The Slice: Last chance before school to go on the lam

Apparently not everyone got the memo.

So I’ll go over this one more time.

If you are a Spokane area kid with a backyard tree house, you are required – at least once before school starts – to yell down, “Come and get me, coppers!”

It’s the law.

•Slice answer: “No, I have never thought about NOT getting into a car because of the bumper sticker it sported,” wrote Shelley Nichols. “Maybe I need to be more careful in the future.”

But bumper stickers interest her and she makes a point of reading them. “I think the fascination is over how people choose to define themselves. Out of all the things that make up that particular person, what is it that they choose to present to the world?”

So what would she pick?

“I have no bumper stickers,” said Nichols. “I’m too complicated.”

•Feedback: One occasion when I find myself feeling especially proud of my readers is when they artfully inform me that I can be an idiot.

Take this note from Judith Loback.

“OK, so you can make fun of Neil Diamond all you want,” she wrote. “But the exaggeration of his age, meant to be comically demeaning, makes easy use of the same type of humor that made race, ethnicity and sex the butt of jokes and permeated the American culture of youth. All my life I’ve refrained from ‘jokes’ that ridicule others for characteristics that were determined at birth.”

Well played, Judith.

Then there was this postscript to an unrelated note from Eleanor Hill. In its way, it says it all.

“We enjoy most of your columns,” she wrote. “Others, we shall leave unremarked upon.”

•Slice answer: Yes, said Sam Riddlesberger. He has put their home-security system on the wrong setting before leaving the house.

Riddlesberger and his wife were heading out to dinner with friends visiting from Bellevue. “I turned our home alarm to ‘Away.’ ”

That activated the motion detectors inside the house.

The problem was, Riddlesberger had forgotten about his adult son visiting from Everett. He had decided to not join his parents in going to dinner and was taking a nap in a guest room.

Of course, when he woke up and headed to the kitchen the alarm went ape.

Riddlesberger’s son had no idea how to turn it off.

Before the adventure was over, things would get worse.

“The police thought they caught a burglar and our son had a time of it.”

•Today’s Slice question: What percent of Inland Northwest residents have not gone swimming even once this summer?