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The Slice: Some birds are best left in the hand
Sometimes a flip flops.
A reader who has appeared in The Slice 11 times going back to January 1997 saw Friday’s story about flipping the bird in traffic. It reminded him of something. He asked that I keep his name to myself this time. So I’ll just call him Jim.
“Many years ago, when I was still young and stupid, I was driving along Sprague minding my own business,” he wrote. “I pulled to the left a bit to give some room to a bicyclist.”
For some reason a driver behind him got bent out of shape and zoomed by, honking and giving Jim the finger.
Jim didn’t like that. He pursued the flipper at fairly high speed. When he caught up, he emphatically aimed a finger at the other driver. “Just at that moment, I recognized the guy as the husband of my wife’s best friend.”
When he got home, Jim told all. “It did not play well.”
Retiring in Spokane: “Nothing is perfect but after traveling the world we have not found a better place,” wrote Gerald Gibson. “We even learned to like the marmots.”
Long ago and far away: Howard and LaFaye Smith live in Post Falls now. But years ago, Howard was a police officer in Berkeley, Calif.
There had been a string of liquor store robberies. And inside the police station photos of two suspects had been posted on a bulletin board.
(LaFaye took an oath on the veracity of what follows.)
One day around that time, Howard was acting as tour guide for a group of grade school children visiting the station. As they passed the aforementioned bulletin board, one kid noticed the pictures and fingered the two men as his dad and uncle.
Arrests followed.
Slice reader Rick Lockert wonders: “Will the next generation of kids think that cursive writing is when you hand-print cuss words?”
No, Rick. They will just stare blankly at whoever used that expression and then go back to their hand-held screens.
Today’s Slice question: Do you agree with reader Cindy Finke that the commercials during the Olympics have been way better than recent Super Bowl commercials?