The Slice: Everybody’s cut footloose

GOING BAREFOOT can be a bad idea. Jenny Egly learned that lesson when she went out at night to turn off the sprinkler and stepped on a big slug. Squish. “I wear sandals now,” she wrote.

Priscilla Asker learned while she was helping her son give his horse a bath. “The horse stepped on my foot,” she wrote.

Actually, it was sort of a double lesson. “I also learned that, even though I don’t care for the style, wearing cowboy boots when messing with a horse is a really good idea.”

Ralph Decker wrote, “My wife is a quilter.”

And in case that wasn’t clear enough, he added one more word: pins.

Others wrote about the risk posed by stinging insects, diaperless toddlers and sharp pine-cone fragments.

But Ray Wenning summarized his policy on going barefoot in just five words. “Doggie doo, so I don’t.”

•Three different approaches to getting dressed for work:

1. “I guess this is clean.”

2. “What will make me invisible?”

3. “This outfit will blow their minds.”

•Just wondering: What’s the surest sign that someone you are speaking to on the phone isn’t really listening to you?

•Slice answer: “Before being diagnosed with breast cancer, my hair was graying, dry, broken and had only a slight curl,” wrote Bonnie Brown. “After radiation and chemotherapy, my hair fell out but returned healthy, very curly and with no gray. It has remained so for the last four years.”

•In case this physician thing doesn’t work out: I can’t recall seeing a bouncer or bodyguard who had more impressive arms than Spokane emergency room doctor Darrol Hval.

•How I spent my summer: “My sister, Darla DeCristoforo and her girlfriend decided to visit every park in Spokane this summer,” wrote Leonna Bowers. “So they did. She has researched, located, identified, cataloged and set foot on every park listed in the Spokane Parks Department brochure.”

•Encore performances: Dora Davis can watch 1995’s “French Kiss” over and over.

As a general rule, Elaine Bartlett doesn’t care for watching movies she has already seen. But she makes an exception for 1968’s “The Odd Couple.”

Heather Leveque and her husband never tire of seeing “Johnny Stecchino” from 1991.

And according to his wife, Gerald Bowers has memorized 1963’s “It’s a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

•Old business: Asked about local obsessions that are seen as utterly normal, several readers mentioned WSU football and GU basketball.

And one reader said the key to understanding Spokane is recognizing that, when faced with bold new ideas, influential people here constantly ask themselves, “How might this change where I fit in the pecking order?”

•Warm-up questions: How many people have computer passwords that are references to television shows? How did your family solve the problem of different people preferring different brands of raisin bran?

•Today’s Slice question: Who in the Inland Northwest gets offered the most bribes?