would cauterize their souls. Believe me, I can do that. The miscreants invariably dodge around me. They have never challenged my position in many years. If they did, I have a back-up plan. But I WILL NOT ‘back up.’ ”
Noted.
And by the way, if you suddenly find yourself humming Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down,” take it up with Bob, not me.
No, I’ll stand my ground, won’t be turned around
And I’ll keep this world from draggin’ me down…
•The first Slice contest of 2008: Briefly explain why fans of the movie “Dr. Strangelove” will sometimes incorporate “POE” or “OPE” in their various passwords.
I’ll send a coveted reporter’s notebook to the reader submitting the best answer. Admittedly, that’s a subjective matter. But my old practice of declaring the first correct responder to be the winner effectively excluded anybody who looks at the paper later than 4 a.m.
•Today’s Slice question: Who makes the best corn bread in the Inland Northwest?