Quake! update

A few random thoughts, post-quake:

1) In some weird way, it's nice that this at least made top-of-the-page news all over the place. Here's the New York Times story, which downgrades it to a somewhat less sexy 5.4 quake. And for posterity, here's a shot of the CNN home page, which gives us the exciting, but still ridiculous "Live breaking news" banner. Repeated memo to CNN: It's not breaking news anymore. It's already been broken. Get over yourself.

And, also for posterity, I guess, here's a shot of the L.A. Times home page, which illustrated the magnitude of the quake by showing that a lot of paper towels fell. Oh, the humanity!

2) First person who contacted me after the shaking stopped was the ultrawonderful Loree (holla!), who heard about it within minutes thanks to Twitter. I'll have to get into this subject more another time, but other than notifying friends about natural disasters - for which it apparently works beautifully - I don't get the attraction of Twitter. But it was still good to hear from Loree - let's not lose sight of that fact.

3) The quake was another reminder of how much Sprint blows. I don't know if it's really fair to blame Sprint for this, but I will anyway: It was 32 minutes before I was able to make a call on my cell phone. And nothing bad actually happened in my part of town.

4) Apparently this was nothing to the natives. I walked through town during my lunch break, and it was if nothing had happened - nobody was talking about it. Well, maybe these suckers are laid back out here.

OK, back to work.