We’ll Have No Earthquake Before Its Time

This is the month, according to the psychics, in which Los Angeles will be destroyed by the Big Earthquake.

I feel safe in predicting that it will not have come by today--May 5.

For one thing, if it has come by now, the presses at The Times will undoubtedly be wrecked and this column will never be printed.

I predict further that the Big One will not come in the entire month of May. As I am undoubtedly the most accurate psychic in the country, I hope that this prediction will allow Angelenos to forget their fears.

If you question my powers, I will remind you that for years I have been counterpredicting the predictions of all the leadings psychics, and I have never once been wrong.

The current fever seems to arise from certain quatrains written by the French astrologer Nostradamus (1503-66), which contemporary astrologers interpret as predictions of a devastating earthquake in Los Angeles this month.

In the first place, Nostradamus was a fraud whose verses were so vague that they could be interpreted as predicting almost anything. This one, for example:

When the animal tamed by man

Begins to speak after great efforts and difficulty

The lightning so harmful to the rod

Will be taken from the earth and suspended in the air.

That is supposed to mean radio.

The current anxiety arises from reruns of a 1981 movie, “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow,” narrated by that prophet of calamity, Orson Welles, in which a Nostradamus quatrain is interpreted as predicting “a mighty trembling” in “the new city” (Los Angeles, of course) in May, 1988, when the planets are all aligned.

The Griffith Observatory, harassed by calls from anxious residents, has issued a voluminous press kit pointing out that Nostradamus was a “miserable” prognosticator, even with the advantage of centuries of hindsight; that there is, in any case, no alignment of the planets this month; and that if there were, the effect on the Earth would be infinitesimal.

I admit I am more worried by the predictions of psychic Hamilton Farmer, who says he has been informed by Lao-tse, the Chinese philosopher who died nearly 2,500 years ago, that the Big One will come around Sunday and will register 8.5 on the Richter scale. Our last bulletin from Farmer was that he was hoping to communicate with Lao-tse again, so he might get an update.

I’ve been trying to get in touch with Lao-tse myself, but he doesn’t answer my calls. He may be tied up with Farmer. I’ve even tried getting in touch directly with Nostradamus, but he’s out to lunch too, or away from his desk, as they say.

I don’t know why Shirley MacLaine doesn’t get in touch with somebody for us, now that we need her; but I doubt that she would answer my calls either.

I’m not sure how channeling works. Do you go into a trance and try to make contact with a certain dead person, or do you go into a trance and wait for some person to get in touch with you? I don’t know whether the channeler has any control over whom he contacts.

I’m not sure, either, what point there is in contacting Lao-tse and any other great persons who have been long in their graves. The people I want to contact are the seismologists out at Caltech, who have their ears to the ground and who know more about earthquakes than Lao-tse, Nostradamus, Aristotle or anybody else who is dead.

We have always had earthquakes, but we have never until recently understood what causes them. We used to think they came because the gods were angry. Our seismologists have been telling us for years that we are going to get hit by a big one sooner or later--maybe five seconds from now, maybe 50 years from now.

But the Mexico City earthquake and our own little shake of last October have excited the populace more than all their scientific treatises could. Thus, the psychics are jumping on the bandwagon. If it happens, they’ll be rich and famous. If it doesn’t, everyone will forget their predictions.

I myself am counterpredicting.

It’s only fair to tell you, though, that I have recently taken out earthquake insurance on my house.