Not exactly the very beginning of my days at a local community radio station, but it was still very near my start there, one day when I arrived at 6:45pm for my still brand-new Tuesday Night shift in their "Promo Department" there. That was the exact moment when my phone rang with a text message telling me that an 8.2 Richters Earthquake had just struck at Chile! Naturally, just earlier that same day, April 1, 2014, I had just posted an alert for a "Megathruster" on my Twitter Page, although just now checking as I write, it didn't actually say for Chile in that "Tweet"!
So, that was very much how Community Radio started out for me right after applying and having the Volunteer Coordinator hire me for the Promo Department due to the fact that I'd been doing a lot of work in Chicago Film Production and the Promo Department was basically for just when I'd be available, but it would not interfere, or should not interfere with my work in the movie biz!!!
"It's a fair trade," the voice on the radio had been telling me. "Give us all your great info, and we'll give you the studios and professionals you need to make it happen," or something along those lines, there. Never, ever was really too sure all my excellent work in the earthquake biz was a fair trade for using studios at local Community Radio and as I'll go on to explain more, yet, thought of myself much, much higher and better than, "Radio Folks," if you know what I mean!!! Well eventually having given it very, very much thought, and although it took a lot of time for me to agree with that, eventually I decided it IS a fair trade due especially to me not having too many other options at that time the option of taking my earthquake work to the radio did start to seem interesting! So it wasn't too long after my very first, "EQ Radio Show," that I applied there and not long after that I was hired!
Along with other duties I talked to the Volunteer Coordinator about their News Department, and we discussed all those choices on the News Department form. . . . and I decided sports, science, government, and all the other options on the news sheet, weren't for me! And besides, I'd already been hired for their Promo Department and that would get me through, so I never even filled out or returned that News Department portion of that application to this day!
Another task I took on from the beginning, and partly because it's a duty all entry level volunteers should do, was as a phone answerer during pledge drives, there! Couldn't have been too long after I started there on January 7, 2014, that a, "Winter Pledge Drive," would have came along and I helped out there as much as I could answering phones during many different shows!
Somewhere along the way as I was in the lobby answering phones, I began to notice, and become more and more aware, that there were, "Pledge Rappers," also coming and going from the main studio! Much nicer dressed fellows who were generally not your radio Dee Jay types, too! Well it wasn't long before I put two and two together and figured out they were the additional voices being heard on the radio during "Pledge Breaks" and the ones asking for all the money! Yes, similar to more historic (To me anyways) Public Television Pledge Drives! At least one dude even actually IS a Pledge Rapper from our local Public Television Station and there may be more, too, I'm not really sure.
So, as a result of some radio shows getting a LOT of calls, ALL the phones need somebody there in case two or three phones ring. . . . . they will still need someone on the fourth phone and even still those phones WILL RING when we're all already very busy talking on the phones with those first four or so callers!!! I've heard it called a, "Grand Slam," when ALL the phones are busy, there!!! Great way to make money for Community Radio, too, and all the pledges we get amount to around seventy-percent of the stations operating costs, there, too!
I also knew volunteering as a pledge phone answerer would be a great way to meet a lot of people associated with the station and counting the guy who worked on the old, "Radio Free Madison," show from the 60's and 70's did indeed meet lots of people! Thereby eventually getting to know my way around the station, too. Well, the very words, "Pledge Rapping," had always got to me all along the way, too. Took quite some time to realize it was more or less just a compound phrase for guys who rap or talk, specifically during Pledge Drives. That's how they got the name Pledge Rappers and about that same time, or surely not long after. . . I decided I, too, wanted to give Pledge Rapping a try!!!
