Tuesday, January 6, 2015

Whole Lotta Shakin'

Oh, Drunkards, if ever a post needed a musical backdrop, it's this one. So crank up your speakers and press "play" before you read on.

It was Earthquake Day in my corner of North Texas today.

Honestly, this meme never, ever stops being funny to me.
But big deal. The Dallas area has had something like 20 minor earthquakes in the last year or so. Yeah, earthquakes in Dallas are a thing. More on that in a minute.

But today was different. First, there were as many as four shakey-shakes today in the space of a few hours, ranging from 2.9 to 3.6 in magnitude.

Second, and far more important: I felt one of them.

It's 2015, gotta start weaving in those Back to the
Future II 
references whenever possible.
For the first time ever, I experienced an earthquake. It was small. It was brief. It felt sort of like driving over a particularly bumpy patch of of road, except I was sitting at my desk at work. Californians may feel free to laugh at the amazement we all felt when the ground shook a tiny bit for less than two seconds.

Still, the point is: Holy shit I was in an earthquake I actually felt the fucking Earth tremble beneath my feet as if maybe it was about to stop spinning in its orbit and just collapse into a pile of space-rubble.

So much for the Cowboys making the playoffs.
Earthquakes are weird, guys. Even itty-bitty ones. I feel confident in saying that I would lose several years' worth of lunch if I were ever in a major seismic event. The very idea of my planet rising up to damage or destroy my home is absolutely terrifying. The ground should not be able to do that.

Yet it can, and it does. And we all know how and why earthquakes happen. You know, uh, tectonic plates and physics and stuff. Yeah. Basic science.

As I understand it, the Earth is a series of tubes.
The thing is, until recently, earthquakes were exceedingly rare in Texas. Way rarer than the Cowboys fielding an effective defense, or a Democrat being elected to statewide office. Un-freaking-common, is what I'm saying.

There's a popular theory that says fracking - the process of injecting pressurized water and chemicals into subterranean rock to release natural gas deposits - has caused the ground beneath us to become unstable. Hence, the sudden recent onslaught of temblors. This is a pretty obvious conclusion, since the oil and gas industry is EVIL, EVIL, EVIL.

By the way, my car (Benedict Cumberhatch) runs on unicorn farts
and the dreams of fangirls everywhere.

I think the anti-frackers are on the right track, but I don't think they go far enough to explain just how fracking and Texas earthquakes are related. Fortunately, I have a theory that ties up all the loose ends.

Because of course I do.

Here's the thing. Everyone knows that once something is interred in the Earth, that ground becomes sacred. You don't mess with graves, man. We've all seen Poltergeist; we know what happens when you mess with an Indian burial ground.

Pretty soon you're desperately seeking a tiny badass woman to come and
cleanse your house of evil clowns.
You know what's buried beneath most of North Texas?

Goddamn dinosaurs, that's what.

Just another day in prehistoric Fort Worth.
Why are we having all these earthquakes in North Texas? Because we've pissed off the dinosaurs by dicking around with their graves, and they're stirring from their eternal slumber.

They've been dead a long time, so it's taking them a while to get good and riled up. That's why our earthquakes have been in the lower range of the Richter scale.

But how long do you think that's going to last, people?

Also, they know there's a new Jurassic Park movie coming out,
and dinosaurs are masters of public relations.
So people in California are always going to live with the threat of The Big One, because they decided to live on the ass-end of North America that's hanging on to the continent by one tiny, ever-eroding faultline. Enjoy those beaches before the West Coast relocates to Utah.

But here in Texas, we've brought our problems on ourselves. We've incurred the wrath of thousands, perhaps millions of ghostasauruses. Two dollar a gallon gas is great until you're bitten in half by a spectral T-Rex. And that day is coming, people.

Today was just a foretaste. The real apocalypse is coming.

As foretold in the Chronicles of Barney.
Y'all better be noivus.


  1. Holy mother of gawd you're right!!!

  2. That makes far more sense than any other explanation I've heard for the previously un-heard of earthquakes in Texas.

  3. Seismosaurus, I'll bet. Buried seismosauruses causing seismological seismotudes.

    Which reminds me, we haven't had an earthquake in maybe six months. WTF?

  4. You were the first person I thought of when I heard about the Texas earthquake. That's weird because I'm closer to Reelfoot Lake, which was created by an earthquake so huge it killed one person...a woman who panicked and ran until she died. In Greece they call that a marathon. In the South, as you know, we call that "bless her heart...that exploded."
    I've been to Reelfoot Lake where they have an exhibit, a little room that shakes so you can experience what an earthquake is like. I think it's like putting someone on a playground slide and telling them "Now you know what a roller coaster is like."
    Tennessee doesn't have either fracking or dinosaur ghosts. I would offer to take the fracking, but from what I've heard about it I don't want it here. We do, however, have the Bell Witch, who can kick the ass of any dinosaur ghost. Please send 'em here so you can get rid of your earthquakes.

  5. DAMMIT, TEXAS!!! Stop stirring up dinosaur ghosts. You're ruining it for all of us.

