Maybe it’s the pet owners who run...
Maybe it’s the pet owners who run away: We furnished figures the other day to show that, contrary to one theory, earthquakes are not foreshadowed by an unusually large number of lost-pet ads in the newspapers. In fact, there were fewer such notices the week of Jan. 11-17 in The Times this year than for the same period in 1993.
Harry Atwater of Pasadena isn’t sure that sets the issue to rest. “Perhaps,” he wrote, “the message is that, with a disaster in the offing, the pets were smart enough to stay home.”
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Lights! Camera! Duck!Mary Moss of Torrance scolds us for overlooking this eerie quote in the Footnotes column in the Jan. 17 business section. Referring to the ease of shooting movies here, city film czar Cody Cluff declared: “We close freeways better than anyone else in the world.”
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Pre-shocks: What is it with “Jeopardy,” anyway? We’ve mentioned that the 1994 desk calendar for the TV show has the answer “we all fall down” for the quiz question asked Jan. 17. Another caller points out that the answer for Jan. 15 involves a body of water known as “Trembling Earth” to the Indians. The question: What is the Okefenokee Swamp?
Of course, the early Spanish explorers called the San Gabriel River the Rio de Temblores after feeling an 18th-Century shaker there--in the other valley.
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Finally, an artwork that’s all it’s cracked up to be: L.A. artist Tracey Landworth hopes to create a 16-by-20-foot earthquake mural, made out of the items broken by the quake, which would be installed on an underpass of the Santa Monica Freeway. (Well, what else is the freeway good for anymore?)
“We urge people to take their broken things to the Children’s Museum, which is sponsoring this project,” she said. “Or, if they’re out in the Valley, to hold onto their items until we can find a location out there.”
Wonder if there’s room for Walter Matthau’s swimming pool.
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Quake quips: Like the victims of Hurricane Andrew, many victims of Mr. 6.6 have posted humorous signs to deal with the catastrophe.
Jeri Benson and Linda Mann each spotted a good one-liner on a crumbling home in Northridge (see photo).
Meanwhile, Nick Stein saw this notice posted on a house that had partially slid down a hillside in Pacific Palisades: “For sale. No appointment necessary. Just needs TLC . . . and a bulldozer.”
miscelLAny:
Carleton College in Minnesota offers a class on California, which a press release describes as “our nation’s greatest, biggest, glitziest, most chaotic, dramatic, problem-plagued and schizophrenic state.” No mention of earthquakes, unless by schizophrenic the author meant the state is likely to be divided into several parts.
