Seismic Gifts

Here in Southern California, we love earthquake-scare stories almost as much as we love scary real estate bubble stories. In case anyone has forgotten, aftershocks ensued several months back when UCLA scientist Vladimir Keilis-Borok and colleagues predicted that the Southern California desert would see at least a magnitude 6.4 quake sometime before Sept. 5. That prognostication was clarified to a 50% probability, but still. What with the July publication of David L. Ulin’s “The Myth of Solid Ground: Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Reason and Faith” (Viking), temblors are big these days. We recommend getting into the spirit of the thing with the Los Angeles Public Library’s “San Andreas Fault Tie,” a 100% silk rendering of California and its most famous tectonic fissure, available for $38 downtown in the Central Library store run by the Library Foundation of Los Angeles as well as on the foundation site at www.lfla.org/cgi-bin/store. Shaky nerves are no excuse to let neckwear fall between the cracks.