The Cosmic Tap

The Quake Pod

I was sitting in my magic floating office pod when there was a very explosive and intense jolt – I felt a big shock / compression wave burst through the house (and me).  Everything shook and rattled.  It was powerful and incredibly jarring.  Then, for a very short duration – maybe three seconds – there was major shaking; the house and its components made noises that I do not wish to hear again.  I made it out of the pod and up against one of the core beams of the house within that time, and waited a few seconds.  I looked out one of the small windows and the trees and telephone poles were visibly swaying.  There were several more seconds of diminishing wavey motion, underscored by the oddest, deepest, almost-soundless roaring I’ve ever heard.  Like the world’s biggest subwoofer turned way up, but without any actual music.

I stayed where I was for a bit, then checked around the house.  Pictures on the walls are moved, a few things fell over, but there’s no visible damage.

To find out that the quake was a puny 3.4 was also jarring.  A 3.4 felt like that?  I must be a serious rookie.  Virgin in the ways of earth-quaking.  Really new and gone all wimpy-Maine-kid on these nerves-of-steel Californians. But then I found out it was centered about 800 meters from my house.

So I grabbed the camera and zipped down to the epicenter – the end of Venice Boulevard where it meets Pacific Avenue – to see if there was anything up.  Everything looked normal; no sign of damage or anything.  I walked the canal area for a bit; chatted with some people at Canal Club [literally at the epicenter].  Fuck yeah we felt it, the staff said, that was crazy.  I talked with a girl who lives at Venice and Canal Street, and she said it was the biggest one she’d felt in her life, and she thought someone crashed into her house.  Everyone was buzzing about it down there.  This helped me feel a bit less wimpy.

Then I checked the Richter Scale article at Wikipedia and found that the approximate “energy yield” of a 3.5 is 747 gigajoules, or about the same shock wave as detonating 178 tons of TNT.  Put another way, that’s a quarter the yield of a small atomic bomb.

Whoa.

Nearby, Xeni had a similar reaction.

The pod is also where Deanna was sitting when we had the rolly-quake last summer.  She found that to be a unique experience.  So, I’ve redubbed it The Quake Pod, and don’t plan on going back in there tonight.

Before I get into this story I want to set the psychographic stage, because I’ve been through this enough now to know what kind of conversations these controversies stir up.

My 2007 incident in San Antonio [see An Accidental Interview With Lieutenant Phil Dreyer] – which was much scarier and more flagrant than the one I’m writing about today – made me realize how out-of-fashion standing up for your rights has become, and also how much it opens you up to criticism for being a troublemaker (and more).

People like Thomas Hawk and Carlos Miller have famously faced this as well. The assumption (often verbalized) is that we’re belligerent, in-your-face assholes who go to places sticking our cameras (and our laminated, marked-up copies of the First Amendment) in people’s faces, looking and hoping for a fight. Sorry, but that’s just not true.  I absolutely hate these confrontations and just want to make my  pictures and be left alone.  For instance, I had a terribly embarrassing and awkward police / photography incident at LAX a few months back and decided not to write about it because of the rather sensational issues it would raise.   So trust me, I am not in this for the fight.

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For the are-you-fucking-kidding-me files, we have an article from this month’s issue of Realtor – the official magazine of the National Association of Realtors. In the article “Overcoming Buyer Reluctance“, various ways to trick people into trying to catch a falling knife are discussed.  While the piece is primarily excerpted from Gary Keller’s new book, “Shift”, it’s presented as a how-to for realtors who are struggling to find buyers in this market.  (They find it odd that people finally seemed to have smartened up, I guess.)

Here is the first tip they offer:

“A simple technique to prove to potential buyers, or even sellers, that they can’t perfectly time the market is to do this easy demonstration: Take out a blank sheet of paper and pen. Now, starting at the top of the paper, draw a line going down and at the same time ask the buyers to stop you when the market has bottomed out.  As long as your line keeps going straight down they won’t be able to. The moment you start back up, they’ll say ‘there!’ but of course they missed the bottom. Now, keep drawing your line up while asking them to tell you when the market has peaked. Again, they won’t be able to tell you until you’ve rounded the top and started back down. Then they’ll say ‘there!’ and once again they’ll be behind the peak.  This should be a moment of truth for them.”

Yeah, it should.

I am sitting here in Dulles, stuck, thanks to this awesome weather (and being reminded, again, why I live where I do.)

I thought I’d take this opportunity to wish y’all – with words and a photo – a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Saturnalia, Yule, Kwanzaa, and Boxing Day.

Enjoy, everyone.  Have fun and stay safe out there.

First, this article requires some personal background: I had meningitis as a kid; as a teen I went to a lot of rock concerts with zero hearing protection; then, a few years ago, had a vestibular infection and/or Meniere’s Disease (even the experts at Harvard’s Mass Eye and Ear couldn’t decide) on my right side.

