(Rooney and Oscar are my grump role models.)

Berger (and his fellow "Lesser Seattle" losers pine for the days when they were the scolds and nannies.

If only we could harness this power for good....

Screw Knute Berger and the "Nanny State" argument. Go dotter off somewhere to mumble about the seventies and let us get to work building an actual city that actually works.

I'm from a small town with well water and there were days when the water smelled of sulfur or tasted of copper, never mind the one or two days every other year where we had to boil the water while the water tower was cleaned. I'm not about to claim any sort of hardship status, but compared with that, I love Seattle's tap water. Put it in the fridge and I'd rather drink it than send money to [insert bottling company here].

Your biggest problem with Berger seems to be that he has a sense of historical place and memories about Seattle of a bygone era. What's wrong with that? It lends perspective to the present.

Still, this:

"Oh, snap! I also think people starving to death in developing countries because of Americans’ meat consumption is bad, therefore I will drink infinity bottles of water with impunity!"

Sometimes you can still delight me.

I think Berger was refering to this plan: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2004369904_tolls24m.html
which proposes charging drivers tolls depending on when and where they drive in order to get them to make more efficient use of the roads. It involves installing GPS devices in all cars. I could be wrong.

Whether it's banning cheap high-octane beer (far more of which is actually sold to poor and working-class people than street alcoholics), imposing grocery bag fees that the City acknowledges will generate millions of dollars (and which you'll also pay whenever you get restaurant food to-go), Greg Nickels and Tom Carr continuing Mark Sidran's war on nightlife, and yes, holding a press conference about banning bottled water at City Hall, this whole trend all does sound like galloping nanny-statism to a whole lot of people - many of whom are longtime Democrats in good standing.

It's a lot of little stuff, but it adds up to a local government that is increasingly intrusive, punitive and yes, nanny-ish.

What's more, Seattle ought to have working drinking fountains (and public bathrooms, for that matter), and there's nothing wrong with KB pointing out that local government is more focused on holding press conferences scolding people for drinking bottled water than it is delivering basic services.

But yeah, he kinda does sound like Andy Rooney. I'll give you that.

As for his comment that the tap water doesn't taste good, Seattle has some of the strictest taste testing of municipal water lines in the country. Here are some SPU docs that talk about the quality control of Seattle's water supply and water mains:

http://www2.seattle.gov/util/engineering/ArticleView.asp?ArticleID=7-11.2(2)#7-11.2(2)

http://www.seattle.gov/util/stellent/groups/public/@spu/@usm/documents/webcontent/spu01_002164.pdf

No one reads the dailies, except when they do.

I love wathcing one hack attack another.

Keep up the good work.

I read all the way through everything Erica writes because it feels so good when I stop.

Here's an idea: if your pipes are bad, replace your pipes! How is that hard, Knute? Aww, good plumbing costs money. That's what we call 'reality,' jackass.

"To me, one of the few mitigating factors in Seattle’s march toward Manhattanization is the hope that the resulting mess will at least be broadminded, perhaps even creatively fertile. But instead Seattle seems to be on the forefront of a new kind of urbanism that demands we adopt its least appealing qualities (crowding, high cost) and eschew its virtues (broadmindedness, variety). Instead, we’ve got a dense city full of scolds and micromanagers."

is spot on.

This new kind of "urbanism" that implies I must bow down and adopt crowding, condo conversions, escalating density, bad transit is precisely the reason I'm already considering moving back out of the are after having been here 5 years.

It's sad really. There are so many great things about the area. But if Seattle becomes as dense as it is predicting within the next 5 years...

I'm gone.