#53: Shaking quite literally all over

Actual updates

So, sure, there was some regular life stuff this time out. For instance, we switched our heating system over from oil to gas (still not great, I recognize, but the better option, heat pumps, were not a viable option for our house), and in the process went 4 days without heat during winter’s last gasp.

“But, Camille,” you are surely asking, “how did a routine one-day procedure wind up losing you heat for 4 whole days?” So glad you asked. At the end of the routine one-day procedure, the plumbers tried to turn the new gas heater on, and it did not stay on. They determined that the cause was our gas meter, which was too small: it had enough capacity for a gas stove, which we have, but not enough for the heating apparatus for a whole house. Fine, we were to call National Grid and they would install a new one, then the plumbers would come back and switch on the heater. Good. Great. One chilly night, but that’s not so bad.

The next day, we spent all day trying to get in touch with someone at National Grid. It’s supposed to be considered an emergency when there’s a child under a certain age in a house without heat, but the people Matt had talked to the night before didn’t call back, and no one we tried to reach on this day was available either. The helpdesk kept sending us to this one person’s voicemail. Eventually, I tried emailing her, and the missing piece of the puzzle was revealed: she had changed roles at the company and no longer handled our region, and she gave contact info for the person who had taken on that job.

He got to work scheduling a crew to come out and make the change, but again - no level of urgency, and it was not until that night (this is the third day) that they came and got started. Turned out they felt that the gas line coming from the street was insufficient as well, so they also replaced that, ultimately finishing after midnight.

The next day was a Saturday. The gas was ready to go. We just needed the plumbers to come back and do their final steps. It took most of the day to get that sorted as well, because it was Saturday; ultimately my point of contact at the company just came out and did it himself despite not usually being reachable on weekends.

Naturally, a day or two later, it was warm enough to have the window open.

But that brief frustrating period of excitement doesn’t stand as large in my mind as two other things that happened in swift succession early this month, and I’m talking, of course, about the little earthquake in New Jersey, and the eclipse¹.

I’m afraid I was a massive snob about the earthquake. I don’t really have grounds to be? I grew up in a place that was supposed to have them, but didn’t really have them, and we had earthquake drills in school and had earthquake consultants check out our homes and buildings, and overidentified with places down the coast where the real earthquakes did happen, and learned about s-waves and p-waves in high school science class², and thought about The Big One, and (if you’re me) missed every small one that came through.

That’s true, by the way. I know about two that occurred while I lived at home - one while I was stepping out of the car, one, I think, while I was in the shower - and I felt neither of them, not that they were any great shakes (lol). I didn’t feel the one that rolled through here, either, but I was on the ground floor of my office; no one else with me felt it either, but the people on the second and third floor did. The only earthquake I’ve ever felt was, weirdly enough, while I lived in Montreal, and it woke me from sleep, as if someone had shaken me by the shoulder.

But in terms of earthquake snobbery, I know it was widely noticeable closer to its epicenter, and everyone in New York thought their building was going to fall down or that their boiler had exploded or that there was a truck crash down the street. But it was, and let’s be totally serious, a 4.8.

You see where 4.8 is on that scale! It’s officially and categorically “small.” And the Richter Scale is a logarithmic scale, so each number is 10 times the strength of the number before it. A 5.0 is 10 times as strong as a 4.0, for instance, but that also means the reverse is true: a 4.0 is 10 times weaker than a 5.0. The one I felt was, I’m pretty sure, this one - the date matches when I lived in the right apartment, and the time being 6:41am matches me being woken up in bed - and it was only a 3.9, albeit centred closer to my location, so, I don’t know, that’s a nothing of an earthquake but here we are.

But aside from all the ones I didn’t feel, I spent my youth thinking about how the always capitalized Big One was 200 years overdue, or something like that, and that any second, the big subduction fault just offshore was going to jerk back into motion after being “stuck.” Actually, I’m not sure why, or if, I really stopped thinking about it. It’s not the kind of thing you can really get bored with.

Related sidebar, I didn’t realize until I was researching³ earthquakes and subduction zones and so on, that the seafloor doesn’t just drop away to the depths of the sea just offshore everywhere in the world - some places the continental shelf extends much further out from the coast, and it’s a sign of there being a subduction zone when it behaves this way. I wrote⁴ a story as a teenager - actually, a concept I might revisit - about a climate change apocalypse that involved sea levels decreasing dramatically, rather than rising (well, water in general was very scarce, so it had to come from somewhere, etc etc), and my characters lived in a settlement at the foot of the huge cliffs that had been the edge of the continental shelf back when there were oceans to speak of. I feel like that idea maybe deserves a fuller exploration! But anyway, I hadn’t even considered, when I was writing that little yarn, that this wasn’t going to be the way coastlines behaved worldwide, and that it was specific to a region of seismic foreboding.