The net:net, without all the personal whining, is that I’ve ended up with some fairly significant nerve deafness, much worse on the right side. While it doesn’t much affect my day-to-day life, over the past several years I’ve found that I just don’t use the phone like I used to.  Don’t like it much at all.  No fidelity to the voices, they sound extremely flat, have to ask people to repeat, etc. etc. …… so I generally avoid the phone if I can.  I know, I know, I should probably go get a hearing aid or something but I hate the idea – and besides (and more important) – why? I can carry on conversations just fine (unless there’s a ton of background noise), can still enjoy music, and honestly, most of the sound out there in the world I’d just as soon not hear.

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“Various administrations have closed in gloom and weakness … but no other has closed in such paralysis and discredit (in all domestic fields) as did [President Ulysses] Grant’s. The President was without policies or popular support… half its members were utterly inexperienced, several others discredited, one was even disgraced. The personnel of the departments was largely demoralized. The party that autumn appealed for votes on the implicit ground that the next Administration would be totally unlike the one in office. In its centennial year, a year of deepest economic depression, the nation drifted almost rudderless…”

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photo by me

This is my third winter away from New England and my second one here in lovely Venice, California.  I’m proud to say I’ve braved dozens of brutally cold New England winters.  I’ve never considered myself a “cold baby.”

After spending almost two years here, though, I am officially a “cold baby.”  When it drops into the low 50s here at night, I notice it.  I feel cold.  I don’t like it.  I whine like an old lady.  I want to bring a jacket or turn on the heat a little bit in the car.  I never would have done this just a couple years ago.  As a Maine schoolkid, I would have laughed at the notion that I’d ever feel cold at such temps.  I recently reminisced with a friend about the miles we would walk as kids in brutally cold weather (because we had no other option.)  It really had to be arctic for us to feel uncomfortably cold.

A few people have responded to my recent whining with remarks such as, “living in warmer climates thins your blood.”

So I got to thinking – is climate acclimation a psychological process or is there a physiological component to it as well?  Is the “blood thinning” thing an old wives’ tale, or is there really something to it? (I’m not knocking old wives’ tales here – some certainly turn out to be true, such as my grandma’s eat your colors rule)

And here’s what I learned: no, it doesn’t thin your blood.  Recently, Doctor Ashok Kumar told Mary Ann Roser at the Austin Statesman that: “the blood viscosity, the technical term for the thickness, doesn’t change” and goes on to suggest that the myth might have started because high altitude can thicken your blood.

I don’t think this necessarily obviates that there may be other physiological changes, but it sounds like the simple answer is: you just get used to it (or unused to it.)  I certainly have acclimated.  It happens fast, I guess.

“A bailout creates perverse incentives. Rather than punishing their behavior, it encourages fiscal irresponsibility among bankers, mortgage brokers, speculators, and refinancers. These folks made money hand over fist in the past nine years (remember, homeborrowers who tapped their home equity received cash money to pay for Escalades, vacations, and stainless steel appliances; now they want you to pay for it!). Why change your behavior when you benefit from it?”

“[T]he inequities [of a bailout] smell to high heaven, and that is one of the huge problems in dealing with it. It runs against the streak of basic fairness in a lot of Americans. You’re going to provide a handout to the fool. The fool is going to be rewarded and I, the taxpayer, will be put at risk at the margin for that handout to the fool. When all I did was exactly what I was supposed to do. Where is the fairness here?”

[StopTheHousingBailout.com]

How about for Thanksgiving, we give thanks that we’re not being tortured to death?

In Venice today, it was a record 90 degrees, windy and bone-dry.  When I woke up, I could see huge walls of smoke rising just north of the Santa Monica Mountains, then billowing west and south out of the San Fernando Valley from the Sylmar Fire, presently raging 20 miles north of here.

As the afternoon wore on, it really began to feel like the outer edge of a fire zone.  Ash and smoke passed over the eastern portion of the Santa Monica mountains and rolled down into the western section of the Los Angeles basin, casting a reddish-grey, eerie smoky darkness over this area for much of the late afternoon and into the evening.

The sun burned an angry alien red all afternoon until suddenly letting go behind the wall of smoke now hanging over Santa Monica Bay to the west.

I am amazed and thankful that, despite all the damage so far, there appear to be few injuries.  The Los Angeles Times has more, and the LA Fire Department blog is being updated often.

I’m certainly safe where i am for now.  From a personal standpoint, I’m more worried about new fires than I am the Sylmar Fire.  Compounding this worry is that in the last 24 hours, I’ve seen two separate cretins throw lit cigarettes out of their car windows.  Who the fuck are you people??