Debate till death

One of the things I miss about Seattle is the need for all the stoned hippies to debate everything until everyone is sleeping and nothing gets done.

While I lived there, once or twice a year a vote would be help to built a monorail, not build a monorail, have a monorail that goes to the moon, construct a monorail from my house to your house and on and on. Silliness and pettiness never looked so unpleasant. I believe there were over 700 votes on monorail options, almost all of them passed. So one would think that there must be monorails all over Seattle, right?

Well, that's where it gets a little complicated. No monorails were ever built. Not because voters did not support them, but because, well, no one is quite sure.

At least with all the radiation flowing into Seattle, no one will notice all the empty monorail tracks.

A Department of Health air monitor in Seattle has detected trace levels of radiation in connection with Japan’s nuclear emergency. The minuscule amounts of radioactive iodine are millions of times lower than levels that would be a health concern. Despite these very small amounts, the state’s overall background radiation levels haven’t risen.

The positive results are consistent with findings reported by federal and Canadian partners, and by independent researchers. As expected, because of the distance from Japan and air mixing, radiation reaching our state is so diluted there is no health risk here, making protective action unnecessary.