'Bred Crumbs

08:20 AM Here's my earthquake* routine:

1. At the first sensing of suspicious movement, I sprint to the closest door frame.

2. Once I'm sure the shaking is done, I immediately hit the computer, go to the government earthquake maps, and refresh repeatedly until I find out what the location and magnitude of the shaking was. By this time, I've made a guess at the Richter number; I'm often within .2 of correct.

3. Meanwhile, I've started scanning the local TV stations to see how quickly they react, and how long the overkill goes. Last night, they were surprisingly slow, especially given that the top local newscast was already on the air. But once everyone caught up, the coverage ran well past the supply of actual information. Though there were no injuries or serious damage, we had to hear from every witness who called in, each reporting, unsurprisingly, that things shook. I was reminded of the last moderate quake two years ago in Napa, which slightly injured a few and broke some glass. Nonetheless, one channel spent a half-hour on it the next day. The memorable part was an interview at a lamp shop, where a clerk recalled how the hanging lamps swung -- then pushed one to demonstrate to those of us with no trace of imagination what such an event would look like.

But for this quake, the media stupidity award goes to one of the sports guys on Headline News. That the quake made national news at all was evidence of a slow news morning, but that was no excuse for this lameoid to try to work it into everything he mentioned. I'll give him one -- yes, they briefly stopped the Sharks game and people in the upper deck felt the swaying -- but he opened his segment by trying to make a joke about things being "shaken up" at the NBA game in Sacramento -- far out of range of the quake.

This is the same network that recently ran a feature on the supposed long ski season in Sacramento, which is far too flat and warm for alpine events. What really happened was that a Sacramento affiliate filed a report on skiing at Tahoe, and the poor newswriters in Atlanta got confused. Apparently, this is how the Atlantans conceive of California:

 
* Note that this newspaper article, like every newspaper article about earthquakes, goes out of its way to call the quake a "temblor," a thoroughly unnecessary word which is used by no one in real life, but which newspapers use because they can't bear the thought of using the word "quake" more than once, and some woman-hating curmudgeon back in the 1890s probably saw the word in a dictionary and threw it into a report thinking he was clever, and all his slathering minions turned it into another stupid newspaper tradition -- like the dateline, that all-caps location at the beginning of a story that purports to tell you where a news event happened, but in fact tells you only where the reporter's butt was at the time he wrote it, like you care.

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