Although by then I'd been working in the Promo Department several weeks, pledge rapping was talking into the microphone on LIVE Radio and had a little different feel to it! Starting out I was mostly the guy who read off the list of, "Premiums,." Hats, shirts, bandanas, etc. and how much to pledge for the whole list including books, CD's, etc. Other more experienced Pledge Rappers told the story of Community Radio and how it comes to you free, just ask for a pledge every so often and whenever possible I mention earthquakes and plug my, "EQ Blog,"!!! Felt weird for quite a long time seeing the black coaxial cable running out of the mic and coming to the realization mic and microphone cable was going to be my future largely replacing all my work in front of the camera after so many years, too!!! Also took me a little getting used to being around all nothing but people famous for radio voices and being other, "Air Personalities," too! Dare I compare working with Liz Taylor, Ryan Seacrest, Robert Conrad, George Hamilton, and George Clooney with all these new people such as Mad Man Marcus, Fire Worship Girl, Serpentine, and Jaguar! No, not the same, and a little ways from it! Once the adjustment was made from TV & Movie People to Radio Folks and from all the cameras to a microphone, cable, audio counsel, and radio transmitter. . . I guess I just got used to it and continued answering pledge phones, pledge rapping, and Tuesdays in the Promo Department quite some time, there, too!
Knew very early on in the Promo Department that this new job and whole new way of life for me meant I was going to be surrounded by people who knew a lot of the same stuff as me!!! It never stops being fun when a band or song is mentioned. . . . . everybody in the room knows that one! Otherwise you might not think mention of a song by the name, "Gonna Fly Now," would get everybody's attention, but it did turn out to be a great choice for an Instrumental and my idea to use it one day in the Promo Department and much to my surprise everybody in that room not only KNEW the song. . . but agreed it was a very good idea to use for whatever!
Then, just this Friday as I'm writing this chapter, Friday was January 24, 2020, last Friday now, I brought some donuts to munch on, and naturally as usual, enough for everybody, when I asked the guy subbing for the regular, "Who Cooks For You," Dee Jay if he wanted one and I said, "Got BOTH Kinds,"!!! And before I even went on to say the Gas Station Brand ones, and the Name Brand ones. . . HE caught the line from the Blues Brothers Movie!!! The line in the movie is, "Both Kinds, Country AND Western," talking about which type of music a specific tavern in the movie normally plays, there! Even though on that Friday. . . I was using it to describe the kinds of donuts I had brought that day! Such is the Radio Biz! Filled with lots of other people who on occasions already know the punchlines to my jokes! Like DJ Endless did on that Friday!!!
Getting into what they call, "Combo-A," or basically another studio all set up more or less exactly the same way as the main studio done over where we do Promos on Tuesdays, meant a chance for me to reserve the Combo-A Studio and eventually I started me some DJ Practice, there!!!
With a little experience running my very first, "EQ Radio Show,", a few days of Promo Department, some Pledge Rapping, and etc., and I was qualified to use Combo-A on my spare time and spin some vinyl, CD's, do my, "DJ Intros," and etc. and did several of those, too! For a long time afterwards those practice D. J. hours helped me tremendously for long into the future and still today I refer to things I learned in there and recommend such practice to others, too!
For a long time afterwards I had several saved sessions and downloaded onto my I-Pod listening on the Audio Input of the TV out in the garage and in the car until I got really good and that's when the Music Director declared that I was ready for my next gig. . . as a Substitute Dee Jay!!!
Ready for my very first Dee Jay Show since about high school, when my next, "Access Hour," came along I decided to switch from my up to that point usual, "EQ Radio Show," and onto my new thing, "Les Lusters RockShow!!!” I'd spent a lot of time pondering a name for my new radio show such as Classic Hits, A to Z, and different ones such as those and GET NAMES, and then one day in the lobby during a discussion about volume levels switching from a CD to vinyl, etc. I just blurted out maybe Rock Show. . . and calling it "Les Lusters RockShow" and that has been my DJ name there ever since!
After one more final EQ Radio Show, which I don't really think a lot of my new friends really got into, and although I'm sure at least a tiny niche audience listened to, RockShow took over the airwaves there on that and all my future Access Hour Shows, as well as now into my future as a Substitute Dee Jay!!!
Come October 2014, I'd now done about everything there and one day when I volunteered to fill in a vacant Pledge Rap shift. . . there was NO Engineer there to run the board (Audio Console) for that show! So when the Chief Engineer Assistant walked in to sub for the missing engineer, I asked him how to apply for that job, now, after he told me the guy quit for a different job, or due to his own obligations at his place of employment or something such as that. When he said it hadn't been posted, yet, I suggested I'd simply send an E-Mail to that department which is what I did. On the following Friday I wrote them again saying I would simply just show up and when I did the Chief Engineer himself was right in there at 4:30pm and told me to sign the log and showed me where the Promo Carts were and that was that! Been doing that Friday shift now for five years and three months as I write this!
