Yield For The Finger
It’s important to know your traffic signs.
A woman Larry Hester works with has a bumper sticker he considers to be just about perfect for driving in Spokane. It reads, “Horn broken watch for finger.”
Look what the dog dragged in through the pet door: “My toy poodle, Sidney, was a tiny pup weighing a mere 4 pounds at the time of ‘The Incident,’ ” wrote Pamela Place. “I returned home from work one day to find not the usual crushed pine cones, but a soaking wet stuffed Ernie doll (of Bert and Ernie fame) lying in the middle of the den floor. It must have weighed at least 5 pounds and was 14 inches long.”
Place has no idea where the sodden doll came from, but she would have loved to have seen Sidney hauling it in through the pet door.
Perhaps parents can cite this story as a cautionary tale when trying to convince their children not to leave toys outside.
“Honey, if you leave your things out in the yard that little poodle might come and haul them away.”
Or maybe, when some household item mysteriously seems to be missing, you could just shrug your shoulders and say, “Poodle got it.”
One of Spokane’s underrated pleasures: Scanning the FM radio dial over and over, sticking with each station for about five seconds.
You hear it all, from disc jockeys talking about what they watched on TV to zealots planning the religious revolution.
You would make your own picks, of course. But here are four things that will get us to stick with one station for longer than five seconds.
1. Hilarious ego-tripping.
2. Dazed and confused listeners calling in with song requests.
3. Several hundred tunes that are not on the “Titanic” soundtrack.
4. The locally produced “Taco Time” commercial on one of the stations that airs a lot of conservative Christian programs.
Twenty-eight items exceeds the limit, no matter how you carry them: Hayden Lake’s Wanda Leonard has a theory. She thinks some of those grocery shoppers who overburden their hand-baskets do that so they can more easily sneak through the express lane.
Small world: The fathers of two of our Swell Paper colleagues found themselves sharing a hospital room in Seattle just recently. They didn’t know of the Spokane connection until they started talking.
Thinking about that got us wondering about coincidences. And that leads to…
Today’s Slice question: What has happened to you lately that seemed like a million-to-one shot? , DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
MEMO: The Slice appears Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday. Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; fax (509) 459-5098. Buh-Bye. See you Friday.