'Bred Crumbs

No Injuries, But Plenty of Passion

So there we were, sitting on the couch, bloated from dinner, sucked into some gay-skewing reality trash on MTV, when – just as young, double-life-leading Chris was about to tell his straight friend Holly who already knows that he is gay, that he is gay – the screen went blank, and the audio was replaced by the tinny, squawking alert noise that Northern Californians usually only hear in winter, when the Russian River is overflowing its banks for the umpteenth time.

It's not winter.

We waited through the standard emergency alert preface and ...

Tsunami warning.

The warning ran along the Pacific from Canada to Mexico, after a 7-point-plus quake off the coast at Eureka. No injuries reported from the quake, no known tsunami – though if there was one, it would hit San Francisco at 9:23 p.m. So, for those who are low-lying, heads up.

(FYI, we're not low-lying; we're five, six miles inland.)

I swung open the laptop and headed to the USGS site, while Robbie switched the TV over to poor, forlorn, formerly-NBC-but-now-independent station KRON, since news is all the programming they have. From KRON we got little info we didn't already know, just lots of dramatic EARTHQUAKE graphics and useless banter from local anchors.

Within 15 minutes, the tsunami warning was canceled, and the newsbeings were left high and dry, dramatically speaking. But not before one of them could interview a seismologist, asking him about the "seduction zone."

I wish I were kidding.

Send e-mail