We’Ll Welcome Windstorms With Open Arms - For A While
There’s a sane alternative to raking.
It’s called waiting for a big wind.
* Slice answers: Airport security personnel once scrutinized a belt buckle belonging to Donna Clellen. “They thought it was a saw,” she wrote. “Sure, I thought I’d saw a hole in the plane while we’re up there.”
Sylvia Hutton had her mother’s ashes in a metal box and was taking them back to her hometown in Georgia when security got suspicious.
Moscow’s Mary Penticoff recalled the time a friend got stopped because of a bronze statue of Darth Vader in his backpack.
Others told about security personnel snapping to attention because of baseballs, a glass container of Moose Drool beer, hunting knives, dominatrix paraphernalia, a lead crystal bowl, an amaryllis bulb, cosmetics containers, a nail file, pliers and a carburetor.
Then there was this. “About six years ago, when laptop computers weighed twice what they do now, I had to carry two battery-packs from SeaTac to Spokane,” wrote Daniel Fears. “I had them in my briefcase when going through SeaTac’s airport security. On the X-ray, they looked like two rather thick sticks of dynamite.”
And Lorrie McLaughlin said security personnel did a double take when three friends arrived carrying their own parachutes. (They were headed back East to pick up aerobatic airplanes to be flown back to Spokane.)
* True colors: Bookkeeper Karen Sullivan, 51, reports that her quest for the perfect shade has resulted in her having 396 tubes of lipstick.
And that’s not counting the many she has given to friends searching for the nonpareil plum or just-right rose.
* Romantic Gestures Department: Back around 1940, when he was in high school in Canton, Ohio, Tom Russell was ice skating. He saw a pretty girl from his neighborhood about to step onto the ice. So he zoomed toward her, intending to make a showy stop. But instead, he fell flat on his face.
“She had to help me up,” Russell recalled. “So much for romance.”
* Decision 2000: A phone pollster asked Mari Drewes if she’d be voting for “John Carlson or Gary Luke” and “Slate Gordon or Mary Cantrell.”
* Warm-up question: If your office was a sitcom, what would happen in the much-hyped final episode?
* Today’s Slice question: What’s the one thing you’ll almost never hear someone around here say?