The Slice: Singers take cowboy approach to dress code

Country singers wearing cowboy hats: Appealing nod to tradition or silly affectation?

“I think it’s great so long as they are singing outdoors,” said Howard Bisbee.

“As long as they aren’t all hat and no cattle, it’s all good,” wrote Michele Robinson.

“I grew up on a cattle ranch 50 years ago,” wrote Conrad March. “Those dudes who rolled the brim of their hats so high making the hat useless against sun and rain, we called them ‘Drug store cowboys.’ They are still that to me today.”

Linda Rust saw the question as an invitation to weigh in on men’s contemporary hat-wearing etiquette. It’s not what it used to be, she said.

Today’s Bloomsday tip: “I’ve used this training tip every year since 1977, and it’s never failed me,” wrote Collin Galloway. “If you don’t run it, you don’t have to train for it.”

Earliest Memories Department: “One of my earliest memories was being outside with my dad near to our horses,” wrote Karen Mobley. “I was too small to hold his hand so he would put one finger down toward the ground and I would reach up to grab on. It was like walking with giants.”

Kidspeak: “When our little girl, Lisa, was learning to talk, she called the lawn mower and ‘mow lawner,’ ” wrote M. K. Jones. “We thought that was pretty cute.”

They were less charmed by Lisa’s attempts to say “truck.”

Jan Wall wrote, “My sister coined the phrase ‘moppers mit dip’ for ‘waffles with syrup.’ Sixty years later, it’s still a family saying.”

I asked if German was spoken in her childhood home. Uh, no. “My mother was an English war bride and endured many nights in an air-raid shelter.”

Debt-collection advice for Girl Scouts from the movies: Shannon Harader suggested emulating the persistence of the newspaper boy in 1985’s “Better Off Dead.”

Today’s Slice question (fill in the blank): We like to imagine that there is something unique about living here, but the truth is the Spokane area has just about the same cross-section of (     ) that you would encounter almost anywhere.