A temblor Sunday; Herbie goes to Montreal

At 8.45am Pacific time today, I experienced the first real earthquake in Southern California. My hand was placed on the mattress and as the ground and cot trembled vigorously for a few extended seconds, the minor spasmodic stab of pain that began many miles away near Palm Springs completed its instantaneous journey through my palm and finally into the closely guarded recesses of fascination in my mind. The two-threefuls of local network stations lost no time in seeking out a Sunday-working "Caltech seismologist" who this time happened to be Kate Hutton. Maintaining an unspoken vow not to stir out the whole of today, I hazard a vision of large vans full of gadgets and little transponders with their moon roof opening up to reveal an ever-elongating ladder holding out a receiver that crouches out from the trees to speak its language to Channel 4 and Channel 7 via the séance of satellites. The quake is recorded at 5.6 -- our solicitous newscasters inform us in the 'Anza Earthquake' backdrop and plead with us to keep tuned in, in spite of the Spurs' Game 2 in San Antonio against the Pistons.

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Herbie goes to Montreal

After a long hiatus from Formula One, I finally got to watch the Canadian Grand Prix in Montreal, and what a sensational return it was. The race started with Button and Schumacher on front row, Ralph Sheheen and Derek Daly providing the background vocals. Mr Sheheen was the American F1-to-NASCAR interpreter to Mr Daly's Irish pseudo-technical commentary: What are soft-compound and hard-compound tyres for those of us who are not familiar with Formula One? A safety-car is the equivalent of the Indy pace car. Half of me wanted to sympathise with the combination for the sake of increased coverage of Formula One and half of me just wanted to shout out obscenities at how cloddy the two of them were. And then there was the minor matter of differences in what passes as utterable speech in Ireland and the United States. I think it was when Fisichella had to retire when Derek Daly attempted to say to all of us watching him on CBS that Fisichella got screwed but alas, he only got to the 'got' before the rest of his sentence was sanitised and flushed out. Strangely though, when Montoya was black-flagged and Mr Daly tried a repeat performance "Montoya got screwed", the censors gave him a drive-through which he capitalised on by saying "and the reason he got screwed is...". But now, back to the race. This year has been widely spoken of as the beginning of the end of the dominance. Ferrari has had an unspectacular car for the year and Michael Schumacher has not been overly phenomenal. Happily for me though, today was a brief return to form as Schumacher, blessed by the light fuel load to get to the front row, retirements from Button, Fisichella and Alonso and the usual act of indiscretion from Montoya, came back from fifth to second and furiously bore down on Raikkonen until the last word was said. He got to approximately 1.3 seconds behind him but then ran out of laps. One hopes that even though the odds of his going lossless for the rest of the year are close to insgnificant, there shall be some fight within him to retire in style.

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That earthquake lady ...

Los Angeles Times on the earthquake

New York Times on the quake

Raikkonen closes in on Alonso

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