The Slice: How much creative muscle can you flex?

Welcome to August.

Let’s start with a seasonally flavored reader challenge.

Come up with a ’60s-style name for a set-in-the-Inland Northwest beach movie.

You know, something like “How to Stuff a Wild Bikini with Fake Diplomas.” Or “Beach Blanket Watering Restrictions.”

I’ll send a coveted reporter’s notebook to the reader submitting the best name for a make-believe summery movie.

•Mixed feelings: For me, they’re triggered by being stalled out in line behind a person who is ordering a complicated coffee drink and buying a copy of The Spokesman-Review.

•Multiple choice: SpokeFest is…

A) A big honkin’ neighborhood yard sale. B) An uptight celebration of provincial family values. C) A high school debate tournament. D) Yet another amorphous Lilac City gathering featuring music, crafts and portable toilets. E) A sort of rash. F) Other.

It’s F. SpokeFest is a community cycling event scheduled for Sunday, Sept. 7. It’s not just for hard-core bike riders.

Check it out at www.spokefest.org or phone (509) 838-1040.

•Knowing more about the T-shirt than the wearer knows: Longtime Washington Redskins fan William Hall encountered a young woman in a ’Skins shirt. So he started to chat her up.

Hall quickly figured out that she did not realize the Redskins are a professional football team or that the “Washington” in question is Washington, D.C.

•Sounds of summer, continued: “My parents had eight kids,” wrote North Idaho’s Jan Moyer, who grew up in Michigan. “My dad was a WWII Army bugler. Everyone in our neighborhood knew when the McDs were going to eat dinner because we were called home by my dad playing ‘mess call’ loudly off the front porch with his old bent-up bugle.”

•If you need another way to waste time: You might try calling up www.youtube.com and playing the ancient celebrity-guest segments of “What’s My Line?” for someone who cannot see the computer screen. Then he or she can guess along with the blindfolded panel.

•Guys of a certain age who drive convertibles: Must get tired of people assuming that they are going through a midlife crisis. I mean, at least the 10 percent who aren’t going through a midlife crisis.

•Warm-up questions: Who is the youngest Inland Northwest pianist capable of banging out a decent rendition of “Clair de lune”? The oldest?

•Today’s Slice question: What was the first bit of memorable misinformation you received about sex?