The Slice: No altitude adjustment required

When he was 11 or 12, Mike Altman was flying a kite way up high near Sea-Tac Airport when two thoughts occurred to him.

“One was, ‘Oh God, what if a plane gets tangled up in the string and crashes?’ The second thought was, ‘My dad is going to kill me.’ ”

Winding it in as quickly as possible, he avoided both outcomes.

Kids, teachers and parents: “This is not exactly on point with Monday’s question, but I have always found it amusing,” wrote Jim Clanton.

His sister taught third grade for ages. When a parent started to confront her with something a child had said about her, Clanton’s sister had a ready response: “I won’t tell you what little Johnny said about you if you don’t tell me what he said about me.”

That usually moved the conversation forward.

Monitoring themes in movies and TV: Chris Kelly always notes this. “One character says to another, ‘We’re alike, you and I.’ It’s in both good movies and bad ones. I think Morgan Freeman’s Nelson Mandela said it to Matt Damon’s rugby player in ‘Invictus,’ and the cult leader/serial killer said it to Kevin Bacon’s FBI agent in ‘The Following.’ Sometimes it’s probably true in some way, as in ‘Invictus,’ but usually it’s just the bad guy trying to justify being evil, or make the good guy question his motives. But it’s ever-present.”

Dirk Stratton shared this. “The often-repeated theme or plot device I notice with regularity can be summed up in one word: resurrection. This applies to both sides of the hero/villain continuum. In short: 1) the monster never dies the first time you kill it/him/her; and 2) the hero frequently dies (or appears to, or suffers some symbolic death) but isn’t actually dead.”

Slice answer: Maybe it’s not just wrangling friends’ furniture that does in the backs of pickup truck owners. “Perhaps the bad backs stem from actually working or having a more physical lifestyle,” wrote Bruce Werner.

Decades of bucking hay can do the trick, he added.

Today’s Slice question: Come fall, we’ll look back on the season and call it “The summer of …”