The dude who (Substitute) engineered there that day had been there since the 80's and has also moved on since. . .and was working at nearby, "Progressive Magazine," last I knew.
That right there was about the end of my days rapping and answering phones there and my new duties now consisted of engineering on that Friday shift basically just playing the Democracy Now Show, giving the station identification (I.D.), and playing a couple promos during the show! "The time is 5:00 and Democracy Now will be right back," and the station call letters and community of license every now and then, too. Again I missed mugging for all the cameras and it continued to take getting used to all my magnificent work going out over that coaxial cable from the mic and literally nobody really getting to see me. . . sort of the best part of being a moviestar all those years, you know! NOW. . . it was me starring into the microphone, and that coaxial cable and took lot of getting used to for me!!!
Didn't take long at all to realize one part of this new job was working with the Dee Jays there beginning with the one on the, "Who Cooks For You," show that leads up to my 4:30pm shift, but also the, "Blues Cruise," D.J. who arrives early for his 6pm show. The first was also the guy who announced on my first day that the Chief Engineer's dog had peed on the floor in the lobby and I believe that was probably the moment I knew I was going to like this job. . . I was already getting along really well with all of them, there, you know! Or was that when I got the feeling I could do this for some time into the future. . . or something like that, you know!
I proceeded to do my best to hang-out with Mr. Jaguar there every Friday and started getting into his music and eventually, of course, at some point the subject of earthquakes managed to come up. Well, I must have said something about all my work, although today I have no idea what that could have been, and he said for me to say it into the microphone! He said, "I'll turn the microphone on, and you talk into it!!!” I had no choice right at the moment, but to turn down that excellent chance which I knew from experience would probably get me like a thousand views on my EQ Blog, and since it had started making a few cents here and there, could have been a couple dollars there that day, too, although it has since ended due to YouTube changing around a lot and basically ending subscribers AND removing ads from all my vids! So long story short, January 2020 is currently at one cent as of the 27th and a far cry from up to two-hundred a year I've made in my hey-day of blogging!
So on THAT day, I turned him down! As much as I would have liked to at least say something, instead I told him Yes, I will someday as soon as something big comes along. . . I told him I would have that for him at once! Today I'm not sure what day that could have been, but I recall being very worried that he'd remember, or that anything WOULD ever come along or if he'd remember he had once asked me!
Meanwhile he kept having his usual endings which in every other way were not really all that notable and so I kept coming in, and saying hi, and getting on with my own show at 4:30pm, there.
Maybe he would do a piece about shows going on around town that night and just sign-off or something such as that, but for some unknown reason I always felt something was missing there at the end of the, "Who Cooks For You," Show and I admit to never really knowing what I thought was missing!?
Then one Friday as I was getting all ready to go to work was the day Cyclone Pam was making landfall at Vanuatu! THIS was just the thing I'd been waiting for, too! Huge two-hundred mile per hour cyclone with the vortex-eye passing directly over the heavily populated main island, there!
Well, I could hardly get to work fast enough that day desperately hoping my chance to make good would still be there for me!
Couldn't have waited more than about one minute after I walked into the main control room-studio there that day and proudly announced that I had something for him!!! Although I had to take him back to when he wanted to turn on the mic. . . . . when I told him about the cyclone there was no question he was interested and just asked ME if I wanted to tell it on-the-air.
I suppose mostly because at that point I still was not real comfortable talking into the mic like that, I came up with the idea maybe for now he should just say a cyclone was making landfall at Vanuatu and THAT was how it all started!
That day was March 13, 2015 and the first time I, myself actually went on-the-air and told my story about how that landfall of Cyclone Pam at Vanuatu would NOW mean a very big, bad, and probably very dangerous earthquake would come the following Friday, March 27, 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 the addition now of a possible earthquake report on the radio was not all that much of a challenge. However, I would come to see it as a reason to eliminate podcasts but all the various podcast sites have been deleting them along the way and so it had always been bothering me that there might not be any record of a specific podcast if anyone were ever to want to hear one out of the archives. No archives for my podcasts such as my EQ Blog and so far all my Youtube videos, too, so far up to this point do.
