Chapter 10: "My Final Retirement"

Chapter 10:  "My Final Retirement"
April 1, 2014, huge two-hundred mile per hour cyclone with the vortex-eye passing directly over the heavily populated main island, there!   That day was March 13, 2015.   At this point I continued to just write my EQ Blog and about that time had already done some, "Podcasts," and Video Logs or, "V-Logs," so all those names might just be applied to this big cyclone from 2015!
     After this big earthquake hit, I had one video log on YouTube where I indicate about where Nepal is on the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate!  Yes, in that now great vid I'm holding up an 8 1/2 x 11 sheet and referring to it as the Indian Ocean/Australian Tectonic Plate. Then I point towards the top of that sheet held long-ways, and say, "Up here's Nepal," while pointing at the top of that sheet with my finger!!!
     Aamazing to me was the fact I heard said the Indio/Aust. Tectonic Plate moved SOUTH 10 feet!  This was a very new thing to me hearing that since my theory on the movement of that tectonic plate up to that point, was, "Eccentric Movement Theory"!  After landfall of Cyclone Debbie at Australia I had reasoned that that plate normally rotated in an event such at this. . . resulting in the 6.6 Richters Bam, Iran Earthquake of December 26, 2003 and that being the explanation!  Today I now know and after figuring out what transpired it seems Bam, Iran probably would still be affected with this new straight-line movement theory!!!   The nearest I was able to calculate was most of my original research was pre-internet, pre-computer and largely done with or on microfilm of old newspapers that came on rolls and roll through a viewer/projector.    Reason I'm saying that is because one reel would equal about one month, and so I had been forced to limit most searches in the 90's anyways to two rolls of microfilm and thus most Day #'s never exceeded Day 60.
     Even since adding Day 76, which I now use regularly, I've seen similar shaking on what I now call Day 109 and am forced to watch all the way through Day 109 or Day 110, haven't decided which number to go with just yet, because this new science is so new, you know!  I also know even with a Day 76. . .extending my alert to Day 109 or 110 generally will start to get day #'s sort of mixed up!  
     They will very generously overlap with any number of different alerts and sometimes it can be many, ESPECIALLY during the busiest seasons!  This tends to leave me possibly never knowing which alert some specific tectonic plate movement is then the result of!  Maybe, as happens, too, more than one potential source might be involved if you want to extend one of those alerts from May or June all the way into October or November, which is what a Day 109 will do, but probably IS correct scientifically and surely needed for best accuracy and on rare occasions still a big alert stands alone, too!  Still keep watching around Day 20 and Day 30, though!
     Of course no way could I, or do I ever, put out an alert and say in June that it might not strike till October!  Just that a hurricane in early August might conceivable, then produce an alert that could run until Thanksgiving!  I'll always give as short of number of days first to start out an alert and Day 5, Day 10, and Day 18 have seen big earthquakes along this line, too!  
     I was working on at Soldier Field got rained out the third night and, well, I continued to get a call every so often to work in Chicago Film Production, too, and probably most notably the big grand opening of a new restaurant on the one show I've been known to work on and I just so happened to work that night although just walking back & forth in front of the place, still another day of working with all my great friends there in Chicago Film Production.  Another recent day we filled a courthouse, probably a fire there, and stood in a hallway at the elevators as one of our hero's ran out of the room, grabbed a fire extinguisher, and made his way back through the crowd.  Possibly most memorably about that particular day was when they released us, I happened to be standing near the stairs, and so instead of waiting at the elevators to return to holding and check-out, I ran down the stairs, across the lobby and into holding and was about first in line allowing me to get checked-out and beat, "Rush-Hour," and get back to Wisconsin in great time that day!!!
     Today as I write this, one of the shows just got renewed for three more seasons, although or two since they've called me, making it less often that I scroll through the cast calls, and getting fewer callbacks when I do call-in for a part and don't hear from them. . . results in me spending all together less time searching for parts because they no longer seem to produce work down there for me like it did in the old days 
     These days the cast call page is followed by over a hundred-thousand folks and so it takes just a little bit longer for everybody to get a chance to work!!
     Cyclone Winston having just made landfall on February 20, 2016 at Fiji. . . . . and a big alert we'd been watching for at around Ecuador.
     Ecuador got a 7.8 Richters Earthquake on April 16, 2021 or Day 55 after that landfall of Cyclone Winston at Fiji and  as every new piece still to this day provides me with some new angle or potential angle on how my theory of, "Precision Plate Tectonics," works, I have a card that tells me Typhoon Hagibis and looked it up to find a Major Typhoon at Japan with windspeeds 120 and gusts of 185.  The reason I would have written up a card with this typhoon would have been because, or likely because it would now appear, and was discussed in my EQ Blog on October 13, 2019, that while Typhoon Hagibis was making landfall at or near Tokyo a 5.3 Richters Earthquake struck there!  Before the month of October was out a 6.4, 6.5, and 6.6 also struck around Philippines, too!  Yes, it was a really big windstorm equivalent of a Category-3 Hurricane, and lot of earthquakes did seem to immediately follow!  That's my story and I'm sticking to it!
     Cards on this subject go on to say, and I might have told this story before, here, too, a seismology person once told me if the ground is going to move in the way I describe it, there will not be an exact number of days for earthquakes to follow due to it being a large, or very large mass of rock being moved and it will move of it's own accord and not on any timeline.  In the case of Typhoon Hagibis that timeline was not so far into the future and still today I like to say to watch immediately with most new alerts, and that proved correct with Typhoon Hagibis.
     I could go on forever about all the things I have done along the way towards that end!  You'll recall a good stretch I did as, "Quake Chaser," and I continue to have a blog on the subject that I'll write in on occasion and never really know if and when my next big and exciting, "Quake Chase," Event might happen!
     While my days of really heavy study might now be past at least for the most part. . .it remains something I still do a lot of and all the latest books, writings, documentaries, or etc. always top my list of things to do when they might arise. 
     And so it is up to this minute as I'm writing all about, "Bringing Earthquakes To Life," you know!!!  In addition to this one, and still always lingering in the back of my mind, are some other great, I'll call them manuscripts since none of my other big writings have been published as I write this!  Other works I continue to have some faith in someday include, "My Earthquake Memoirs," and, "Earthquake Prediction Manual," since it was originally at one time my thought that folks simply just want to know how I do it, or how they can perhaps achieve the same results as I have over the years in simple terms!  Those writings now collecting a lot of dust on a shelf somewhere with regards to the more lively volume you're currently reading!!!  I just thought you might like to read something just a little more animated and that has more of a sense of how they do that, then just laying it all out as past volumes have.
     Then there was once a script for possible movie, I suppose about my life that I wrote for possible television movie, "EQ Alert: The Movie"!  In which I grow up and go on to do some Dee-Jaying, acting in movies, Hollywood, and of course the Northridge Earthquake!!!  Finally, I might hope that someday there will be a market for my old, now very old favorite, "Life Story Of The EQ Guy"!  No need to explain the contents of that one, because in addition to the fact that the bulk of it was written all the way back in the very early days of my acting, it was also pretty much even written before I'd known anything about earthquakes and if memory serves me correctly it does not mention earthquakes at all. . . if anyone would want to read such a volume!  In fact it covers so much of my life the original title "My Life Story" at the time I wrote it, I always wondered which of my greatest life endeavors would be the one readers were reading it because of!?  Never would I have guessed back in the year 1991 that it would even have anything at all to do with earthquakes!!!  If you told me back in those days it would have something to do with getting struck by lightning I would have even believed you!!!
