Something really odd just happened. So I made a screen capture of it. Look:
What you've got on the left is a live track on the Facebook page for the USS Iowa, 881 feet long, displacing 41,000 tons, being towed majestically to Los Angeles to become a military museum no one visits. What you have on the right is a Google map, linked from the U.S Geological Survey, of an earthquake (4.0 on the Richter scale) that just happened. Here on Pt. Dume our walls creaked, and our daughters blamed each other.
The earthquake happened under the USS Iowa. How cool is that?
But then, I'm a primitive, and we've always overreacted to omens and strangers in boats.
When Perry's black ships full of strangers neared Tokyo, the Prince of Mito warned Lord Abe that things would go "from bad to worse"...
At first they will give us philosophical instruments, machinery and other curiosities, will take the ignorant people in, and trade being their chief object, will manage bit by bit to impoverish the country; after which they will treat us just as they like; perhaps behave with the greatest rudeness and insult us... If we don't drive them away now, we shall never have another opportunity. If now we resort to a willfully dilatory method of procedure, we shall gnaw our navels afterward when it will be of no use.
Little did he know.