Well I didn't personally start to save my own archives that day and it was quite some time before I did, but currently have all of them going back to early 2015.
The following week or so, and this came after the landfall of Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam, I showed up and when he asked me, I quickly wrote some stuff out by hand on a sheet and called it my, "Earthquake Report," and went in to some detail about how after landfall of Cyclone Pam at Vanuatu there'd probably be a major earthquake such as had followed similar landfalls of Cyclone Debbie at Australia in 2004, and Cyclone Yasi, at Australia in 2010, and I notice from just now having read that script, one or two other examples of landfalls followed by earthquakes, too! That remains today as my very first script and still called it the EQ Guy, "Earthquake Report," although the one I was just now looking at for the purpose of writing this today did actually say, "Earthquake Minute," not being exactly certain at what point that name was changed.
In the future, and at least partly to keep a foothold on my time during this transition between air-shifts, I decided I would use the process we use in the Promo Department and capped following shows at closer to one-minute. This has worked great and contributed at least somewhat to eventually changing the name, "EQ Guys Earthquake Report," to the now popular name that's a little more like a household word, "Earthquake Minute With The EQ Guy"!!!
While still getting used to the mic and the mic cable and the name "Moviestar" fading into my past as I now stared only at a mic cable, I eventually, as I'd been doing for my blogs so long, now had my guesses as to what would happen next with the plate tectonics in that region after landfall of Cyclone Pam, which just having re-read one of those old scripts can say I was calling it, "Super Cyclone Pam," and then just now rechecking a fact off the internet see they're calling it, "Severe Tropical Cyclone Pam," so all those names might just be applied to this big cyclone from 2015!
On my other blogs and video log I had plenty of time to give a big giant list with names of places around the Indio/Australian Tectonic Plate where this now upcoming major earthquake might be striking soon. For my first ever attempt at radio, I mostly thought Indonesia and Japan and that's that, having re-checked now add Indonesia and Philippines. . . usual places on such an alert, you know.
However as I found 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!!!
The day before the Saturday Evening when that earthquake did hit there, I had mentioned on that Fridays show that it was at about the number of days when I might expect something to strike and the 7.8 Nepal Earthquake struck the next day!
Amazing to a lot of my new radio folks who weren't acquainted with the fact that there WAS infact reasonably sure to be such an earthquake as I'd been saying, amazing 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 with the Nepal Earthquake, it seems Bam, Iran probably would still be affected with this new straight-line movement theory!!!
While we were all high-fiving in the studio, next thing I began to do was posting all the new transcripts from these new editions of practically weekly, now "Earthquake Minute" Shows! Although having just now checked as I'm writing this, there does not yet seem to be a copy in my files of the scripts associated with the Nepal Earthquake following Super Cyclone Pam. Such a script probably does exist, though, in typed out and printed out format in a pile of such scripts somewhere. . . .that original file probably never kept just printed out, you understand.
Long time before I ever got comfortable talking into the mic, the show producer/Dee Jay started asking me about my rollerblading, swimming, tubing, hiking, and bike riding time permitting and I guess I owe that little segment for finally making me comfortable talking on the radio, there! This also took a little bit of getting used to, going different places around town for like some swimming or whatever and coming to the realization that lot of people might just know me as The EQ Guy. . . rollerblading around town or whatever!!!
Eventually I started changing my up to then regular "EQ Video Log" to camming my weekly show and since then pretty much every edition of, "Earthquake Minute," has also been posted on my YouTube and embedded into my EQ Blog, too! Occasionally cause for a new edition of my Video Log will come along but even today as I write I'm mostly posting what I call, "Earthquake Minute Video From The Studio," at Community Radio or my local Community Radio Station!
Some of that chatter that always seems to go along with it usually has in the past made those vids, but more recently I've had to switch to a new format in order to compete with all the new, "Sponsored Videos," and such and as a result have gone to post in just vids under 2 minutes, 10 seconds! Don't ask me why, but I'm still at least able to compete somewhat with all the new ads by switching to/doing that! Problem, though, and still taking me just a little getting used to, is the fact that I can hardly afford any space for our traditional patter. . . that once used to be a big part of my video, "Earthquake Minute"!!!
Life goes on. . . and so does The EQ Guy's EQ Blog, EQ Twitter Page, Facebook Page, and all that even having to change as social networking changes, too.