     Probably loaded with stories about film production and a lot about all my earliest years of acting school, driving to Chicago, and very first calls to set on a movie or TV series, I can honestly tell you today that is right now safe to say how my life story begins!!!  And right this moment as I'm putting the final touches on Chapter Ten, the latest chapter that there is rather sure to be yet more to come of my work at, "Bringing Earthquakes To Life"!!!!!
QUAKECHASE 2011:
     Continuing on, now, a typhoon was coming up through the South China Sea one day in late September of 2011 when I started to notice it was headed right for the South of Japan. This particular direction of travel always gets my attention because if it is a direct hit at the South of Japan from the direction of the South China Sea it can mean a Major Earthquake might be heading directly for California. Well, that turned out to be exactly what Typhoon Roke did, too.
     I tracked the new earthquake energy from the landfall of Typhoon Roke with my globe and straight-line tool the best I could knowing it looked like it would soon be intersecting the lives of a lot of folks on the West Coast of the U.S., and the line went straight through Southern Oregon right where it shares a border with Northern California.
     I began posting the information immediately as soon as I knew something was headed directly for Northern California like that. There had been several prior to this and some of my best ones, actually included one where the two readers had written me back thanking me which I discussed a while back in this book.
     It wasn’t the first one that had looked so certain as this one did, and wasn’t the first time it had occurred to me to head to the city or region where a Major Earthquake was about to strike. The thought of going on a, “Quake Chase,” had occurred to me on a number of occasions before, and then someone left a comment on one of those EQ Blog entries in which I discussed this prediction. Someone pointed out that the October 2011 Full Moon would fall on October 12. Well, October 12 just so happened to also be Day 21 after the landfall of Typhoon Roke and I was immediately convinced it would surely be the day of this earthquake at Northern California or Southern Oregon around the region of Eureka, California, and Coos Bay, Oregon!
     I was discussing driving out there in a chat room with some of my friends from around my hometown when one of them said it might be easier or cheaper to fly.
     I checked and found it rather cheap to fly from Chicago to San Francisco and so I immediately bought a ticket to fly out there on October 11, the day before the October 2011 Full Moon.
     I told the lady at the El Camino Motel on Mission Street that I wanted an upstairs room incase the earthquake flattened the building I didn’t want to be underneath it. I had originally wanted to rent a car and drive it up to Eureka, but looked at Eureka on Google Earth and it is almost right at sea level and would be a huge problem if too big of a tsunami resulted in the event the earthquake did actually strike and was too huge. I was also not sure how I would explain to the rent-a-car folks that I sustained a lot of damage in an earthquake that I knew was supposed to happen and that was a whole entire thing I didn’t want to get involved in, too! Finally there was also the problem of what to do if the earthquake strikes in San Francisco while I’m up in Eureka and it is so big that I then have difficulty getting back into the city, to the airport, and to return the car, etc. Not being all that familiar with the highways around that city could have made that very difficult in a Major Earthquake.
     That was when I began looking up hotels close to SFO, the name of the San Francisco Airport. I decided I could go everywhere I needed to go on the Bay Area Rapid Transit, or B.A.R.T.
     That was exactly what I did the minute I arrived was take B.A.R.T. from Colma station which was actually closer to my motel than the Daly City Station also nearby, to Millbrae where I caught the Cal-Train to Palo Alto actually closer to where I was going than the actual Menlo Park Station and with a better route for rollerblading/inline skating, too.
     Upon arriving at the Palo Alto Station, I detrained from my Cal-Train, put my rollerblades on, and headed down Middlefield Road to the offices of the United States Geological Survey or USGS. There I found among other things the worlds largest typographical map store where I spent a moment looking around and eventually bought the one that included all the typography around my motel on Mission Street. Then it was on to find any of the offices of the USGS people I had on my prepared list. I went down the directory and compared all the names I had written down to all the names on their directory at the front of the building by the room where they have all the seismographs on display there.
     The only name I recall finding was Jeanne Hardebeck and so I headed down the hall to her office carrying my rollerblades in the handbag that I carried with me along with my Quake Chase Nikes that I carried in my little stringy backpack thing along with that handbag for my Rollerblades when I wasn’t wearing them.
     I hand delivered a printed out copy of the Official Prediction for Eureka, California to Jeanne Hardebeck who just so happened at the time to also be on the California Earthquake Prediction Evaluation Council, she no longer is, and it wasn’t long before I was out the door there putting my Rollerblades back on and heading to my next stop on the San Francisco road towards Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
     So I pull my rollerblades out of my handbag along with my string backpack and put the rollerblades on and throw the shoes in the string bag and my next stop is the 711 across the street from the Palo Alto Cal-Train Station for an ice cold Slurpie! Then upon exiting Cal-Train at Millbrae Station, I take a quick side trip up to see the very beautiful San Andreas Lake and check out the San Andreas Trail which turned out not to be paved so no Rollerblading up there, although it will be a great trail for hiking for me on some later trip up that way. I had actually even seen the region once before during my time in L.A. having driven past it on one of my trips to the San Francisco area.
     Got a beautiful shot of San Francisco Bay from the top of Millbrae Avenue there as I headed back down for the B.A.R.T. Station. With a couple of tall palm trees in the shot you can see the bay with the mountains in the background.
     The next day was the day and night of the October 2011 Full Moon, although since then I have begun narrowing the full and new moons down to the exact moment and adding twenty-four hours before and after them to create what I call the Full or New Moon Window. Back in October of 2011 the full moon was October 12 and that was probably all there was to it. I was up early on the 12th and caught the express B.A.R.T train to Berkeley where I went to visit my old friend Professor Richard Allen, who is presently the Director of the UC Berkeley Seismological Laboratory, and formerly from Seismology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. You might remember when I visited him at the Geology Building in Madison and he told me to file with CEPEC, and NEPEC and also inspired me to track earthquakes all around the world. That was also where I discovered that big giant globe out front of the Geology Museum there and discovered how to use it to track earthquakes much more accurately.
     Professor Allen was very glad to see me again and on this occasion he was very happy to show me the latest in Earthquake Early Warning software right there on his computer monitor. As he was showing it to me right at that moment it suddenly began to beep, buzz, ring, howl and squawk quite noisily right there before my eyes with an earthquake that had just struck around the border with Mexico. It then proceeded to begin counting down the number of seconds before the earthquake energy would be felt in his office and while it counted down the seconds, it also said it wouldn’t be felt there at his office where we were at inside McCone Hall at UC Berkeley. Although I clearly felt the slightest rumbling under my feet at the moment when it counted off to zero, and knew it was probably the earthquake energy from that one that just got done making the warning alarm howl.
     Just then another one struck somewhere else around the Southern California area and it went through its whole routine all over again.
     Our wonderful visit that day ended with the conversation about the L’Aquila Italy Seismologists matter. That was where Giampaolo Giuliani accurately predicted there would be a Major Earthquake at L’Aquila, Italy and had many people evacuated due to the elevated radon readings he had been getting in the area. Somewhere along the way the mayor disagreed with Giuliani and formed a committee of seismologists who determined there was no reason for concern and sent all the people back into their homes. Giuliani was allowed to keep his own family out and when an earthquake struck there a few days later 297 people died and Giuliani and his family survived.
     Not too long afterwards the public conscience demanded the seismologists on that committee be charged with manslaughter and a trial was scheduled. This was where I took a couple of steps towards the door of Professor Allens office due to him being one of the first signatures that I saw on the petition to let the scientists go or whatever. Of course I was exuberant that they were standing trial with everything to GAIN by Earthquake Prediction going on trial over in Italy, but certainly controlled that excitement at this point, you understand. I simply took a few more steps towards the door there and at right about that point told Professor Allen that I didn’t want to take any more of his time and obviously had a lot of other stuff to do around Frisco. Although I might have briefly explained my position to him that I was happy to see the world was finally listening to some facts about earthquake prediction while at the same time very sorry it had to be at the hands of a, “Heavy Handed,” government and how sorry I was for his friends being chastised, some of whom I think the professor mentioned knowing personally although I did not get all those details. It made for a nice discussion with my old friend whom I originally met that day back in Wisconsin around the year 2002 when he was on the TV talking about a much earlier version of that same system.
