February 27, 2008

• I'm lookin' at Google Earth Pro right now with the CBS Seismic Monitor plugin. Lookin' like a .5 divergent quake along the N.American & Eurasian plates. Wowee.
• Actually just found a rather better plugin. More data. 'An earthquake occurred at 2008.02.27 - 00:56:45 (UTC). The magnitude 4.9 event has been located in Europe. (This is a computer-generated message -- this event has not yet been reviewed by a seismologist.) Location S 0° 5.880, E 53° 14.700 Depth 26 km (16.16 miles) set by location program Region Europe Distances 0.70 km (1.12 miles) S from Ludford Magna, United Kingdom'
• Looks like it was felt right thru Europe along the Med. & up into Czecho & Poland.
• Portugal, Spain and even right across in the Bermudas. Must have been on the plate in the N. Atlantic.
• 4.9 is pretty minor, yes?
• Moderate. Highly unusual in Britain.
• weenies. we have 4.9's for breakfast around SF.
• Mag 5.9+ out in the Azores.
• correction: 5.0
• That latlong is somewhere off the east coast of Africa.
• There are dozens of those little markers with different data, I just picked one.
• So, anyway, all UK monkeyfilterians are now dead. news at 11.
• Mind the gap!
• Why do Californians always boast about how big their earthquakes are? Like it's some kind of really smart thing to build a city on one of the most active & dangerous fuckin' fault lines on the planet. Duhhhhhrr. Generally I tend to live furthest away from really dangerous things. Just a quirk of mine.
• But what about dropbears?
• WHERE?? /runs
• FTFTW.
• Well, when my choices came down to earthquakes, tornadoes/hurricanes or places that had too much snow or were really boring, I chose the one I was most familiar with. Earthquakes won. I was around for a couple of biggies in the 1950s and the '89 quake in the San Francisco area, but none of those affected me as much as driving to work on ice-covered roads in Oklahoma or New Jersey. And, the quakes don't happen on the same annual schedule as do the blizzards and tornadoes. Plus, there's the fun of thinking you know what the measure of the milder of the quakes are. After sitting though a roller, you can say, "well, that was a 3.5, or a 4.2...". Earthquakes happen with no warning and are done. Tornadoes and flash flood warnings were big news in Oklahoma. I remember my 6 year old daughter lying in the bath tub (interior room, supposedly safest) and crying since she thought she was going to die the first time we went though a tornado warning. It came close, but didn't hit us, but the worry was awful. As for flood warnings, Oklahoma is quite flat, so I always wondered where I should go to escape. All I could think of was a freeway overpass. So, yeah, I'll take earthquakes anytime. And, I know I can trounce any drop bear that I come in contact with.
• *buys Path a beer*
• Kiss, kiss for the cheese.
• What's shakin' bro?
• I saw posts on a UK forum I frequent asking if other people had noticed a quake. Poster was in Manchester I think. Others elsewhere had felt it too.
• Heh, and now I see it's top story on the Beeb. I am first with the news again!
• I'm a California native (third-generation, if it matters), and when you've grown up here, earthquakes are kinda fun when they're not lethal (and they're almost always not lethal). The ground shakes, you say to your neighbor or coworker, "Hey, did you feel that?" and then you swap stories about the last quake. This is a form of community, Dr. Mabuse, and not to be sneered at. But if you're not used to it, it must be very frightening. Are y'all all right?
• I slept through it in London. First I knew about it was reading the paper.
• Yes, Californians, ok, you don't have to justify it I was just jokin' around. :p In my backyard I probably have about 10 different kinds of deadly poisonous snukes so I can't really point the fignob.
• Those Californians are so wimpy when it comes to earthquakes... I think it can be more frightening when earthquakes happen in places you don't expect them too. Here in Japan buildings have earthquake proofing up to a certain level - and there are procedures for if/when a bigger quake hits. So they still freak the crap out of you - but not as much as if you were sitting in a house made of bricks which is likely to crumble down around you.
• Ah, this would explain all the alarms going off around the place last night.
• Earthquake boasting fight Japan vs California FIGHT
• Fish tick, I think I love you! Eng-a-land swings like a pendulum do...
• My daughter heard something, but it could have been a fox pushing a wheelybin over.
• MonkeyFilter: about 10 different kinds of deadly poisonous snukes.
• a fox pushing a wheelybin over. This to the expat is as lyrical an evocation of England as any dreaming spire or maid cycling through mist to evensong. I thank you, Plegmund.
• C'est l'Angleterre profonde, innit.
• My cats totally failed to wake me up / warn of impending doom. They are crap and I slept right through.
• But an earthquake followed by the reemergence of kitfisto -- shurely, that's an apocalypse of some kind?
• They probably just need to have their stripes adjusted. I'll send the man with the calipers 'round to see to it.
• Oh god, SNUKES!
• Snukes on a plune!
• Drat! I leave the country and just then something exciting happens! The Beeb says that the epicentre was near Market Rasen in Lincolnshire. jb will be so pleased that something earth shaking came out of the fens.
• Perhaps you stood up too quick on your way out Dreadnought and caused the tremor!!!
• Views from the epicentre, where local newshounds were quick to clear the front page.
• EYE WITNESS REPORTS OF DEATH-QUAKE '07!!! "My long case clock stopped and a picture frame fell off a table," "The house shook and the dogs ran around with their tails between their legs!" "I went outside, looked around but saw nothing and went back to bed." TRULY A TESTAMENT TO THE HUMAN SPIRIT AND ITS ABILITY TO THRIVE DESPITE THE VERY WRATH AND DESTRUCTION OF THE EARTH ITSELF!!!
• What?
• Oh yeah, I don't live there anymore.
• Just so long as Lincolnshire's vital haslet mines were unharmed (should a veggie even make that obscure joke?)
• And as long as there are no tidal waves in that pool of liver...
• The sad aftermath.
• Haslet! Tea at me granny and grandad's...
• Japan's clearly got us beat for 'quakes, but the 1337s in this game of living next to peril have got to be the people who live by volcanoes. Just wait 'til Rainier goes all St. Helens and blasts Tacoma into the ocean. Then the Seattleites will be all, "... thass right. We bad."
• Valuable artworks destroyed! Oh, the hu-manatee!
• I'll tell two California earthquake stories: At my friend Andy's newly-bought, insufficiently-braced, near-ancient (for the area) cabin on a very steep hillside in Guerneville, Sonoma, one morning the earth shook (not much, really), and I woke up in a bed suddenly near what I KNEW to be easily shatterable picture windows that, should they break, would drop me a couple hundred feet down onto the tops of pine trees. This was far more scary than the Sylmar earthquake (which was much more destructive but which I loved because it caused my insufferable big brother [he was maybe eight, I was maybe five] to fall out of his top bunk and cry his smug ass off).
• I managed to sleep through it, but then again I slept through Guinness' brewery despite living right next door to James' Gate.
• "I slept through Guinness' brewery despite living right next door to James' Gate." I guess one has to be from the UK to understand this.
• > I guess one has to be from the UK to understand this. More probably from Ireland.
• Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeelybin! I want to go ride my trash can down to the curb now.
• @RalphTheDog, @roryk. I grew up right next door to the Guinness' brewery in Dublin. There was an explosion in one of the mash tuns in the 80s - so great that metal was strewn around a square mile. I couldn't find any reference to the event though.