And then - the eclipse! The eclipse, the eclipse! Here we were at a point of 92% coverage, so not in the path of totality (although my in-laws were!) but close enough to have a really singular experience. And I know totality-experiencers will pooh-pooh it, and share that xkcd comic that shows the relative coolness of every percentage of eclipse coverage, and I know it’s really not the same, but: it is still very cool and something I’ve never experienced before and likely never will again.

I went to work, where there was a pile of eclipse glasses and roof access. We shut down operations for the duration of the eclipse, and sat out on the roof; someone made a pinhole camera, someone else brought couch cushions to prop our heads on as we lay on the floor. We tried to help each other take pictures through the eclipse glasses lens while not accidentally glimpsing the sun with our own eyeballs, with some degree of success. Together, we felt the temperature drop and the wind rise as the sun was as covered as it was going to get. We marvelled at how light and warm it still was, even with 92% of the sun covered, which is to say - it’s not that it wasn’t noticeably different, it was, but if we had 92% less Sun, or (maybe?) if it was some degree smaller, farther away, less powerful, what have you, we would not be altogether in darkness, not altogether feeling the chill of night. A lot would change, but not everything; I imagine some plants could still grow, or evolve to grow, water would still flow, there would be enough heat or light to capture and make more of. It was a very science fiction experience for me in that way, if you want to think of it like that - it gave me a mind full of previously unconsidered possibilities.

On the way to work, I noticed all the different people on the bus with me and thought about how we were all going to be experiencing this together, and how everyone was going to be pretty impressed by it, even if they were a blasé teenager who would never say so. But there I was with Hap, age 6 and a half, on his way to watch the eclipse with his class at school, all those little kids who might see another one in their lifetimes, depending where they live in 55 years’ time; and there were senior citizens on the bus too who might have seen another eclipse earlier in their lives; middle-aged folks like me who were probably going to see the only one we’d ever see, the aforementioned sullen teens, people from all walks of life, going to school, to work, to run errands, to do whatever their day required, and then to have that day interrupted at 2:30pm with a SPACE EVENT. Not to be a woo woo hippie about it but it gave me a real sense of being all together in this; we were all going to see something singular; we were all going to be different afterwards.

The eclipse turned me into a sap! But I’m right, is the thing. I’m right. Tell me I’m wrong.

What am I reading right now

I’m in the middle of How Much of These Hills is Gold, by C Pam Zhang, which I just picked up at the library book sale. The last book I grabbed at the book sale was a major dud, even though the author had won a Pulitzer, I think, for one of his other books. This book, which, not for nothing, was longlisted for the Booker, is not a dud. It’s a story of two kids, immigrants from China to the US (maybe? No countries are ever named, but Chinese words and stories are woven through the text, and it’s almost clear that they’re in California), striking out on their own in an unhospitable landscape after their parents die.

It’s harsh and austere and beautiful and laced with thin veins of magic; I mean the book, but also the land they’re traveling through. I’m enjoying it a great deal. But.

But. Someone has highlighted and written notes ALL OVER this book. I object to that on “don’t deface a book” grounds generally, but if you’re keeping it for your own reference, who cares. When it leaves your hands and lands in someone else’s, suddenly YOUR NOTES are leaping out at me while I’m in the middle of reading the book. I’m being bopped over the head with the significance of this or that passage. Why yes, I do agree this is a situation where they’re focusing on the positive memories of their parents, thanks for pointing it out! It takes me out of the book something awful, and everything I like about the book is in spite of it. Don’t give away your written-in books! Don’t write in a library book, for god’s sake! I don’t want to do homework while I’m reading! I just want to read the actual book, and I want to read it for myself, without the fact that someone found this passage particularly relevant!

