More Clues in the Seattle Children Mystery: When I first moved out to the wooly Northwest, there were a number of small ticks about Seattle that made me feel out of place. Some of them, such as the slightly different distribution of cars (i.e., the percentage of cars less than five years old; the percentage of $30,000+ cars on the road, the percentage of US brands versus foregin brands, etc.), I've gotten used to. Some, like the distribution and even the weather, I've come to accept. But there's one quirk that really stuck in my craw.

I couldn't find any babies in Seattle that I thought were cute.

In Boston, Providence, and Atlanta, this was never really a problem. But something about the kids in Seattle made it difficult for me to say they were cute, and I couldn't figure out what it was. The most common observation that I could make was that most kids seemed to be really vacant and disengaged. Were they really disengaged or was I making it up? And if they really did look different, why is that so? Was it the weather? The relative lack of white-black and white-latino interracial couples (and the increase in white-asian interracial couples)? The consequences of growing up in a city with a different level of racial strife? The higher percentage of Scandinavians in the Pacific Northwest? Some regional difference in childrearing that affects behavior? I was stumped.

I've taken this picture from the esteemed Mr. Yglesias's Icelandic vacation as evidence that I simply don't find Nordic children, and by extension many Seattlite children, cute. It's quite possible that distinguishing facial characteristics for Scandinavians are different from those in Scots, Irish, English, and French, who make up the bulk of my ethnic roots, so I simply never learned how to distinguish one Nord from another. Further cursory research provides more evidence that nordic children strike me as a bland lot (warning: performing a google image search for "swedish children" will turn up a few pictures that aren't necessarily safe for work). Inversely, I've met several attractive people I've here who aren't ethnic Nords.

So for now, my working theory is 70% ethnic origin, 15% weather related, and 15% related to upbringing.