     That was the point where we shook hands and I then departed the office of my now old friend who I will surely meet up with again someday in the business of earthquakes, and seismology and who himself has been an enormous help to me on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life. 
     My next stop on the Bay Area Rapid Transit was Beautiful Downtown Hayward, California where I again put my Rollerblades on and took a real nice tour through all of their downtown including a lot of what looked to be the Hayward Fault. Then a stop at the Lucky Store for some chicken wings for my lunch and back on the B.A.R.T. to the San Francisco Zoo.
     At the San Francisco Zoo I found the animals only mildly rowdy and not really seeming to be saying too big of an earthquake was just hours away as they should have been. This lead me to think smaller like 5.9 Richters Earthquake although I did not bother sending any such message out to my EQ Twitter from there and ironically if I had it would have been exactly right. Across the street from the zoo was the very beautiful Pacific Ocean where I jumped in and went for a long awaited swim. Next throwing my Rollerblades back on and heading up to San Francisco State University where I would catch the number 220 bus back to Colma B.A.R.T. Station.
     The earthquake I had traveled out there for struck later that night at 8:15pm while I was crossing the street to the, “Seven-11,” for an ice cream cone that night. It gave one violent shake and several big aftershocks as I was crossing the street in the crosswalk and nearly threw me back across from south to north when it hit. The initial shock was a 5.9 that was later downgraded to a 5.3 and is still to this day by far one of the biggest Major Earthquakes to ever hit that area. The epicenter was just offshore from Coos Bay, Oregon just a few miles from Eureka, California as I had stated in the banner headline of the Official Prediction that I hand delivered to CEPEC immediately upon my arrival in San Francisco.
     With the remaining days on my trip I visited Haight-Ashbury, and Golden Gate Park for some Rollerblading and took the boat out to Alcatraz. On Saturday, October 15, 2011 at 2:30 in the afternoon I was on my plane flying out of SFO to the tune of a song by a band called, “Train,” titled Save Me San Francisco. Coincidentally the last time I knew that was how the script for my movie, “EQ Alert: The Movie,” ended, too. Maybe as of the last time I updated it anyways. I’m sure it will be updated again before it gets made. . . maybe not. I was also thinking about including some of the scenes here in this volume, until it occurred to me that including that final scene would give away how that movie ends. It also occurred to me that maybe I should change the name of that movie to Bringing Earthquakes To Life.
     You might think something like overnight becoming the Worlds First Official Quake Chaser would be a really big thing or that there could really be some media coverage to follow what I did. Well, I did get one story about my trip printed and am happy about that although I was a little disappointed that the Guinness Book of World Records doesn’t’t have a category for Earthquake Prediction, nor probably for Quake Chasing, either.
     Just the same being on the front page was easily one of the biggest days of my life and I want to thank all of the people involved in making that become a reality, too.
     The earthquake energy from the landfall of Typhoon Roke crossed California and while they did have a 5.9 the night of the full moon while I was out there, they got two more that appeared to have struck like directly under the city of Berkeley that week in the 4 Magnitude Range. That would not be the end of it, though, since the energy would continue on and cross Oklahoma where they got a 5.6 earthquake a few more days after I got home from San Francisco. Today fracking is getting a lot of the credit for that big earthquake and so I will not go on and discuss it anymore beyond that and just hope the best for my neighbors and friends down in Oklahoma.
     When December rolled around it was the two-hundred year anniversary of the Great New Madrid Earthquake, or series of earthquakes I suppose you could say. December 16, 1811 was actually the date of the first in that series while the other major ones that followed were on January 23, and February 7 of 1812. Somewhere along the way I found those earthquakes were preceded by severe winter conditions on the East Coast. Something I will do more research into at a later date.
     They had a regular stage show in Downtown New Madrid, Missouri at the Dixie Theater featuring an interview with the lady who wrote a complete journal of all the events of that earthquake. So I drove down to New Madrid to see all of it in person and stayed nearby at Marston which just so happened to have been the epicenter of one of those in the series of earthquakes. Also made it out to the portion of Tennessee that is out on the Peninsula there across the Mississippi River from New Madrid to visit the towns of Tiptonville, and Ridgely also two towns that get a lot of earthquakes. I also cruised over and checked out Reelfoot Lake which was a part of the Mississippi River that was very much involved in that series of earthquakes. A stop to visit Hillbilly Junction and I was on my way. I think I took a quick windshield tour of Dyersburg, too, before I left. Still, as of this writing, I want to make another trip down that way because I missed Blytheville, Arkansas, and Poplar Bluff, Missouri, and I’ve heard I should see Vicksburg, Mississippi, too.  Note: been to Poplar Bluff since this original writing.3v
     As long as I seem to be doing a fairly good job of Bringing Earthquakes To Life, I’ll just continue on to a story that actually got started in late 2009, a few years before the anniversary of New Madrid, yet! I know I discussed some of this already in the severe winter conditions story but 2009 got sort of an early start as far as the arrival of Winter was concerned and by December 22 of that year what I like to call severe winter conditions were covering practically the whole country.
     December 22, 2009 was the date I wrote all up and filed, “Official Prediction for a Major Earthquake to Strike California before January 12, 2010.” I was watching something on the television on the early evening of January 9, 2010 when my phone chimed with the latest earthquake information. I was so shocked when I flipped my phone open to see what it was that I can hardly breathe even now as I write it! Couldn’t believe that it said there had just been a 6.5 Richters Earthquake at Eureka, California at 6:37pm Central Time! I did not happen to have the computer on at the time and couldn’t get up out of that chair fast enough to rush over and turn it on.
     There was a lot of stuff already on there including my EQ Twitter being practically overloaded with, “@ Messages,” telling me I had said Eureka would be getting a Major Earthquake.  Twitter has since changed their name to, “X”, just saying.
     On the final day of that Official Prediction that I filed back on December 22, 2009 at around 4pm on the afternoon of January 12, 2010 was the exact moment that the Haiti Earthquake struck. This was all, in my opinion, due to the same identical movement of the North American Tectonic Plate with Eureka, California situated up in the northwest corner and Haiti situated all the way down in the opposite corner to the southeast. Somewhere along the way I was even asked what I thought about aftershocks of the Eureka Earthquake and I said that I considered it the movement of the North American Tectonic Plate and that Haiti was in the opposite corner, down there in those Caribbean Islands.
     I guess I had also been thinking of all the rain they had gotten over the last year or so and in the back of my mind was calculating the factor that a lot of rain plays in possibly loosening some of the fault lines situated out in the Haiti region between the tectonic plates.
     Of course it’s not at all new that I had said the name of a place where a major earthquake struck before it struck there so I don’t really feel the need to go on into any more details there with that. Especially since I have not actually found anywhere that I mention Haiti in any of my EQ Blogs or anything from the hours and days following the Eureka 2010 Earthquake.
     I must have immediately went on to quickly also file “Official Prediction For Another Major Earthquake,” dated January 13, 2010 thinking it was necessary due to the immediate threat of a major aftershock, although I do not think there were any additional major aftershocks in this series.
     When I finally arrived home from Quake Chase 2011, I found that there had been an error in my bank account and immediately called their 800 number. Well, I was able to get my balance fixed by transferring the funds, but was not able to deal with all the charges that accrued throughout that error process.
