Fun:Washington

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Washington
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You may have been looking for one of these articles instead: Washington, D.C., George Washington
Weather that rivals London.
File:WA winner.gif
Salmon roasted over the sulphurous embers of an active volcano. A tasty treat!

Washington, sometimes called "Washington State", "the other Washington" or the "good Washington", is the northwesternmost state in the contiguous United States.

It is named for its first permanent settlement, which was founded where trappers and traders used to gather every few weeks to scrub their dirty apparel.

The official language of Washington State is Chinook, widely spoken by loggers, fur trappers, fishermen, and drunken grunge music fans. Typical words in Chinook include muckleshoot (which means to give the casino all your money) and skookumchuck (which means to blow salmon chunks).

Washington is divided into western and eastern halves by the rugged Cascade Mountains, both physically and culturally. People on the (super-duper) wet side of the mountains are very liberal, diverse, and love a good non-GMO organic vegan Starbucks latte in a cup made from recycled plastic with smoked salmon for breakfast. People on the dry side, however, are mostly Karens either White or indigenous farmers who vote very differently and strangely; most of them vote Republican except in Whitman County, as it is home to the WSU campus. You probably shouldn't call them out on this, though, as the dry side of the mountains used to be in the nuke-making business.

Cities and towns[edit]

  • Seattle: It's already gloomy and rainy in Seattle. (Except for the end of June 2021, when it was actually bright, sunny and 106°F.) All we need is more neon signage and less enforcement of housing/workplace safety regulations and we'll on our way to a Ridley Scott dystopia. (We don't have Tyrell Corporation's big arcology pyramid but we do have Bezos' Balls.) Home of a baseball team that won more games in one season than any other team except the 1906 Chicago Cubs and STILL couldn't make it into the World Series. Also home to a football team who regularly pumps their players full of Adderall and horse steroids. Votes Communist most of the time (they even have their own Lenin Statue). Their pathetic little grunge-zine, The Stranger (founded about 1992), is still a viable newspaper today, which reveals more than one would want to know about Seattle.
  • Bellevue: Where they make them Microsoft Win-doze and stuff. (Or is that Redmond? I forgot.)
  • Everett: Where they make them aer-e-o-planes and stuff. (Or is that Renton? I forgot.)
  • Forks: DO NOT drive into this town with any bumper stickers expressing environmentalist viewpoints. You have been warned. Spotted owl barbecue is the local delicacy. You will be safe, however, if you have pale, sparkly skin and a taste for blood. The exact cultural opposite of Olympia.
  • Olympia: A notorious hangout for "riot grrls", anarcho-crusties, and animal rights extremists. The KFC there gets vandalized on cue every few months. Home of The Evergreen State College. Was once the source of the main competitor with Coors for "nastiest cheap beer west of the Mississippi". The exact cultural opposite of Forks.
  • Richland/Kennewick/Pasco: Technically three different towns but usually thought of as one place, the "Tri-Cities". Due to it having the lowest rainfall in the state, hot summers, and ugly neighborhoods, it is known locally at the "Dry Shitties". Everything glows in the dark, and if you have a Geiger counter it will go off the scale at times. Kindred spirits: Oak Ridge, Tennessee; Los Alamos, New Mexico; and Pripyat, Ukraine.
  • Spokane: aka Spokaloo, "The Funnel"[note 1], and some other unprintable names. A fun little time warp of flophouses, hobo jungles er, that was so 50 years ago...no wait, it's still true today...and Hells Angels, pawn shops lining East Sprague, an old World's Fair site, snowplows mounted on seemingly every pickup truck, and abandoned aluminum plants. Has streets with names like Thor Street and Freya Street and suburbs with names like Dishman and Medical Lake. The radical chic fashion sense seems to be Carhartt coveralls and Sorels. Whites and Nicks boots are both made there, so at least that's something. Kindred spirits back east: Cumberland, Maryland, and Scranton, Pennsylvania.
  • Tacoma: A hellhole with three claims to fame--a now-defunct aluminum smelter that provided local lawns with a constant shower of arsenic and other heavy metals, a paper mill, also defunct, that closed years ago but smelled so bad that even now the town still has a strong aroma of overcooked Brussels sprouts and feet known regionally as "the Aroma of Tacoma", and the status as the most stressful city in America.
  • Fife: A city just across the bridge from Tacoma that houses the jail, the port, a casino, and 50 bajillion RV dealerships. It one-ups Tacoma by being one of the state's rare redneck hellholes. Evidence of its residents' ignorance wing-nuttery strong moral character includes electing one of the Discovery Institute's leaders as a state representative[1], and fighting tooth and nail to stop the godless Commie hippies from legalizing marijuana. [2]
  • Vancouver: If you made hotel reservations there for the 2010 Winter Olympics, you were probably disappointed.
  • Walla Walla: The town so nice they named it twice. Or wait, wasn't that this place?
  • Yakima: Where the men are men and the yaks are nervous. Also, the methamphetamine capital of the Pacific Northwest.
  • Pullman: A college town with a football team so pathetic that their fans feel the need to fly the school flag wherever ESPN's College Gameday is broadcasting (which is never in Pullman).
  • George: Get it? George, Washington.[3] Founded in 1957 by a man named Charlie Brown.[note 2] Founded for the most pragmatic of reasons -- something had to be located at Exit 149 of Interstate 90. (To date, Washington has no town named "Martha", though the Martha Inn Cafe was once a fixture in George.)
  • Bremerton: The only notable location of interest here is the Puget Sound Naval Yard where several major US capital ships are rotting away.
  • Belfair: Something about Satanic panic, but I forgot what. Eternally covered in fog. Sister cities with Silent Hill.
  • Ritzville: The eat-here-and-get-gas stop exactly one hour southwest of Spokane.
  • Moses Lake: The eat-here-and-get-gas stop exactly one hour west of Ritzville.
  • Ellensburg: The eat-here-and-get-gas stop exactly one hour west...enough already, you're killing me.
  • Wenatchee: The Apple Capital of the World, and Washington's mishmash crossroads town. Here, conservative blue collar types are also hippy ski bums, elderly folk buy weed from head shops shaded by pro-life billboards, and, in winter, folks from out West learn that the only kind of traction you can buy is administered by health care professionals.
  • Point Roberts: Mostly known as a geographical oddity, as the only way to access the town from the rest of the state by ferry or by driving through Canada, as it's the only part of the Tsawwassen peninsula to be south of the 49th parallel. The Northwest Angle in Minnesota is in a similar situation.

