The Slice : Who needs signage? Just look between Nature, Perfect

Katie Salisbury, of Nine Mile Falls, was on her way home after a trip to the East Coast when something odd caught her eye at Chicago’s Midway Airport.

A sign at a Southwest Airlines gate listed departure information for a flight that apparently made four stops. The names of three of the cities – Salt Lake City, Seattle and Sacramento – were printed on neat professional-looking labels. But the fourth, Spokane, was written on an obviously homemade sticker that looked like the work of a grade-schooler.

Salisbury sent me photos.

She knows The Slice is always up for taking offense at real or imagined civic slights. But she had a calming theory. “Maybe we could be optimistic and say that some big fan of Spokane stole the sign for his or her personal collection of cool destinations.”

“One reader’s plea: “Can you use your slicefluence to tell the people who put their garbage in other people’s garbage cans at night to use the BROWN ones, not the green yard-waste ones,” she wrote. “It’s not fun to have to take that stuff out, especially since those green bins are so big and deep.”

Of course, that’s inside the city of Spokane. Other garbage jurisdictions might have different color codes.

“North Fork values: “With everything going on in this world today, I think everybody should watch ‘The Rifleman,’ ” wrote Mark Morphy. “It is good wholesome entertainment, with a lesson.”

That series, still in reruns on cable, originally aired from 1958 to 1963. It starred Chuck Connors as Lucas McCain. And there were actually episodes where he never fired his famous gun.

“A man doesn’t run from a fight, Mark,” McCain told his son. “But that doesn’t mean you go looking to run to one.”

“Lilac code: Slice reader Phil Rose wrote to tell me about a party he recently attended in Seattle. He encountered a woman who had moved over there from Spokane less than a year ago. He told her about his own Spokane connections.

“She mentioned that she had a friend who’d been mentioned in The Slice twice,” he wrote.

Rose can make a similar claim for himself.

“Nobody else at the party knew what the heck we were talking about. I felt like we were members of some kind of secret society.”

“Friday routines: Do you have any? One of mine is to try to delete old e-mails and phonemail messages. This process is a weekly reminder that I never replied to some of those who contacted me.

Sorry about that. But please rest assured, I read/listen to every message.

“Today’s Slice question: A movie based on your own last-day-of-school-experiences would be called what?