They’ll need a posse to find you

Old-time TV westerns offer us some helpful strategies when it comes to getting out of weekend clean-up projects.

Here are just a few tactics you might try.

1. Claim to have amnesia.

2. Say you will be busy transporting nitro.

3. Two words: Town drunk.

4. Spend the day reforming a dance hall girl.

•Slice answer: “It’s hard for me to imagine anyone loving the garbage goat more than my friend Emily,” wrote Catherine Kardong. “Currently completing her master’s at a school back East, she not only includes the garbage goat as part of a city tour for visitors, but she believes that her friends should want to travel 3,000 miles across the country simply to see the vacuuming statue. For her, it is the one and only Spokane landmark.”

•Singled out: Slice reader Keith Miles noted that there’s an unexpected reference to Spokane in John Steinbeck’s “Travels with Charley: In Search of America” – the account of a meandering road trip the celebrated author took with his poodle in 1960.

Steinbeck declared the Bohemian Club brewery in Spokane to be the ugliest building in America.

What building is that?

Teresa Brum at the city of Spokane, who knows about these things, suggested Steinbeck probably was referring to what became known as the Schade building, just east of downtown. (It was not uncommon for breweries to change owners and names.)

It’s no compliment, certainly. Still, being noticed at all by a Nobel Prize winner is a mark of distinction.

•Things people miss: “Nothing beats French bread,” said Janet Culbertson who lived in a French village for four years.

“Hot, freshly roasted chestnuts,” said Betty Hill, remembering her time in Hong Kong.

Sheri Lattimore recalled the sizzling, spicy street food she encountered in countries in West Africa, seaweed-covered rice treats with various fillings in Japan, and volksmarches in Germany. “Like Bloomsday with fewer people and better food,” she wrote.

Paula Conn remembers a German candy bar made with dark chocolate and marzipan.

Daniel Fears got a kick out of hearing fans of a certain football (soccer) team saying “Up Cork!” while he was in Ireland.

Bill Dropko, who grew up in Canada, misses curling. “The kind with ice, rocks and brooms.”

In the domestic division, Pullman’s Evelyn Allen rhapsodized about a certain brand of pork roll she enjoyed in New Jersey.

Jack Maddox, who moved up here from New Mexico, still has visions of “stacked cheese enchiladas with green chili sauce.”

And Sue Boren resides south of Wallace now. But when she lived on San Juan Island in western Washington, she found that the geography kept her from ever getting too hopelessly lost.

“I was just a teenager working at a salmon cannery,” she wrote. “Cats followed me everywhere.”

•Today’s Slice question: OK, what would you miss about the Spokane area if you moved away tomorrow?