Some links

You may have read this - it’s been making the rounds - but in case you haven’t, please enjoy (or “enjoy,” aka read with increasingly fiery fury) this explanation of how once again, subsuming making an actual good product, in this case a usable search engine, to making a pile of money the size of Mt. Everest has utterly ruined the product itself. As a person who knows their way around the internet, I just scroll past the sponsored results as second nature, but they’ve made it less and less obvious, and people who aren’t digital natives, or even maybe people who are but never experienced it any other way, could easily be bamboozled into clicking on an ad instead of a real result. The Men Who Killed Google Search

This is an excerpt from a book, so you won’t get the story wrapped up within the bounds of this article - but read it anyway for the descriptions, and photos, of the insanely luxurious lives of oil barons in the 1950s. The house where the jewel heist in question took place is also WILD - the dining room table stands on a pedestal in the middle of a swimming pool! Go look! The Daring Jewel Thief Who Preyed on Dallas High Society

This house is kind of hideous but I can’t deny that it’s interesting. Inside the Last “Bubble House”

I would never have expected to have been moved by a story about rodeo riders. But I get what they’re saying about the addiction of having to keep doing the craziest stuff; that sounds very understandable even as someone who never really does anything that exciting. Riding the Baddest Bulls Made Him a Legend. Then One Broke His Neck

I’ve talked about this before, I think, but the idea of cross-country train rides is much more attractive as a fantasy than as a reality; it sounds like the only really exciting part is going through the Rockies. This article is set in Canada, but if you’ve heard about the way long freight trains are causing problems in the US, you’ll find plenty familiar in this article. The Diminishing Romance of Train Travel

I had no idea about the Cold-War-era Greek adoption racket - and naturally the world has learned nothing from it, because it wasn’t the last of its kind, either. “Did Something Happen to Mom When She Was Young?”

This article is kind of odd in that it doesn’t spend that much time talking about its ostensible subject, Alain Delon. Instead, it’s particularly interested in beauty and what beauty means. I don’t know if I agree with all of it, but I enjoyed reading it; and the answer to the question posed by its title appears to be “yes.” Can a Film Star Be Too Good-Looking?

Swapping out cows for camels in East Africa as a bulwark against the ravages of drought - this is the kind of thing I anticipate seeing more of as the climate disaster continues apace. It’s hopeful, in that it shows people have solutions in mind to help themselves and their communities survive, but it’s also illustrative of the point that we’ve already brought ourselves to. The Survivor Species

This starts out as an investigation of the Pitchfork version of Ray Smithee, but it moves into what it meant for them to pan an album, at the height of their powers (nothing good, that’s for sure! people lost careers over it! which is kind of a lot of power to give to people who, it must be said, approached the whole enterprise with a kind of shitpost energy). The Secret History Behind Pitchfork’s Most Notorious Review

I read a Neal Stephenson longform piece on transoceanic communications cables years ago and I’ve found the subject interesting ever since, but this does more than just describe how it works and how hard it is to make repairs (and yet how quickly they must be made) - in addition, no one’s scrambling to join this industry, and it’s going to be a real problem if that trend keeps up. The Invisible Seafaring Industry that Keeps the Internet Afloat

This is a RIDE. I don’t even want to say any more than that so you can perhaps go into it with no foreknowledge⁵. A Family’s Disappearance Rocked New Zealand. What Came After Has Stunned Everyone

Remember PostSecret? This piece takes you into its creation and gets to know the guy who founded it. Personally I’ve never submitted a secret - have you? - because while I have plenty, I didn’t think any of them are interesting or unique enough to share (and then after awhile, like everyone, I stopped thinking about PostSecret at all). Put it on my tombstone: cursed with mundane secrets. Dark Matter

Okay, so while I have seen Priscilla, Queen of the Desert, I’ve only seen it once, donkey’s years ago, on a rented video at a friend’s house (my own drag movie ministry was, and remains, To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar). But even I know that it’s absolutely wild that the titular bus was physically missing - for 30 years!! - and some parts of this story are absolutely astounding. The 30-Year Hunt to Find the Priscilla, Queen of the Desert Bus: “My Jaw Was on the Ground”

I saw that this was an article about looking back at a local punk scene, and assumed it would be from 30 years ago or more; nope, it’s from the mid-2000s, an era during which I was also going to shows and making friends in structurally dubious basements⁶! I’m older than the hills, my god. Saved by Neon Christ

Moon time zone!!! I love it on its own merits (time zones are fascinating to me, and also - thanks, Heritage Minute! - they were invented by a Canadian), and I also love it because it means people may need to live there and be on Lunar Time. Imagine trying to schedule a meeting with someone on the moon. Actually, don’t. NASA Will Create a New Time Zone for the Moon, Called Coordinated Lunar Time

Mata Hari!! Famed dancer, spy, and sexy person! She pretended to be from Java and people in Europe believed her because it let them permit themselves to ogle her risque performances, which wouldn’t have been possible if she was just the respectable Dutch daughter of respectable Dutch parents. Also, this article says her name means “eye of the dawn” in “the Malaysian language” (why they didn’t just say Malay I can’t say), and while that’s literally true, the word matahari means sun in Indonesian. You know, Indonesia, the place she lived for part of her life and then claimed to be from. Anyway, her head’s missing, apparently! Her Severed Head Was Kept in a Paris Museum. Then It Disappeared

What is it about failed amusement parks that I find so compelling? The Promise of El Paso’s Magic Landing

What is it about failed chicken restaurants that I find so compelling? The Last Days of Boston Market

Tunes I’ve been listening to lately

Speaking of bands I’ve seen in the basement of the Cantab!