     You see I deposited a check and in order to use it with my check card it would have needed to go into my checking account which was my first question I asked the lady a couple days later when I went to my local Bank of America branch in McHenry, Ill on Monday. Immediately upon my arrival there I requested a copy of the original deposit slip and while I waited a friendly, “Personal Banker,” entered the lobby to say hello, such as is very common these days, you know. Of course I greeted the dude, but wasted no time explaining what had happened to my account while I was out chasing earthquakes.
     As the teller returned with a copy she printed out of my original deposit slip, the Personal Banker Dude was mentioning that him and his family had just been in one of the recent Illinois Earthquakes. Luckily I noticed right at that instant that I had circled checking on my original deposit slip and asked him which of the Illinois earthquakes that would have been and continued telling him, “By the way that is one method I use to predict or forecast these is by taking the one which struck Ottawa, Illinois and the one that struck. . .,” where I had to stop and think before telling him that the recent one was a year earlier in March of 2010 near Elgin, Illinois.
     We were headed for his office to figure out how many charges needed to be refunded when I told him that both of those cities were on the Fox River and one way that I track earthquake energy is along a river such as the Fox River in this situation. So I went on to tell him the next town along the Fox River was Downtown McHenry, Illinois and that there could be an earthquake there around February 2012. Of course he had to ask if I meant a huge earthquake and I said, “No, probably just another Illinois style earthquake of around 3 or 4 Richters or so.” Although banks being what they are, especially that one, they certainly have all of that on video somewhere.
     Before we were all done there that day he ultimately had to make a call to California to reverse the transfer fees and I was paid back the sum of forty dollars to my account. The story about that earthquake ended when on January 30, 2012 a 2.4 Richters earthquake actually struck McHenry, Illinois just two miles south of that downtown I had told that Personal Banker Dude about back in November of 2011.
     I still see that dude from time to time including the time I had to run him down for a newspaper story one day and get a photograph of that Bank of America branch in McHenry, Illinois where we were definitely there Bringing Earthquakes To Life!
     What looks like it might be my last good earthquake story in this original version of Bringing Earthquakes To Life started with the landfall at Queensland, Australia of Severe Tropical Cyclone Yasi on February 2, 2011. Winds had been reported as high as 340 Kilometers Per Hour prior to that landfall and I knew there would be a whole lot of brand new Major Earthquake energy coming!
     By now you probably know the next thing that I do is check on my globe to see where exactly all this new earthquake energy will be headed. I immediately started to write down the names of all the islands offshore from Queensland that lie out in the Pacific. Kiribati, Tuvalu, and then I noticed New Zealand. Well Christchurch did just have a 7.1 Richters shaker a year earlier on September 4, 2010, so I wrote the name of that town down, too. Those islands actually became a headline in my next EQ Blog entry as well as fit neatly into a “Tweet” or Twitter message on my EQ Twitter Page.  Twitter has since changed their name to “X.”
     Today both of those are now fairly famous due to Christchurch getting a Major Earthquake of 6.3 Richters 20 days later on February 22, 2011.
     There was an enormous amount of damage and a large number of deaths at Christchurch, but for some reason I was not convinced that it was the end of all of the new Major Earthquake energy from the landfall of Cyclone Yasi. For one thing I reasoned that due to the direction the storm was moving at landfall, the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate was actually moving the other direction and actually away from New Zealand. This meant the really big tectonic plate collision would be up around the Himalayan Arc somewhere such as Indonesia and in at least one EQ Blog entry I even mentioned Japan and Taiwan and said tsunami, too.
     “Grand Finale,” were the words I used apologizing for using a term that describes the closing act of a circus. Having said it several times that the Grand Finale was probably yet to come, I was not totally surprised when late one night I was checking the latest earthquakes just before I went to bed and, “JAPAN 9.0 RICHTERS,” was in red letters at the top of the list! I immediately turned on the TV just in time to catch the live footage of the tsunami washing ashore near Sendi.
     There might be other stories since that day as far as earthquake stories are concerned, but they certainly will never have names such as Yasi and Japan 2011 or Christchurch. The only great story I could find from 2012 was a Lau/Sumatra and I do not even recall either of those and the 2012 Sumatra Earthquake looks like it was 8 Magnitude following Lau’s landfall at Australia.
     So, I intend to finish out this volume with mostly my remaining stories about all the movie stuff that has happened in 2012 and 2013 including how I got my Screen Actors Guild card!
     A good place to start might be the day I was cast to work in the latest Ron Howard movie shooting in Chicago under the working title What You Don‘t Know, and is now titled The Dilemma.
     I was cast to work in a bar fight scene where there was a lot of stunt men and they were breaking a lot of bottles and there was a lot of broken glass flying everywhere. It was my job to grab my girl and hustle her out of the way into a corner somewhere away from all of the fighting.
     We did many, many takes of that scene and there was tons of glass flying that day and I ate tons of those pretzels off the bar and drank a lot of soda pop that day, too. You see I had to, I was a customer at the bar for the first several moments of every take and so a drink of my pop and a couple of pretzels was my best acting bit! After a few takes I think they added the part where one of the guys turns and punches the camera right square in the lens and that ends the scene. When Vince Vaughn says he was in a bar fight in that movie you will see that scene, too. Maybe me far off to the right in a wide screen version, but I’ve only ever seen it in the theaters and did not see myself in that particular scene, mostly only the part where the guy punches the camera.
     Chicago Film Production being what it is there was a huge scene yet to shoot for this movie that was still at that time doing all their casting under a “Working Title.” They needed a few hundred people for several days of filming at the United Center in Chicago, and so I called and asked if I could repeat due to having worked in that bar fight scene. Actually I might have made this contact by way of this casting company having recently gone to a Facebook page. They messaged me back that I could work the crowd scene, which I know sometimes you can get away with doing. I was immediately booked to work like three days and was headed off to Chicago for my latest big film production shoot!
     The first scenes we shot were all of the scenes from the ending of that movie which I will not discuss in order to avoid giving away how it ends. I will say about one whole entire day we spent just basically being the crowd that cheers for what the two stars, Kevin James and Vince Vaughn are doing right at the end of the movie which you will have to see because out of courtesy I do not want to tell about.
     At some point we were all ushered up to the second level where our next scene was the one that appeared in all of the previews for this movie. That would be the scene where Kevin James gets up from his seat in the 200 section and announces that they are on the Jumbotron! Then he proceeds to do all of his dancing with me in the row right behind him and it’s only another moment before all of us are up and basically doing the same dance to the Chicago Blackhawks theme song, “Chelsea Dagger.” For quite some time I was seen in that preview including in the theaters and got a nice snapshot off a preview that was showing somewhere on the internet and took it and showed it to all of my friends, too!
     There were even apparently enough scenes with the Chicago Blackhawks Ice Crew, hockey’s version of a spirit squad/cheerleaders on ice skates, that I recognized a couple of them, Paige and Jenna, in the recent Stanley Cup Parade through Downtown Chicago after they won the Stanley Cup in June of 2013. The girls from the Ice Crew were among all the rest of the team riding on the top of those double-decker busses in that big parade, there through Downtown Chicago. I took the Metra Train to Downtown Chicago from the Random Lake Beach Metra Station to see that parade that day and had a great trip and got a lot of great pictures including those of my first glimpse of the Stanley Cup, too!
     The story about that movie that I worked on at the United Center where I also had worked with the girls of the Ice Crew, how it ended was when on the last day of the shoot Jon, who I know I introduced earlier from Atmo Casting, came out and looked around at the crowd and then grabbed me and I was instantly upgraded to my brand new job of a, “Guest Services Person,” and went all through the wardrobe and hair routine all over again. Now it was also Jon who upgraded me a year or so earlier on a job called Pleading Guilty which I will detail in a moment after I’m all through with The Dilemma.