Cultural milestones[edit]

  • Rain.
  • Bad musical styles inspired by too much rain in the early 1990s.
  • Bad fashion influences due to the aforesaid musicians dressing for rain.
  • Starbucks coffee helps keep people warm in the rain.
  • Plutonium-based nuclear weapons will end the rain...forever.
  • Mel's Hole - a bottomless pit that brings dead pets back to life.
  • The Twilight fantasy novel series (and movies based on the novels) were set in the small town of Forks, Washington.
  • Sleepless in Seattle and Grey's Anatomy present Seattle with far fewer cloudy days than you would see in reality.
  • The iconic point-and-click adventure classic Myst and its sequel Riven were made by Cyan Worlds, a computer-game studio headquartered in the Spokane suburb of Mead, WA.
  • Location of headquarters for lots of other big-name game publishers including Nintendo of America in Redmond.
  • Legal weed
  • Rain.
  • 300 days of sun a year, if you live in the conservative hellhole that is the eastern side of the state. (See Yakima, Tri-Cities)

Politics[edit]

Washington is notorious for joke and crank political candidates. "Mike the Mover" (his real name) and "Prophet Atlantis" (his real name) are on the ballot seemingly every election for some office or another. Spoof ballot initiatives are also common. In the 1990s, the religious right attempted to put an initiative on the ballot banning adoption by homosexual couples. In response, a competing initiative was filed to ban adoption by right-wing Christian fundamentalists. The initiatives had otherwise identical wording. Later in 2003, in response to a several-years-long rash of initiatives filed by libertarian activist Tim Eyman, another activist filed an initiative to have the voters proclaim Tim Eyman a "Horse's Ass".

In 1989 the second biggest political debate in the state was over whether to change the state song from "Washington, My Home" to either "Louie, Louie" by the Kingsmen, or "Our State is a Dumpsite" by Dana Lyons. The state song wasn't changed. (The biggest debate of course was over whether to save the spotted owl and put 90% of the loggers out of work).

This Washington versus that Washington[edit]

One annoying aspect of living in a state that shares its name with the nation's capital is that, during campaign season, it's common to see ads portraying political opponents as being more sympathetic to the culture of the other Washington than to that of the State of Washington.

The following two videos from the 2010 campaign are typical. Both candidates were running for the same seat that was being vacated by a retiring congressman. The highest elected office either of these candidates has held was in the Washington State Legislature. Neither have ever been elected to a statewide office.

First, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee bashes the Republican candidate:

The National Republican Congressional Committee returns fire:

Of course, the irony of this is that all congressional candidates lust after the chance to become part of the culture of the District of Columbia. In fact, politicians disparaging the culture of Washington, D.C., is part of the culture of the nation's capitol.

Music[edit]

Okay, everyone sing screech along. "Everything sucks / everything's my fault / I'm a creep / I'm so depressed / MAAAARY! / Black hole sun / my dad's a heroin addict / and Jeremy spoke in claaaass todaaaay"

Not suprisingly there's a widespread movement to get rid of this song.

Geology[edit]

The Cascade range has a row of active volcanoes, Mt. Adams, Mt. Baker, Mt. Rainier, Mt. St. Helens, and Glacier Peak. St. Helens erupted in 1980 and blew its top, clogging air filters and blotting out the sun from Seattle to Yakima and creating a thriving cottage industry of trinket sellers making tourist souvenirs made of "real Mt. St. Helens ash". Any of the other volcanoes could erupt at any time. You have been warned.

Famous Washingtonesians[edit]

Gallery[edit]

  • Diablo Lake with Davis Peak in the background.

  • Ruby Beach in Olympic National Park.

  • Mount Rainer.

  • The Seattle Space Needle.

  • Kurt Cobain Memorial Park in Aberdeen.

  • A mountain stream.

  • Thunderbird Totem, carved by a Native American craftsman in 1935.

  • East Wenatchee.

Notes[edit]

  1. ↑ To railroaders but not anyone else.
  2. ↑ Wasn't that a Broadway musical?

References[edit]

  1. ↑ http://houserepublicans.wa.gov/hans-zeiger/about/
  2. ↑ http://blogs.seattletimes.com/pot/2014/08/29/judge-upholds-city-of-fifes-ban-on-pot-businesses/
  3. ↑ Official website of George, Washington
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