Rubber sole: More adventures in what most people call ‘flip-flops’

Around 2008, Ann Hamilton Shields was in a nurses’ locker room at Landstuhl military hospital in Germany, changing out of her scrubs.

“Where are my thongs?” she muttered while scrabbling around on the floor for her footwear. “Who took my thongs?”

Wrote Ann, of Arnold, Md.: “All conversation ceased. I stood up to see shock and pity on the faces of the 20-something military nurses. They were not old enough to know the real name, and thought the old dinosaur had lost her underpants.”