     My time spent working as a Guest Services Person amounted to a long shot of me standing in a portal at the top of the lower section at an entrance to the mezzanine and it was an awesome roll to be playing and while it felt fun being a Guest Services Person, it didn’t go on my resume albeit a nice wardrobe of long sleeve blue dress shirt and bright red vest! I did get to meet Ron Howard at one point, though, and said, “Excuse Me” as I walked past him, there, noticing I’m kind of taller than Opie is today!
     When I arrived at the location for this next movie I pulled in the parking lot and showed the Security Guy that I had my window thing already all nicely made-up. It said, “Matadors,” and probably the name of the casting company. The Security Guy replied to me with how nice the sign was that I had all made up and it proved I did all my studying prior to the days shoot, too, including having looked up all the main actors and what shows they had worked on. He said, “Very nice. . . except this is Pleading Guilty.”
     Long story short the guy I was looking forward to working with that day would not be there, instead I spent all day working with a guy wearing a, “Bones,” jacket. It was the other day I was talking about earlier when Jon upgraded me, this time to a Stand-In and when I got home I looked up the guy with the, “Bones,” jacket. He turned out to be Hart Hansen the producer of this new pilot for a TV series we were working on and currently also the producer for the TV series, “Bones.”
     The scene we were shooting consisted of a lawyer who was talking to somebody at a skate park and we were surrounded by guys who were experts on skateboards who were from Los Angeles. As a Stand-In I took the lawyers position while they set up each and every shot and it was my turn to be surrounded by those experts flying high above my head in every scene that we set up while I worked that day as the B-Team.
     Eventually I would combine those two great upgrades that I received both from Jon, towards getting my S. A. G. card, but the best part of the Pleading Guilty job is yet to come! When it came time to check-out, I found myself standing in line with not only other actors and some guys with skateboards, but there were a few guys standing there with me carrying Rollerblades/inline skates. That was the moment when it occurred to me that Rollerblading or Inline skating, might be fun and I could not wait to get back home to Wisconsin and get me a brand new pair of Rollerblades to try out for myself!
     As of this writing I am now up to about my fourth pair of Rollerblades on top of many, many new sets of wheels and an assortment of different new bearings that I have put on them since that day on the set of Pleading Guilty when I discovered inline skating! The best set of bearings that I have found up to this point being the ABEC-9 Bearings that I am currently running on. The year 2013 is now like my forth summer of inline skating and I even have now officially retired that very first pair that I bought the next day after that shoot, and that accompanied me on my Quake Chase 2011 and now have them set aside to go in the, “EQ Guy Museum” someday.
     Unfortunately Pleading Guilty was never picked up and never went on to be a major TV series that shot in Chicago. One that we worked on more recently DID, though. A pilot called Betrayal was shooting scenes at the Illinois Railway Museum outside of Marengo, Illinois in the Spring of 2013 and I was lucky enough to get called to work there on this great new ABC-TV Series that has since been picked up and I worked on it again yesterday as I write this on July 31, 2013.
     At the Illinois Railway Museum someone was arriving at a station and we pretty much just walked back and forth looking like people who might actually be at a railroad station in real life, you know. Until we were all done shooting exteriors and they asked which of us were never seen by the camera all day, because a lot of them were. I hadn’t been since I was holding inside their Railroad Depot there and just watching for a lot of the day and as a result I was chosen to stick around into the evening and got to work with two of the stars of the show inside of a railroad car in the museums railroad yard.
     As of this writing I have not seen that pilot episode so I do not know if you can see me in it. I can tell you I had a great seat facing the two actors until one of the Assistant Directors decided I should turn around and be seated with my back to the camera instead. It had by then been a fairly long day so I turned around and we shot a lot of scenes with the back of my head facing the camera.
     The Illinois Railway museum is located like halfway between Chicago and Rockford, Illinois and there have been a lot of movies shot there over the years. Probably my all time favorite is League of Their Own. Where the most famous scene shot there was the one where Lori Petty and Gina Davis chase the train, throw their bags onto it, and jump on. One of the volunteers there on the day of the shoot also reminded me of the series of scenes where the train then makes a lot of different stops in different towns where the depot and platform were simply decorated differently for each take to make it look like the train was stopping in a different town!
     Betrayal was a success! The TV series was picked up by the ABC-TV network and as of late July 2013 is now back in Chicago shooting the first episode and probably more. I know because late on Monday Night this week I received an E-Mail to work on the show Tuesday, July 30, 2013 and got up very early, like 3:55am, and drove down to Downtown Chicago where we shot scenes along the streets of downtown all day! Including one particular scene where they directed me to do one of those famous shots where I got to walk in between the star and the camera and got a huge Close-Up! Time will tell if that great Close-Up of me makes the final cut of that episode, but for today you could say it feels just like my best day of Chicago Film Production ever!
     Prior to yesterdays great shoot, my best had been a day when I was cast as a, “Mobster Mourner.” Wearing a very nice all black outfit I was cast to be a mourner at the wake of the father of the main character in the show. In that scene three of us discussed what we should do about the guys who killed him in a rather animated scene with no sound. I carefully watched ever so closely through the end of the series Mob Doctor all the way to the very end of the last episode to see if we were in it and never seen us. No trace of the scene, nor of the wake at all. That show was long ago canceled, too.
     Luckily I worked on yet another great show late last year, and early this year, called Chicago Fire and got a great Close-Up in an episode of that show. I was cast as an, “Orderly,” and wardrobed all up in a scrub suit to work at the Nursing Station where the two paramedics come in with a gurney.
     I was directed to walk past the counter and grab a couple little items such as gauze and exit. When it came time to shoot, it turned out the two paramedics entered from a door right near where I was told to walk and I now had to walk past them to get behind the counter at the nurses station. Well the camera would be right there in my face again and there is today a great Close-Up of me in that episode from season one. Chicago Fire was picked up for a second season and while they did just cast for the next hospital scene, they never called me so it doesn’t look like I’ll be seen on that show playing an, “Orderly,” again anytime soon.
     There was one other big show that I worked on not long ago, too. Kelsey Grammer was playing the Mayor of Chicago in a TV series titled, “BOSS.”  Great day of work and a pleasant part of town just to the north of downtown, although I was nowhere near where Kelsey Grammer got out of his car and walked into whatever building he was heading to that day. I drove my car in a few of the scenes, and actually saw his limo in my rear view mirror a few times, too, but no Kelsey Grammer. Additionally I was reunited with a girl I had been working with since the beginning of my days in Chicago Film Production, Traci Lewis. We had a moment where we quickly established a long friendship and it was great working with her that day.
     Looking at Traci’s resume on IMDB would probably be very similar to my own list of projects right up to the end of the 1990’s. Probably the most famous was my very first big movie job, which was also established at some point one day to have also been her first movie titled Cold Justice. Having started out as a Casting Assistant and a Production Assistant, Traci works these days as a Second Assistant Director, and has been right there working in the Chicago Film Production biz the same as me for all of those years, too! Although I worked a lot in Hollywood and Traci has worked a lot of different places around the country and the world, too.
     In the summer of 2008 there might not have been quite so much film production work happening and so I also did some work in those days as an Event Security person and worked on a lot of shows such as the big Maroon 5, Kid Rock, Lady Antebellum concert up at Lambeau Field in Green Bay back in 2011, as well as an Elton John concert and many other such jobs and my Grand Finale was, “Umphree’s McGee,” at the Riverside Theater in Milwaukee where I worked with that band for 3 whole nights!
