5.6 on the Richter scale according to the USGS report. The biggest one I’ve ever experienced yet. We could feel the entire house shake for upwards of twenty seconds before it subsided - no obvious damage, fortunately, but I’ll have to check the plaster for more cracks in the morning. And right now it’s the top headline on CNN. Woo, earthquake country!
Update: quake may have “heightened the possibility of more quakes farther north along the much more dangerous Hayward Fault”. Aw, crap. (That’s the one closest to our house.)
Quintessential life in California: on the way to Macarthur BART, just off the offramp, drive pass some seriously heavy shit about to go down in Oakland - squad cars parked askew in the street; cops with shotguns and automatic weapons shielding behind said cars; more cops frantically sprinting for cover. Shake head, take BART over to downtown SF; find the weather cooler by 20 degrees; hear the roar of Dykes on Bikes - cheer on the start of the San Francisco Pride parade. Hey, that’s the mayor of SF, right there, just a few feet away! Break for lunch - incredibly good fish tacos. Look for washrooms in Bloomingdale’s, hidden somewhere between the $500 handbags, the disdainful salespeople, and the even more disdainful shoppers. Back out to more parade cheering, most especially of leather clad dudes and bear pirates. Wander down Market over to the UN plaza, where cops sternly deliver warnings.. to better hide the cans of booze. (SF cops: parade duty; Oakland cops: hostage situations.) No S&M demos today, looks like it’s time to head back home to rest them weary legs.
More pictures: flickr.
Gasoline tanker explodes in the “MacArthur Maze” - what we locals call the intersection of I-80, I-580, and I-880, just beyond the east side terminus of the Bay Bridge linking San Francisco and the East Bay. I love this quote from the San Francisco Chronicle.
The tanker, which was traveling from I-80 full of vehicle-ready gasoline, seems to have disappeared. One Caltrans worker at the scene held up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart to describe how big the tanker is now.
Scene of the accident on Google Maps, now imagine a smoking crater in the center. Tanker was apparently on the roadway below and the ensuing fire collapsed the overpass. Good thing I don’t work in SF, because that happens to be the main route from the Bay Bridge to our house. Still, we take the stretch of 580 just a little bit to the east every day on the way to work (Emeryville is just NE of the maze) so it’ll be “interesting” to see what traffic will be like next week.
Update: we drove past the scene of the collapse this afternoon, joining all the other gawkers on the onramp from I-580 to I-80 N (the one that goes right by IKEA). It was awesome to see, in Susan’s words, “one road folded over the other like a blanket”.
I’ve had a radio-less stretch of a few months, ever since it got stolen from my car, so listening to FM on the way home from Vegas was refreshing. During the trip, the heavy metalish remake of “Land of Confusion” by the band Disturbed came on. I find it quite an improvement on the original - replacing a synth loop with nice crunchy guitars is always a good thing. Leon probably disagrees, but then he’s the only Genesis-Phil Collins fan I’ve ever met in my life, so we’ll let that slide.
As a child of the 80’s, with cable (MTV!) for one glorious year, I still remember the Spitting Image puppets in the original video by Genesis. Disturbed’s new video, done by Todd McFarlane (of Spawn infamy), is even better, or at least cheesier and more over the top.
Sensory nadir of the trip: somewhere about a 100 miles north of Bakersfield on I-5, a overwhelming stench reminiscent of rotting fish hit my nose a split second before Susan’s. Then it got eye-wateringly, gaggingly worse. As we looked out the right window, we saw the cause: cows. Not just a few cows. Thousands of cows. A vast sea of cows. Bovines every few feet as far as the eye could see. I wish I’d taken a picture, but I was more focused on speeding through the noxious vapor zone as quickly as possible. The first thing we had to do when we got home was figure out whose cows they were. Turns out that’s the feedlot of Harris Ranch. What’s frightening: there’s a restaurant right there. Now, I enjoy meat, and generally don’t worry about the fact that I’m eating something that was once a living, breathing animal - but I’d completely lose my appetite anywhere close to that putrid environment. This isn’t even taking into account being just down the road from where dinner got slaughtered (do diners get to pick out their cows ala Cantonese seafood dinner?).
To our horror, our roomate’s actually eaten there. He claims the restaurant is just fine. Me, well, I think I’ll drive Highway 101 to LA in the future.
Yesterday morning we were woken up by a cop. Turned out at around 6 or 7 am someone decided to break into my car and grab the stereo. The people across the street saw this happening and called the cops, but by the time they showed up the thief had gone. I’m less annoyed about the loss of the stereo than I am about having to drive out to Walnut Creek this morning to get the glass replaced - all for a stereo that should (in theory) be useless, since it’s unlockable without a specific CD - one that says something about Jamie’s former taste in music.
More cars: I’m in the market for a new one, and we’ve been trying out hybrids for a few weeks now. Zero luck trying to get a test drive through the dealerships around here. We managed to test drive the 2005 Prius at Berkeley for about half an hour, but after phoning every Honda dealership within 30 miles we decided we had to rent one from Fox Rent A Car. Through a mishap we got the Prius again for a day, and finally this weekend we rented the Honda Civic. After all that, I’ve decided on the Prius. The cross bar on the rear window is a definite minus, but the Honda’s rear window visibility is far worse for parallel parking. The Prius feels a lot better when driving than the Civic - with the latter, I had a bad passing experience at 40 mph on the highway, and it also handles weirdly when moving from a stop - almost like the car is going backwards for a split second. It tends to roll backwards very easily too. The two clinchers, for me: the Civic’s lack of fold down rear seats means my cello doesn’t fit easily (as I found out when I went to orchestra practice on Sunday), and the Prius’ mileage during our two rental days edged out the Civic (43 mpg vs 38 mpg, both averaged out over at least 50 miles of driving). I’m going to go put a deposit down tomorrow.
And you thought this entry was about that movie of ours.
