Another Year, and Still the Space Needle Stands

It turns out, it wasn't our booze-addled brains: The Seattle Center fireworks display on Monday night was messed up due to a computer program glitch (Y2K strikes 8 years late!). According to the Times:

About a minute before midnight, technicians with California-based Pyro Spectaculars realized that the computer program that controlled the display was not going to work, said Mary Bacarella, a spokeswoman for the Space Needle. They rebooted twice, then decided to do the show by hand.

The result was that the show extended from a planned 8.5 minutes to 11.5, leading to a slow-burning cacophany of fireworks for the throngs. Phone calls from Seattlest were largely ineffective at determining the root-causes of the problem, but we remain confident that by pushing 0 enough times, we will reach a human being more capable of answering questions than CS-bot 5000.

For our part, it reinvigorated the yearly hope we share with a substantial minority here in Seattle that the explosions will just keep on coming and rid the skyline of our Jetsons-esque, 1960s vision of the future. Alas, the scorched saucer-atop-a-pencil, home to something called a "Wheedle," remains the distinctive feature of our city as of this morning.

Pic of "New Year's Eve 2008, Seattle" by danielkonopacki, a gracious contributor to the Seattlest Flickr pool.