     That is all of the latest stuff that The EQ Guy does when he is not tracking earthquakes. My primary work, though, throughout the majority of all of those most recent years has been to track every single major windstorm, and etc. and write it all up in my EQ Blog and on my EQ Twitter, these days called, “X,” with all about when and where the next major earthquake might strike.
     As of the Summer of 2013 the process of writing in my EQ Blog on a daily basis and then posting it at my EQ Twitter/X and EQ Guy Facebook page is a great system that is working well for me. I have thousands of readers, as well as thousands of followers on my EQ Twitter/X and am now officially getting paid for all of my work over all of those years.  That is pretty much the whole entire story of all that I have put into the business of tracking earthquakes all around the world as well as researching them for twenty years, now! It has been quite a lot of hard work and even actually a certain amount of work that had to be done sometimes when I had better things that I wanted to be out doing instead!
     There have been a lot of successes on the road to where I am today and I hope there will be a lot more in the future! There is still a lot more research to be done and there are yet a lot more EQ Blogs to write as I continue on my way to Bringing Earthquakes To Life!!!  This volume once ended here, but now goes on. . .at least this brand-new Chapter 10 does as of June 8, 2022.
     Life goes on. . . And so does The EQ Guys EQ Blog, EQ Twitter/X Page, Facebook, and all that even having to change as social-networking changes, too.
     is that of trying to predict the number of days when one might strike.  It started to seem like my numbers of days were going way, way past their usual Day 20, Day 30 region and even beginning now with Cyclone Pam/Nepal Earthquake, much farther into Day 40, Day 50 and beyond that.  Yes, it was Day 76 and NO other possible source was known to exist!  The nearest I was able to calculate was most of my original research was pre-internet, pre-computer, and largely done using information then available on microfilm of old newspapers on rolls that roll through a viewer or projector.
     Reason I’m saying that is because one reel would equal one month and so I had been forced to limit most searches in the 90’s anyways, to two rolls of microfilm and thus most Day #’s never exceeded Day 60. . . . .now for the purpose of entertaining my new radio audience I basically just told it like it was as it was happening and when something shook somewhere and it just so happened to be on a Day 76, then that was exactly what I told them on “Earthquake Minute.”
     Even since adding Day 76, which I now use regularly, I’ve seen similar shaking on what I now call Day 110 and am forced to watch all the way through Day 109 or Day 110, haven’t decided which number to go with just yet because this new science is so new, you know!  I also know even with a Day 76. . .extending my alert to Day 109 or 110 generally will start to get day #’s sort of mixed up! Noticing them last two paragraphs seemingly duplicate other such discussions from earlier in this volume, I’ll try and fix that someday!
     They will very generously overlap with any number of different, sometimes it can be many alerts, ESPECIALLY during the busiest seasons!  This tends to leave me possibly never knowing which alert some specific tectonic plate movement is then the result of!  Maybe, as happens, too, more than one potential source might be involved if you want to extend one of those alerts from May or June all the way into October or November which is what a Day 109 will do, but probably IS correct scientifically and surely needed for best accuracy and on rare occasions still a big alert that stands alone, too!  Still keep watching around Day 20, and Day 30, though!  
     Of course no way could I or do I ever put out an alert and say in June that it might not strike till October!  Just that a hurricane in early August might conceivably, then produce an alert that could run until Thanksgiving!  I’ll always give the shortest day number for alerts on first mention and generally later to maintain active alerts then give later, and sometimes even later Day #’s as the alert continues.  Long after Hurricanes and Typhoons that struck in early August might otherwise be long forgotten!
     Friday became a conflict with working in the movie business in Chicago and finally one job I was working on at Soldier Field got rained out the third night.  When that movie, “Captive State,” finally came out the following August I was not actually able to identify any scenes that looked like they were from the Friday shoot, anyways!  Plenty from days I did work including most notable the scenes with the, “Mayor,” of Chicago. . . . .without giving away any more of that movie!  And these were mostly all night shoots, too, and the great scene we did where one night I looked up and the Full Moon was high overhead! Had no choice but to take at least one step back from my acting and forced myself to be satisfied.
     About that same period of my life I also decided I might never have to be actor Les Brown again, anymore due to by now having lot of people knowing me as The EQ Guy!  So I wrote to my people at Central Casting in Los Angeles and said if you should ever need The EQ Guy, that’s me!  And on the other hand when they do use me, they might also want to know I have a fairly good following now as The EQ Guy appearing regularly and now having over a million views on my, “EQ Blog”!
     Well, I continued to get a call every so often to work in Film Production, too, and probably most notably they opened a new restaurant on the show and I just so happened to work that night although just walking back and forth in front of the place, still another day of working with all my great friends there in Chicago Film Production.  Another recent day we filled a courthouse, probably a fire, there, and stood in a hallway at the elevators as one of our hero’s ran out of the room, grabbed a fire extinguisher and made his way back through the crowd.     
     Over the years one of my favorite numbers such as when grabbing ice cubes or such has been the number four due to such things as the introduction to one particular, “Beatles,” song where maybe it’s, “Beatle Paul,” who starts it off with, “One, two, three, four,” etc.  Well in closing the discussion about, “Five Prediction Friday,” I must now add that I rarely anymore use four of anything instead now preferring the association with the number five due to having what I consider not that bad of luck with all those experiences today associated with, “Five Prediction Friday”!  Exception being upwards of six or eight ice cubes in my drink if it’s really hot!
     At least you could say that about every time I really know very close to exactly when and where a Major Earthquake might strike, I immediately look into a trip to be there at the exact moment it shakes!  I went on to add a special Twitter and blog especially dedicated to my Quake Chasing at www.twitter.com/quakechaser and www.quakechaser.blogspot.com and there might be one or two other incarnations as well.
     So, as October 2011 came to an exciting end like it did, I was in the process of doing all of the balancing of my checkbook and discovered a bank error that was not in my favor.  While I was able to transfer funds to satisfy the error in the short term, the matter would ultimately need to be discussed with a Personal Banker at a branch I go to in Northern Illinois.
     The reason this story is unfolding in my Earthquake Memoirs is because it is today one of my all time best earthquake stories!  It all started when for whatever reason my check got put into my savings account instead of my checking account so I could use my check card.  All that aside, now, let’s move on to the earthquake aspect of my visit to my bank branch in McHenry, Illinois.
     Of course it was necessary for me to meet and talk to a “Personal Banker” and that was the point where I no more than introduced myself and mentioned Quake Chase 2011 and the Personal Banker guy replied with having been in one of the big Illinois Earthquakes!
     Well, there had been several that fit the description he was talking about so as I began to go through them, I also noted they ran right along the Fox River as I went on to name the biggest ones.  Of course the first and biggest at Ottawa, I told him, occurred right where the Fox River flows into the Illinois River.  The second one was near Elgin just down stream along the Fox River from right where we were standing talking about it.  Finally, I told him McHenry is actually about the next town in line along the Fox River and at that they were even probably due for an earthquake there in the not to distant future, too.
     Thinking about it for a moment I then told him, “Say, around February of 2012” or what would have been early the following year at the time I said this.  Today I like to add that it was like one of those scenes with all of the cameras on you inside the heavily secured bank and probably recorded over and over with probably a hundred security cameras.  As of this writing I have yet to contact this branch or any of these folks as to the whereabouts of that recording, either, because it is about to be made famous if in fact it does exist!
     Date that earthquake did strike one mile south of Downtown McHenry, Illinois is January 30, 2012 and at 2.2 Richters it sure generated an enormous amount of attention from just about everybody, everywhere!  We’ve gone on to talk about the whole ordeal many times at that bank branch and I’ve visited the actual epicenter many times, too!  It is the location of the local Harley-Davidson dealership or was, since they have moved a few doors east since that day.