Kind of a rough part of now having taken my earthquakes work to the radio 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. Then there was a day when quite some time after landfall of Cyclone Pam suddenly a lot of shaking took place in that very region and seemingly long after I might normally have discontinued watching all together. 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 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. . . . . 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 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!
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 and wouldn't you just know rescheduled for Friday!!!
Up to that point I'd even had a month to try and get anybody lined up for just such a thing possibly happening! Then, when the reality of not having anybody to fill my Friday shift in for me meant having to quit the great, wonderful movie job and head straight back to Wisconsin to fill that Friday shift myself!
While I was out a couple hundred dollars plus the experience of yet another days pay I managed to make the best of it, and actually as you might figure, had a lot to say when I got back to Madison for my regular Friday shift there among all my Community radio friends, too! Melancholy about being supposed to be at work, at my real job, and at least just a little mixed up about all the howsabouts of nobody offering to fill in for me, no union, and no way out for a guy like me who was NOT always available to work that volunteer shift on Fridays!? Lot of money went down the drain the day I missed a day of Film Production and was actually a no show, albeit a crowd scene with like probably around a hundred of us. 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 notably the scenes with the, "Mayor," of Chicago. . . . . without giving away any more of that movie! And the great scene we did, these were mostly all night shoots, where one night I looked up and the Full Moon was high overhead!
At that point I figured that I had no choice but to take at least one step back from my acting and forced myself to be satisfied that I'm doing radio. Although never gave much thought to what was a priority radio or TV and Motion Pictures?
About that same period of my life I also decided I might never have to be "Actor" Les Brown again, any more due to by now having lot of people knowing me as The EQ Guy! So I wrote to my people at Central Casting in L.A. 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 on radio, and now having over a million views on my, "EQ Blog"!
One day there was a particularly big alert which I had going for California and I just so happened to ask one of our guys there at local Community Radio if he knew any guys at our L.A. and S.F. stations? He shook his head yes, yes, yes and told me he knew several folks out there at ALL those stations and that all I had to do would be E-Mail him a copy and he would simply forward it to them out on the West Coast.
Well, inevitably my equipment needed to be, "Type Accepted," for that job to really work out best for all of us and so he had to know what type of mic I was using, which passed. . . problem was I did not have the right kind of, "Download," format to submit to all those big fancy radio stations in California and etc. and to do THAT required, "MP3 Format"! So he instructed me what I needed to do to be compliant with that aspect of radio in the year 2016 and just a matter of time I was updated and ready to submit in the new MP3 format!
For quite some time after we got everything up to standards and going good, I was ready to submit my little sixty-second editions of my show, although mostly on occasions when such an alert covered our friends there in California. Well, I recall having one or two what you could call near misses there, but most notably did not send a big one out and have a big earthquake hit immediately so as to have the effect I might have been hoping for.
I've gone on to name those projects, "Pacifica Earthquake Minutes," and tagged many with just that for a sign-off/outro, too! "For The Pacifica Radio Network, this has been Earthquake Minute, and I'm The EQ Guy."
Now checking back through those E-Mails it looks like late January early February 2016 that I began submitting to them with one talking about the Superbowl which was played at the new Stadium in Santa Clara that year and perhaps I may have submitted just a little alert for that region, too!
When he ultimately moved to another job, I caught up with him and reaffirmed that I might still submit to them via him, and he simply gave me his new business card with his new E-Mail address there. More recently I've sent them to a lot of my own old friends, too, and then realized a lot of them are actually NOT in Pacifica! So most recently now, like maybe once or twice, sent the very most recent Pacifica Earthquake Minutes out tagged "EQ Alert Radio Network," or if nothing else Network Edition always works for me!
About that time in my life I was getting a lot of people who would hear my voice and say they knew me and recognized me from the radio and more often now would say so, too! Either from a promo I recorded and they heard my voice from one of those, sometimes from a Dee-Jay Show I did and then we figure out which show it was and perhaps what night I was on, and many times they simply yell, "Hey, it's The EQ Guy"!!!
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 I've been concentrating on radio, and it's now been a year 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 before internet when they called me all the time! 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, and besides I'm pretty much working already, in RADIO!!!
