The Slice: Even best hits can sometimes be whiffs

OK, where were we.

Oh, yeah. Wiffle Ball ground rules tailored to specific backyards.

Ritzville’s Dale Anderson said his mother didn’t like it when her flowers got damaged during a game. “So we made a rule that if you hit it in the flowers it was an out,” he wrote.

So that took care of the problem, right?

Not exactly. “I remember one particular time when I was up to bat, I hit a line drive right through three blooming irises. My mom saw this and opened the door letting us know we were breaking her plants. To which my brother replied, ‘We know, Mom, that was an out!’ ”

She was not impressed.

And Sandpoint’s Bob Witte shared this:

“We had quite a few rules in my backyard growing up in California. Each bush had its own significance – single, double, fly out, et cetera. A shot in the pool was a triple and over the fence into the neighbor’s yard on the left was a home run. But if you hit it into the neighbor’s yard on the right it was an out, even though it was further away.

“You see, the neighbors on the right weren’t as nice as the ones on the left, plus their fence was harder to climb. So sometimes retrieving the ball out of their yard was a pain.”

Reader challenge: Identify three ways in which “The Jetsons” was, in all likelihood, an unreliable predictor of the future.

When a neighbor hears sounds of distress coming from your place: “She found out it was our beagle puppy howling,” wrote Judy McKeehan.

Would prefer stop signs: Sonya Mounts has lived in several cities across the country, but Spokane is the first where she has encountered uncontrolled intersections in residential areas.

She is not a fan.

“I feel like it is a disservice to the drivers here and jeopardizes our safety,” she said.

If Spokane was really near-perfect: It probably wouldn’t show up on car-theft and skin-cancer lists.

Today’s Slice question: How can you tell that someone doesn’t really want to hear about your vacation?