So the latest staging of The Great Wi-Fi Circus won't take place tomorrow in the City Hall Chambers: A decision on a franchise for erecting wireless computer antennas around town had been put off Feb. 10 by Santa Fe's procrastination-famed City Council after a scatological screamfest from an enraged scientist.

He brandished a copy of GQ magazine carrying an article warning of cell-phone hazards to health. A few days later, in a letter to The New Mexican, the scientist, Bill Bruno, apologized for his behavior — but took the opportunity to advance a largely anecdotal case against cell-phones and Wi-Fi.

Now the decision has been postponed to March 10 — by which time the winners of March 2's municipal election are sworn in as mayor and half the council.

Presumably there'll be police on hand, lest Bruno or someone else gets overly rowdy. Officers were called in Feb. 10, but the noisemaker had, uh, left the premises by the time they got there.

Does the anti-Wi-Fi bloc have legitimate concerns about electro-magnetic radiation from today's marvels of communication? There's certainly some radiation emanating from them — but there's also lots of radiation coming from (bring up the menacing music, maestro) outer space, notably from (twinkle, twinkle) stars — pre-eminent among them the sun. As for what might not be good for us, try TV sets — decades of radiation from which might explain all kinds of societal phenomena ...

And before cathode-ray TV screens, there were light sockets, feared by the grandmother of the immortal humorist James Thurber. She made sure there were bulbs in all of them, to protect the household from invisibly dripping electricity.

Life is fraught with peril, man-made and natural — which, when you think about it, are the same: We're products of nature, even while we're conjuring up weapons of mass destruction or consumer items that might possibly be hazardous to health and safety. But do we give up the automobile and return to the docile-looking, but sometimes-treacherous horse? No, we assume the risk, applying what caution our species can.

Much as some Santa Feans may wish it, we're too far along the road of telecommunications to cast away the Web — and besides, it's out of our hands: The federal government is the one regulating, among other things, Wi-Fi. A local ordinance attempting to regulate it was rejected by the courts — and City Hall is already past its deadline for deciding on an antenna application from a Seattle outfit called NewPath Networks. Presumably NewPath can afford higher-power attorneys than the city can, so the newly sworn mayor and council must face that and other modern-day realities.

Many Santa Feans, frustrated over local- and state-governmental laxity in hooking New Mexico to the high-speed communications train, will thank city leaders for finally getting around to it. There are bound to be further obstacles like land-use ordinances, over which our community will still have control, federal communications laws aside — but resistance to Wi-Fi isn't just showtime at City Hall; it's futile.