One day a band had been playing live, on-the-air from there inside the main control room and I walked in at my usual time. Well, in addition to guitar cases all lined up against the walls and assorted other band equipment, on this occasion the actual band themselves were still there in the studio finishing up their interview part of the show.
So, I scooted to one side of all them guys and in between the guy on the end and the D.J. where I was next to get ready for my show. Naturally the subject of earthquakes came up and it turned out he was originally from Ecuador.
This line of subject all began as the result of a huge Cyclone Winston having just made landfall on February 20, 2016 at Fiji. . . . . and a big alert we'd been watching for at around Ecuador.
On this occasion now in the studio, there, I went on to try to describe about where exactly I thought the epicenter of a big upcoming Major Earthquake might be. Well, today I can tell you the dude I was talking to literally KNEW every town in that region and might even have indicated knowing or having some people there! A much better situation there, then my up to that point target I was giving or predicting I suppose of Quito, or Riobamba, Ecuador, due to those being about the nearest bigger sized towns to where I was watching. Like I always up to that point had done, I have to pick the name of a town and Riobamba was near there, although further research showed the fault line near Riobamba actually ran East and west and this potential earthquake energy was coming from the West, so probably not even going to shake, there!
Ecuador got a 7.8 Richters Earthquake on April 16, 2021 or Day 55 after that landfall of Cyclone Winston at Fiji and although I never did see that one dude ever again since that day, I'm satisfied knowing an actual dude from an actual place where we were watching for an earthquake came to know that we are definitely, "Bringing Earthquakes To Life"!!!
Next great story that also happened in that studio was one time when the D.J. was absent one week and so on this occasion instead of preparing a show which may not air, I spent the extra week preparing some predictions to surprise everybody when he gets back the following week, and TODAY. . . . .that day is now known as, "Five Prediction Friday"!!!!!
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!
The card I'm working off next says for me to "Name those predictions" but if I haven't already I do wish to say I consider 3 out of 5 to be about the result of those 5 predictions. Still saying I felt it necessary to add Seattle just because that city DID show-up along the straight-line left from a big windstorm at the tip of the Baja California Peninsula and couldn't take any chances that they may get something or the result of all that! Today as I write, I want to add a series of earthquakes that shook nearby Vancouver would have probably fulfilled this one!
Might have mentioned this next story elsewhere in the volume, but have a card here that says to discuss submissions to Pacifica. So, I happened to have an alert for California one day and one of my friends who does a lot of work for the Pacifica Radio Network, the network that goes out to a lot of other Community Radio Stations specifically many in California, so he was there in the room and I asked him if he knew any guys with that radio network who we could send to, specifically I was thinking and might have said to him San Francisco and Los Angeles.
Well, he gave me the rundown and he told me to just prepare it and send it to him by way of E-Mail and he would forward it along to some guys he knows that were pretty big with the Pacifica Radio Network (Pacifica). As of this writing it is now going on past the five years mark that I've been submitting these additional pre-recorded "Pacifica Earthquake Minutes" to this dude who continues now to forward them to guys at Pacifica. Gotten just a little more complex over the year 2020 for me with Coronavirus and all and already sending my regular usual show to local Community Radio by way of E-Mail due to the station being closed, and preparing two with that mentioned has left the Pacific Edition just down to ones as needed the most or concerning the folks out in California the most! One day there was a particularly big alert which I had going for California and I just so happened to ask one of our guys there at local Community Radio if he knew any guys at our L.A. and S.F. stations? He shook his head yes, yes, yes and told me he knew several folks out there at ALL those stations and that all I had to do would be E-Mail him a copy and he would simply forward it to them out on the West Coast.
Well, inevitably my equipment needed to be "Type Accepted" for that job to really work out best for all of us and so he had to know what type of mic I was using, which passed. . . problem was I did not have the right kind of "Download" format to submit to all those big fancy radio stations in California and etc. and to do THAT required "MP3 Format"! So he insturcted me what I needed to do to be compliant with that aspect of radio in the year 2016 and just a matter of time I was updated and ready to submit in the new MP3 format!
For quite some time after we got everything up to standards and going good, I was ready to submit my little sixty-second editions of my show, although mostly on occasions when such an alert covered our friends there in California. Well, I recall having one or two what you could call near misses there, but most notably did not send a big one out and have a big earthquake hit immediately so as to have the effect I might have been hoping for.
