Hagrid is in the House!

Wow, Bellingham got a mention on Keith Olbermann's Countdown. "Relatively obscure," he calls it.
(Click here to watch, it's the third segment about radioactive cats).

Aside from the fact that it's amusing to see Bellingham mentioned on Countdown, albeit in a less-than-flattering fashion ("Obscure?" griped the Captain. "I'm a little insulted. We're a town of 76,000 people!"), I'm a little nonplussed by this. This is the first I've heard of the incident -- the Bellingham Herald never reported it -- so it took Countdown to break the story that the border guards are watching traffic that is going past Bellingham on I-5 with monitors that can remotely detect radioactive materials.

While on the one hand, that makes me feel safer, that they have instruments that are that sensitive that they can pick up a radioactive cat inside a car traveling 70mph down I-5 from a car in the median, in order to prevent dirty bomb parts from coming over the border from Canada... on the other, I'm a bit creeped out. What other ways are we being monitored -- even here in Bellingham -- that we don't know about?

Also , if they have nuclear detectors that sensitive on our highways, why are our borders so tight? Shouldn't that be enough to prevent dirty bombs from getting in?

And, I just had nuclear medicine heart scans a few weeks ago. I was warned not to cross the border without a note from my doctor. Had I been driving down I-5 during the time I was most radioactive, might I have triggered a border patrol agent's monitoring device?

Welcome to the surveillance society... Big Brother is watching you.