     I talked to a girl who worked at the gas station right on that corner and she told me she lived in the trailer park across the street from the epicenter and experienced a huge earthquake there that apparently did a lot of damage!  Things swayed on the walls, and fell off shelves, and even some things breaking!  Of course there were other similar accounts reported in media, too, enough that it is safe to say McHenry really shook in that January 2012 Earthquake!
     As of this writing I have yet to call or write Bank of America and ask them, but it would be nice to someday get or see a copy of the vid we made that day discussing the fact that there could be such an earthquake as did happen.  They sure always have every tape from anytime there’s a robbery, but I suppose all the tapes from anytime Les Brown walks in are surely erased right after I walk out of there, so I guess I am doubting they would still have the tape with this now being July 20, 2014.  One of these days I will probably write all of it up and send it like to the President of Bank of America, though, and see if those tapes from the year 2011 are kept that long. Update: Letter to this companys headquarters in North Carolina brought a reply that said such tapes are not available to the general public!  End of story!    
     It was about this same time like in the days that followed Quake Chase 2011 and after the McHenry Earthquake when one day, I’m not sure what it was I wrote about, but I got home and looked on my EQ Blog to find that I had over a thousand views during the day while I was out.  Now I had LONG been watching basically my every view on that blog for about as long as there have been what they call “Hit Counters” and as a rule up to that day they had only ever counted about up to ten, and ten was still quite a lot back in those days, you know!  A thousand was unprecedented the day I noticed it and so I suppose I probably went and looked at all the statistics to see who all viewed it and whereabouts they might have been from because it gives all that by country and what browser or device (s) they are viewing it with.
     How it all ended was when at the end of that day I checked one final time to see how many views I had gotten and that was when I found out it also paid me right around one dollar!  Not sure what the exact amount was for that day, but I do know it was enough that it got my attention for sure!  That’s when you compare a dollar to the zero or one cent, two cent, three cents it usually paid for most days, you know.
     Yes, for all of the many years up to the days surrounding my Quake Chase 2011, I had never really paid much attention at all to those figures, beyond how many views I had.  I can’t even honestly say that I noted days where I might have earned a penny or something like that from days, and weeks, and months for that matter, when I earned ZERO!  I believe there were just a lot of, in the days prior to this, months even with zero earnings.  Which as I’m writing this now I can happily say it’s been longer ago than I can remember that I earned zero for a month.  Generally these days I’m running close to a hundred views on each new days EQ Blog and usually at least a dollar a month, but occasionally I’ll make like twenty-five cents a day or more.
     Unless it changes, the system they use today is if and when you reach a hundred dollars collected in that fund, they mail you a check.  Of course they’ve changed me to direct deposit more recently, but I’ll never forget that one particular day when I looked and it said over nine hundred views. . . And easily hit one thousand before the end of the day.  I suppose that counter and all of those statistics are certainly all saved there somewhere so maybe I will look that date up at some point and find out exactly what day it was and what I wrote about that got all of those views.  Eventually, finally this all came to an end when I never ever received any, “1099’s,” on all that money I was making, and then started to OWE a lot of money on my taxes. . .which eventually has become now, “Back Taxes,” that you could say I still owe, but to this day have never received any 1099 or any other type of income statement to assist me in paying lot of taxes that I know I rightfully owe to the IRS, and state!!!  You could say I’m sort of glad they stopped paying me because it started to only serve to run-up the amount I still owe today on taxes unpaid!!!
     I have also started writing other blogs since those days such as my Earthquake Central where I post a lot of felt reports from earthquakes around California, or larger ones around the world where the felt report looks to be interesting enough.  California ones I’ll post anytime there’s more than one or two reports and if there’s a lot, I’ll usually post it for sure, quite commonly even keeping it up-to-date by going back and re-checking the numbers later in the day or the next day and sometimes for several days after some earthquakes.
     These days I’m now rather entertained by the fact that I quite commonly get far more views for one of those felt reports than I would ever get in the old days for my regular EQ Blog.  When there are those swarms of earthquakes that strike different places I will usually post those entire lists and have to keep them updated, too, and those also run far beyond what my EQ Blog used to make with swarms and felt reports as of this writing commonly getting as high as twenty-five views.  There is no, or does not appear to be anyways, a separate counter for my Earthquake Central where I post those swarms and felt reports.  
     Also have to add here that this whole big number, “Blog Game,” has more or less slowed to a crawl instead of the jackrabbit it once was, specifically because the people in power started blocking lots of accounts at some point and views are currently down to like 5 or 10 today where once was upwards of 350 to 1000!!!  Not just me these days, but it’s come to affect many, many people who were otherwise just your everyday writers are today blocked from in my case about 2000 people who used to enjoy reading all my blogs and watching all my YouTube Videos!  But, I’ve had to adapt and not making money sure helps, but the, “Sticktoitness,” of which I was taught in acting school leads me to continue if nothing else so people throughout eternity will be able to take in all my lifes work!!!
     I’ve also gone on and added an EQ Blog-2 with the dash-two after it, and an EQ Blog-3 with a dash-3 after it, where I’ll post complete writings for whenever I write and post any of my Official Predictions.  I will also post an occasional earthquake type story there when there is a news story that I feel my readers might like to see.
     At some point along the way I also decided that I should post the volume which is currently my very latest Earthquake Book, “Bringing Earthquakes To Life,” on there, too, so it is now at EQ Alert-2 in its entirety and just reached five-hundred views this week and was at like five-hundred something and changing faster than I can type a number into this volume as I’m writing and editing it!  Going on a thousand views on that book as I prepare my other recent volume “Earthquake Memoirs” for possible, “E-Book,” or posting it there, too!  (Never proceeded with that other volume, always thinking of another one I like, “Life Story Of The EQ Guy,” and this one surpassed a thousand the Summer of 2023) I guess that is the one you’re reading right now, too, if you‘re reading this electronically that is, but a published version is always possible, too.
     Some of my very most recent research involves looking into a possible correlation with Full and New Moons and Earthquakes.  Just during the July 2014 Full Moon, I would have never guessed this before, a strong correlation with the full moon and Oklahoma earthquakes occurred.
     I was caught very much off-guard and might not have even ever known there was such a series of earthquakes in Oklahoma that day if it wasn’t for a story just so happening to appear in a local newspaper about Oklahoma getting a lot of earthquakes on one particular day.  The story did not mention at all that it was also the day of the Full Moon.
     When I checked and counted myself I counted thirteen total earthquakes during what I call the July 2014 Full Moon Window, or the Full Moon Window, or the twenty-four hour period before and twenty-four hour period after the exact moment of the July 2014 Full Moon.  Amazingly it was right at that moment when I was looking over this list that I discovered something else, too!  I can’t be sure if I spotted this or found it as a result of coming back later and checking, but one of the many Oklahoma Earthquakes struck at the EXACT moment of the July 2014 Full Moon!!!  Exact moment as listed on all of the lunar, tides, etc. websites and I must assume that to truly mean exact.
     All of those earthquakes struck Oklahoma in the July 2014 Full Moon Window PLUS there was one on the exact moment, too!  Up to that point in time we have been discussing any possible relationship Oklahoma itself might have with the full and new moons as far as seismic activity is concerned and as a general rule have assumed that since they have NO ocean, that additional pull from high and low tides could not affect them.  Well, now you might say we know!  At least it is now looking like we might have a very good correlation there with Oklahoma and full and new moons.
     Initially in my studies on the subject of earthquakes, I did find some mention of full moons, but it was a lot of years later and actually still only somewhat recently, that I started taking those full and new moon dates into consideration when writing and posting EQ Alerts.  Since starting to use first just the full moon like back around 2006 I think, I’ve come across a few that on the surface seemed to lean towards correlation more so than randomly occurring inside of those dates coincidentally.
