The Slice Great Fun In No-Tech Sort Of Way

It’s such a taken-for-granted Spokane classic that we suspect some people have all but forgotten about it.

So we’ll remind you. Preschoolers love feeding the ducks and geese at Riverfront Park. And if you go over to the north bank, you can probably get the birds to do those great waterlandings right in front of you.

Slice predict-the-future quiz: In what year will the practice of tossing lighted cigarettes from car windows officially be relegated to the ranks of things grandkids can’t believe anybody ever did?

Grandkid of the future: “You mean people just threw these stillburning objects out of their cars as if that was a reasonable thing to do?”

You: “Yes. It was quite common right here in the Inland Northwest.”

Reaching out: There’s a guy who lurks by the pay phones outside a Spokane grocery store we frequent. He’s always asking for change. “I’m trying to call Florida,” is his delivered-with-a-smile line.

Now there’s probably some slight statistical possibility that he’s telling the truth, though he never seems to actually make any phone calls. At least not that we’ve seen.

We gave him a quarter once. Just once.

Still, we haven’t been able to bring ourselves to say “Call collect.”

Anyway, we wondered. If this guy confronted you over and over, what would YOU do?

Sam Leithead’s pet peeve: “Businesses that refuse to ever turn their ‘OPEN’ signs off or around.”

Not really: A guy just called us to complain about people using the term “closure.”

We hung up on him.

Beam me up: A woman at a local senior center was on the phone with an Internal Revenue Service employee in San Francisco. She was trying to obtain a big batch of tax forms. The IRS person was helpful and all. But when he tried to spell the name of the Lilac City, his first guess was “S-P-O-C-K-A-N-E.”

Warm-up question: For how many couples is it part of the routine for the man to go to one church while the woman goes to another?

Today’s Slice question: Which Inland Northwest hospital cafeteria serves the best food? , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Drawing

MEMO: The Slice appears Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098.