The Binary Circumstance

World-famous Dame Edna Everage will be performing at The Moore Theater in Seattle, March 22-26, 2006.

I point this out because I saw her in San Francisco a few years ago and she was uproariously funny.

Unless you wish to be chosen for an audience participation gag, I do not recommend seats too close to the stage.

A recent review in the Denver Post, sums up the Dame Edna experience very well.

I was having a discussion yesterday with a man who has lived in many places around the world. He felt that in general people in the Seattle are reserved, provincial, as well as socially and sexually repressed compared to other major cities and countries he had either visited or lived in.

He also noted that there was a very high rate of depression and suicide in the Seattle area.

I wondered if there was any statistical data to back him up.

I noted that Norway is famous for its depressed population and I wondered if Seattle is on the same latitude. He said he thought it was and also noted that Seattle was settled by Scandanavians. (I do know that the Ballard area of Seattle is largely Scandanavian.)

This morning I found this Sperling’s Best Places study from 2004 which ranks Tacoma, WA as the most stressful city in the country of the top 100 largest cities. Seattle/Bellevue/Everett is ranked number 11. Portland, OR/Vancouver, WA is ranked number 6. (Complete listings by city.)

Is it the weather?

According to Sperling’s Best Places, their methodology included the number of cloudy days but they gave it the lowest weight in the rankings. They gave unemployment rate, crime, commute time and suicide the highest weight.

Their source for the suicide statistics was the CDC. This site from the CDC allows you to create your own maps of mortality rates based on cause of death. This map shows comparative suicide rates by county from the entire U.S. Nevada and Alaska stand out as almost completely blood red.

Although Utah has plenty of red in it (I would have expected more in Mormon country), it’s interesting that the states bordering Utah generally have high rates close to the Utah border.

There is definitely some red in the Seattle, Tacoma, Portland corridor so I created suicide maps of both Washington and Oregon.

Seattle is in King County and King Co. is below the 75% precentile (white). Tacoma is in Pierce County which above the 75% percentile but below the 90% (blue). (States above the 90% percentile are red.)

Portland, Oregon (just across the Columbia river from Vancouver, WA) is in a red county above the 90% percentile.

The real revelation for me is that high rates of suicide occur most frequently in counties west of the Mississippi. Those are the real “red” states.

As for whether Seattle is about the same latitude as Norway, this world map shows that all of Norway is further north than Seattle and more in line with Alaska which like Norway has a high depression/suicide rate.

This San Francisco Chronicle article tells how Brokeback Mountain is doing very well in places you would not have expected it to do well.

And that is what Jack Foley, president of distribution for Focus Features, which is distributing “Brokeback,” calls the “unspoken truth” about a movie that has succeeded in markets where few would have expected it to.

“This movie is playing to heartland America,” he said.

“Brokeback” — an odds-on favorite to clean up in Academy Award nominations, including best picture, on Tuesday — is not just an art-house favorite or a cultural statement or a milestone in filmmaking. It is a bona fide hit making money in places, and with audiences, that make an East Bay movie house look like the Cannes Film Festival.

As of Sunday, the latest day for which figures were available, “Brokeback Mountain” had appeared in 1,196 theaters and earned $42.1 million in seven weeks. For a movie that cost just $14 million to make, that’s already some serious profit.

Ang Lee’s was named filmmaker of the year by the Director’s Guild for his direction of Brokeback Mountain.