     It also appears only slightly more commonly that when there is an alert for a place where I really have it narrowed down to a few days and the full moon comes along, then an earthquake strikes there in or close to within the Full Moon Window.  I’ve had to occasionally state that a lot of these are adding like an hour or two and explain that the seismic energy probably does increase making this theory work, however it does not work on an exact schedule making twenty-four hours more my own personal, “Scientific Window,” than an exact clock to expect earthquakes to strike in.
     You could say that the window is more of a tool to hold up and view past earthquakes in so far as either they did and we count them or they didn’t and we don’t count them rather than one will or won’t strike inside a future window, because we do know some can strike hours early, and others can strike hours late.
     Much more recently a person commented on one of my blogs that if the full moon does in fact have a lot of additional effect on earthquakes, then the New Moon MUST also have the same effect.  Well, without too much time spent questioning the difference in pull between full and new moons, I just assumed he was right and thereafter treated New Moons the same way as I had been treating Full Moons.  I suppose that was the point when I began what you might call New Moon EQ Alerts, although it may have only been a lot of talk in the first EQ Blogs to start with.
     In the time since I started using the new moon as well, there have been some fairly great correlations that have come along, there, too!  Virginia City, Nevada is the one that comes to mind.  But at some point along the way since now using both the full and new moons, I’ve come up with something very new and also probably important.  I have found a number of swarms, specifically starting out one day up in Virginia City, Nevada where it went on shaking, and shaking and was found later to have virtually ceased all shaking right AT the exact moment of the January 2014 New Moon!  There has been one other one since Virginia City where the opposite happened and at Mammoth Lakes a swarm STARTED at the exact moment of the June 2014 Full Moon!
     So, as of this writing there are a number of historical correlations with full and new moons such as the Fort Tejon, and San Fernando Earthquakes, and I have made some use out of the correlation on my own watch, too!  One good example would be Susanville, California on May 23, 2013 when a 5.9 Richters Earthquake struck 40 minutes before the “New Moon Window” officially started and I actually add an hour or two to the start of  those alerts now, due to that Susanville one.  Thus, there is no question that the added pull from both the full and new moons certainly has its effect on Precision Plate Tectonics.
     Probably one of the all time best Full Moon Earthquakes which also just so happens to be what I once liked to call a, “January Earthquake,” is the Great Fort Tejon, California Earthquake of January 9, 1857.  Happening on a January 9, just eight days before the date of the Northridge Earthquake of 1994, this estimated 7.8 Richters Earthquake was most likely also preceded by those same severe winter conditions.  
     Recently when I was digging back to an old newspaper to see what was on TV the day of the Northridge Earthquake, I noticed the front page of the paper from January 17, 1994 where of course the banner headline had the Northridge Earthquake since it happened early in the morning and this was an afternoon paper, and directly below it a local story about our severe extreme cold temperatures!  In fact the Northridge Earthquake took place on a Monday, but this story reported on Saturday the local temperature was a high temperature of minus eleven degrees!  It was not getting any warmer on the day of that newspaper article, either, with the low that night predicted to be like minus twenty-six degrees!  (Might need citation for that article)
     What makes the Fort Tejon Earthquake probably the most interesting is the fact that it struck at around 8:20am Pacific Time and the exact moment of the January 1857 Full Moon would have occurred at just past midnight early the very next morning at 1:08am Pacific Time!  That would be about 17 hours and 32 minutes before the full moon when it struck, and WELL within the 24 hours window I use. Note the moon must have been quite full looking, and high in the sky that night albeit FULL the following night after that earthquake!
     It was the August 2014 Full Moon-Super Moon which lead to my next story.  Lots of earthquakes going on all around California and Nevada with one particular one a 4.7 at Napa, California and I knew this probably met something major was about to shake.
     As all of that continued the exact moment of the August 2014 Full Moon was quickly approaching and THAT was when I heard somewhere it was to also be one of those Super Moons!
     Immediately I went into, “Quake Chase,” mode and started looking up airlines and motels.  Well, as often happens, my timing was terrible and with the computer these days you need to have lightning speed as you go through and search all the possible flights that come up when you type in your dates.  Flights are quick to fill when they are down to a couple remaining seats and it starts to come down to how much effort you want to put into this task ultimately affecting the outcome.  The result was that I eventually ended up taking Amtrak and even then managed to somehow lose my coach seat from the first leg of Chicago to Denver only to restore the trip by finding an economy sleeper.
     Awesome Quake Chase this then quickly became with that train taking me practically the entire length of the Colorado River and the full depth and breadth of the Rocky Mountains!!!  Originally planned as a replacement for a direct two hour flight, this became a once-in-a-lifetime excursion through the wild, wild, American West!  Omaha, Denver, Grand Junction, Salt Lake City, Reno, Sacramento, and all of the places in between.  Including miles of the Greatest Railroad scenery anywhere in the world and lots of unforgettable scenery everywhere along the way!
     The Amtrak station for San Francisco-Oakland is located right there in Emeryville and so I named this Quake Chase, “Quake Chase 2014 Oakland,” due to Emeryville and Oakland sharing a boundary in the metropolitan region.
     Again my Quake Chase was at least partly justified by putting on my rollerblades and conquering a lot of any given area and on Quake Chase 2014 it was first to be downtown Oakland.  All downhill from my motel to Jack London Square and then across the ferry to the Embarcadero where I covered as much of San Francisco as was possible on Rollerblades. . .and with the help of a bus or two.  In the process visiting Baker Beach and all of Gateway Park as well as rollerblading the length of Pacific Beach although with no time to spare for a swim there.  Recorded that weeks video log from the North End of Baker Beach and of course went for an August 11, 2014 swim in the waters of the Pacific there under the Golden Gate Bridge at the furthest East End of that wonderful beach, there!.
     Pictures of the Super Moon from my motel and some great catfish from 17th and Telegraph highlighted that Quake Chase.  Even managed to journey directly to UC Berkeley on my Rollerblades and on this occasion meeting the great crew of the Berkeley Seismological Center, missing Professor Richard Allen who was absent attending a recent birth at home with his family.
     The Super Moon came and went and the day came for me to head back to Amtrak Emeryville with a stop at Pixar for a couple great pics since they had been at one time a fairly big film or animation outfit and I was greatly surprised to see their name there on the map along my route.  Then my return trip Eastbound on Amtrak for home, and a second opportunity for still more great photos along that same awesome railroad route.
     Much of which had already been prepared and needed prior to the original air date of July 7 and pre-empted for July 4th programming.  The show went exceptionally well and as I write this on October 9, 2014.  Just so happened to be the very night of the September 2014 Full Moon .  As a result I watched closely for earthquakes on the computer and even announced several of them live during that show which was an astounding success!
     Of course you will want to know that how this book is going to end for now, or this chapter anyways, is that when the August 2014 New Moon came around that followed that August Full Moon-Super Moon in the early morning hours of September 24, 2014 a 6.1 downgraded to 6.0 Richters Earthquake struck at Napa, California!  For what it’s worth, if I had chosen to travel out there for the August NEW Moon instead, my train would have been STOPPED out in the middle of Nevada due to that earthquake causing Amtrak to cancel all trains when the Napa Earthquake struck just three hours before the August New Moon Window began.
     Then, as of August 15, 2025, and now August 15, 2026 I am fully retired!!  With August 15, 2026 I'm now about to turn 66 and slowing greatly in my efforts at "Bringing Earthquakes To Life"!!




*************************Complete On May 2, 2026!!  THANK-YOU!!!!!  EQ Guy