Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Seattle. Show all posts

Monday, January 17, 2011

The Emerald City: A Surprisingly Mild Place to Be

It is not the perfect climate, nor is it much of a tourist draw, but Seattle, Washington has a climate you would not expect for being so far up North. The latitude here is 47 degrees north, the same latitude as northern France. We are about a two and a half hour  drive from the Canadian border-yet even so, snow fall in Seattle is rare (some seasons it doesn't snow at all), and the average temperature the past few days has been in the upper forties-lower fifties (I am writing this on January 17). But don't get me wrong-ever once in a while, the temperature drops into the twenties. Also, with the prevalent rain here, winter can be cold, damp, and dreary-but rarely as cold as, say, Chicago or even New York City. Temperature-wise, it's a bit like Memphis, Tennessee in the winter time. Except for one crucial fact: in Memphis, it rains occasionally. It Seattle, it rains constantly.

Seattle has such a mild climate because of it's location in a huge valley, with the Cascades to the east and the Olympcs to the west. Running through the center of this valley is Puget Sound, an arm of the Pacific. Just off the Pacific coast, a warm current moderates the temps, and the mountains block cold Arctic air from having much of an effect.

A tropical paradise it's not, but Seattle's climate is remarkably mild. The only trouble is the rain. Anyone visiting the Emerald City should take an umbrella.

As for the character of the city itself, it is marked by an astonishing prevalence of courtesy and friendliness-Seattle is quite civil, unusually so. The setting of this city is spectacular; downtown rests upon a  hill overlooking Puget Sound, and when the sky is clear, Mt. Rainier, perhaps the most perfectly shaped volcano on Earth, looms over all like an ominous stone idol.

Beautiful, clean, high-tech, space age, and  über-liberal, Seattle is unique and distinctive.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Quantative Easing, A Junket to India, Big Brother Bans Food, and Indian Summer

THIS MORNING HERE IN SEATTLE is beautiful and unseasonably warm. For the past three days, we've been enjoying a most welcome "Indian Summer" (yesterday I saw a few ladies wearing shorts outside). I got to campus right at dawn as I usually do, and I spent about twenty minutes admiring the expanse of cobalt blue sky above a faint ribbon of reddish pink...and thinking about the times we have found ourselves in.

So, in the news today.....

Sunday, October 10, 2010

I-1098: Soak the Rich

by John Russell Turner

While I was walking down 4th Avenue in the Seattle CBD today, a protest march of about 50 or so people passed me by. There were about ten Seattle Police on motorcycles, and about ten more officers on foot escorting these people in the misty rain...

I saw them coming, so I decided to stop and take a look. It was an anti-war (in Afghanistan) protest march, and it seems that they were using the war there as a pretext to argue for passage of Washington State Initiative 1098, the infamous "soak the rich"  initiative.