The Slice: Records are made to be broken, usually

You can pretty much tell how old a person is from hearing how he or she regards certain racehorses.

Oh, and by the way, I’m betting no thoroughbred will ever break Secretariat’s records.

Slice answers: “I’d say going to about every yard sale I could find for most of my life qualifies me as a hunter gatherer,” wrote Lan Hellie.

“I once picked huckleberries while working in a blister rust control camp in the Kaniksu National Forest in 1950,” wrote Jack Thompson.

Sandy Tarbox said her friend Dennis Held is an impressive hunter gatherer and presented as evidence a photo of a bag filled with 11 pounds of morel mushrooms picked just the other day. “Don’t ask where he found them.”

And Nina Elo described her hunter gatherer credentials as impeccable. “Daily I hunt for my glasses while my house gathers more dust.”

A tale of two mailboxes: Hank Greer shared a story.

“When we bought our house in January, it did not have a mailbox. I bought a really nice locking model and mounted it on the wall on my front porch. On the day we moved in, our mail carrier stopped by. She said she really liked the new mailbox, but … ‘Could you move it to the back of the house?’ She explained that it was always there before and it worked well for the way she walked the route.

“I wasn’t keen on moving the mailbox since I just drilled holes in the wall. So I bought another mailbox and mounted that one in the back. And that’s where we get our mail – most of the time. On days she doesn’t work we often get our mail out front. It’s good to have the bases covered.”

Singing in the car: “Hey Paul, get out of my head, dude,” wrote Tim O’Doherty. “Your column on car singing made it seem as if you were a hidden passenger in my beat-up old truck. I dearly love to sing. Love to sing obscure lyrics.

“Fire all of your guns at once and explode into space.

“My favorite song of all is ‘I Can’t Get Next to You’ by the Temptations. Check it out on YouTube. You get to sing high, you get to sing low, and for some strange reason I know most of the words.”

Today’s Slice question: What crawled into one of your shoes between taking them off and the next time you put them back on (and how did this squatter make its presence known)?

Write The Slice at P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210; call (509) 459-5470; email pault@spokesman.com. What percentage of Bloomsday participants who claim to have read James Joyce’s “Ulysses” are lying?