To keep tying it into bands from the Boston music scene of a few years ago, which these guys aren’t, they sound like if the Evil Streaks had a baby with Hambone Skinny. Actually, in some songs, not this one, they sound like if the singer of the Evil Streaks was singing for Hambone Skinny. You could do worse than listening to either of those two bands as well, if you don’t, by the way.

My toxic trait is that I listen all the way through an artist’s discography online, rather than doing what I think normal people do, namely picking songs or artists or albums that suit their mood and interest at the moment and listening to those. I got introduced to Thee Oh Sees not too long ago⁷ and boy do they have a deep discography. I’ll be lucky if they aren’t overrepresented in my Spotify Wrapped this year.

This month’s top 5: earthquakes I think about

I should stress here that I don’t mean “think about” in the sense of “obsessive dread” or having nightmares or anything like that. Most of them are in the past. I think about them in a Wikipedia wormhole way, or in the sense of having an anecdote about them - do you ever find yourself telling the same little anecdotes to different audiences and then justifying it by saying that’s basically what bards did to memorize stories? Me retelling the same two-sentence story about something that happened to my dad before I was born is basically the same as Homer saying “wine-dark sea” every few stanzas, yes, that’s exactly what I’m saying. ANYWAY! Back to earthquakes

1. The Northridge quake (1994), because it happened when I was 12 and also it happened to my aunt and uncle: they live in the LA area and all their kitchen cabinets flew open and the dishes all ended up in the oven.

2. The Loma Prieta quake (1989), because I mix it up with the Northridge one, especially in terms of whether this or that incident happened in this or that quake⁸.

3. The massive 1964 Anchorage quake, because it was SO large and the effects were so dramatic, and it was, you know, right there

4. The one that happened to my dad while he was in grad school in Chicago sometime in the early 70s, which the internet offers no ideas on - apparently there was one in September of 1972, which checks out date-wise, but it was just after midnight, and the story he tells about it is that he was just returning to his office after having lunch, and, it being the 70s, he had had a drink with lunch. But just one! And he was having all kinds of trouble trying to get the key to go into the lock on his office door, and thinking “what’s going on here, I can’t be this drunk?” So… maybe an aftershock of that midnight earthquake? I don’t know. Maybe he made it up.

5. And, of course, The Big One. Will it happen in my lifetime? Maybe not! But it could!

Alright! Well, I’m once again going to end this on a fundraising note: one place that could really stand to receive a few of your dollar bills is bail funds for college students and professors⁹ who have been arrested in the sweeps of campus pro-Palestine protest encampments. Here is a list of funds by school!

Possibly by the time this hits your inbox, everyone will be bailed out, which would be nice. If that’s the case¹⁰, you can occupy your time calling up your senators (if you’re in the US) and telling them you want them to vote no on the “Antisemitism Awareness Act,” which makes it a hate crime to criticize Israel. That’s obviously a bullshit definition of antisemitism; a country, and specifically its government, are not the same as a people, and criticizing the actions and policies of a country or government only reflects on that government! This is simply another attempt to criminalize dissent and we can’t sit still for it.

_{1 as someone funnier than me put it on Bluesky, the combination of those two things back to back would have taken down a whole ass dynasty back in the day}

_{2 do i know what they are now? no. one of them is vertical and one is horizontal, i think? i could look this up but i’m not going to}

_{3 by which i mean falling down networks of wikipedia rabbitholes for no reason other than personal interest}

_{4 started. did not finish.}

_{5 unless you’re really up on New Zealand news, which maybe you are! i don’t think i have any readers there, although i’d be thrilled if i did}

_{6 the Cantab (RIP)}

_{7 i’ve long ago given up shame for coming late to the party on a particular band or artist. all that means is that i got there through some reason other than media saturation, and surely that’s a good thing}

_{8 this is the one, for instance, with the baseball game; this is also the one where the freeway pancaked on itself}

_{9 no I know many professors make piles of money but many adjunct professors make pennies! They need your help too!}

_{10 or even if it isn’t! you can do more than one thing!}