The entrance ramp from 405 N to 520 E. For those of you not familiar with it, I will do my best to describe. When you exit 405, you enter a 30mph curve that takes you in almost a full circle. The curve ends basically right beside 520, forcing you to merge with oncoming traffic. This entrance is awesome. If you can’t already visualize it, you’re going 30mph and then all of a sudden you really need to be going 70mph to not get run over. That brief 5 second interval of merging onto the highway hearing the engine roar just makes driving to work a few degrees better.

Mt. Rainier as viewed from our house (slightly stylized).

I’ve been an avid reader of the gaming blog Kotaku for many years now, and admittedly, the site is partly responsible for my inspiration to move to Seattle.  Now, you might wonder how a gaming blog could influence where I wanted to live.  In answer, I present to you two classic Kotaku posts from 2006:

Link Alive and Well in Seattle, Washington

Seattle is Top Video Game City, Bitches

If I ever meet the real life Link, I’ll consider my life completely fulfilled.  Maybe.

To christen this weblog, I figured I ought to write a little something about the main inspiration.  The fact of the matter is I could probably list a million and one reasons why Seattle is ‘the best city in America’, but it would be a long, didactic, undisciplined post.  So instead I’ll focus on one aspect at a time, and do my best to enumerate the myriad benefits found in each one.

The first answer to “Why Seattle?” has just a little bit to do with this site, hence why I’ve chosen it.  Seattle is the most literate city in the United States. Well, okay, so technically it’s tied for most literate city with Minneapolis currently, but in prior years it has donned the crown solo, which leads me to deem it the undisputed champ.

The most well-known definition of “literate” means simply a knowledge of how to read and write.  However the study that ranks the “most literate” cities isn’t just judging literacy by that definition alone.  Literate also means having knowledge of literature, or  having an education in general.  This concept of education lends itself to a great many reasons as to why Seattle is superior, but I won’t go into that right now.

At its base level, literacy is a necessary skill for a populace to be reasonably productive in this day and age.  Illiterate workers cannot effectively communicate or follow written instructions.  For the literate individual who grew up among educated peers, it may seem laughable that someone with a high school diploma couldn’t read an instruction manual, but it happens.  Having a literate populace not only guarantees a certain level of education, but it also promotes continuing education.

At higher levels of literacy, in which the populace is actually fond of reading or writing as subjects in and of themselves, there is even more to be gained.  Reading, in general, functions to make an individual more cultured and open-minded by exposing them to a variety of ideas, philosophies, and beliefs.  Writing is simply the best known medium for expressing oneself known to man, and any pursuit in that direction is a step towards better communication.  The qualities of being open minded and highly capable of communicating are two essential elements that make up functional communities.

With all that said, you have to wonder why levels of literacy aren’t a higher determining factor on most people’s rankings of places to live…