Earthquake

Today we had an earthquake in LA. Registered about 5.4 on the Richter scale. I've been through a few other quakes--one in the early 80's in Kalamazoo Michigan. Yes, Michigan. There was a huge tremor down in Illinois and it was felt up in Kalamazoo. I remember being out in my driveway shooting baskets one overcast afternoon when all of sudden it got quiet and I felt a bit of rumble beneath me. It was strange. Later I heard on the news that we indeed had experienced a "quake".

IN San Francisco I experienced a couple of quakes. Once while I was at work at this stupid public policy institute, the other one evening at home. I remember the girl in the apartment below me started screaming when the ground started to shake. At first I thought she was having an orgasm of some sort as she and her boyfriend were rather loud in their sex, but no, it was the quake that was rocking her, not her man.

Today's quake felt like a rickety old carnival ride one might find at Coney Island (tells you where I feel my home really is). Afterwards, several people in the office turned on the radios. Got the basic info, then the station went into overkill trying to cover this "disaster". Fortunately no one died and there was no severe damage, but the stations are geared up for this sort of coverage, though after about 15 minutes the low level sustained hysteria that local news likes to assume whenever weird weather or ghastly geology occurs began to get on my nerves.