I've gone on to name those projects, "Pacifica Earthquake Minutes" and tagged many with just that for a sign-off/outro, too! "For The Pacifica Radio Network, this has been Earthquake Minute, and I'm The EQ Guy."
Now checking back through those E-Mails it looks like late January early February 2015 that I began submitting to them with one talking about the Superbowl which was played at the new Stadium in Santa Clara that year and perhaps I may have submitted just a little alert for that region, too!
When he ultimately moved to another job, I caught up with him and reaffirmed that I might still submit to them via him, and he simply gave me his new buisness card with his new E-Mail address there. More recently I've sent them to a lot of my own old friends, too, and then realized a lot of them are actually NOT in Pacifica! So most recently now, like maybe once or twice, sent the very most recent Pacifica Earthquake Minutes out tagged "EQ Alert Radio Network"!
That all changed when the days of "Coronavirus" came along! It was not enough that I'd been doing those occasional recordings and submitting them to the guys at Pacifica, but at some point along the way it must have occurred to somebody at my local Community Radio station, that I should now due to the virus, submit a pre-recorded version to be aired on our usual Friday Afternoon Show! A look back through the archives or my own copies on my EQ Blog, will show I probably only missed about one or two weeks if I even missed any, before I had it figured out how to go about sending a short version via E-Mail to one or both of my, "Producers," there at the station. Then, whomever was there at the station filling in live would simply play my pre-recorded version and with time it worked out well and I suppose quite similar to how my, "Pacifica Earthquake Minute," has been working all along for over five-years now.
Already having a "Type-Approved" mic, and the handy-dandy program I downloaded long time ago to record and edit with. . . I was basically in business, there!!! At first producing my very own WORT-FM, Madison style, "Earthquake Minute,", then adding me some music in a manner similar to how I'd been doing for Pacifica now at or near five years, too! Turned out to be sort of a long tenure of doing such work in the basement of moms house on Lake Koshkonong but as I write this the whole deal is all over with! That is at least with respect to having to record stuff, due to returning to the studio during the Summer of 2021.
Likewise for my up to that point, usual, videos that I've also enjoyed making over the years and then posting on my, "Earthquake YouTube," and EQ Guy Facebook pages now looking at million and a half reads and views there all told when you count my EQ Blog where those vids and/or links to them also appear. Nevermind that the whole system of using one internet service to link to another internet service has undergone a heavy compromise in recent years to say the least!!! Looking at that today, showed going back to about as far as the year 2015 was the time when pretty much every single video posted would be more or less guaranteed to rack up several hundred views and easily upwards of a thousand or more lot of times! Now days I've actually got one video which shall remain nameless here in this volume that still to this day has prominently displayed NO VIEWS! Meaning, I'm sure I don't have to explain it, nobody has ever viewed it.
A card, of which I'm working off to write this segment, says that a possible motive the folks we call, “Moderators,” might have was one time when there was a big Korean Nuke Test and I correctly guessed it would be followed by a possible Hawaii Earthquake and they sure enough did get about a 7.1 on the Richter Scale that did a lot of damage. Suppose today we know those services are calling such postings as that, "Unsubstantiated Science," or something along those lines and you can be sure a Korean Nuke Test preceding a big earthquake is out there, so don't expect much beyond what the world is today calling, "Being Blocked"!!! Consider me blocked on most if not all of my videos and seemingly tons of my EQ Blogs, too, since I continue to this day to have upwards of Two-Thousand followers on that instant message posting service and many if not most of those people had eventually always gotten around to viewing bout every video. No more, and you might as well say no more since I posted that little ditty about North Korea, too!
Over the years, not sure if I've covered this before or not, but I've had plenty of time to ponder what the effects of publishing all my theories such as, "Go Straight,” and, "EQ Alert Theory," let alone my theory on, "Precision Plate Tectonics," would be a good valid method to propagate all that. The nearest I can figure is that it would at best serve the book readers and they would all collectively leave knowing what all my Earthquake Stuff was all about and how a little bit of the Plate Tectonics worked. If you can imagine my own mother, who happens to be reading it right this moment as I'm writing, if SHE is going to now comprehend much Plate Tectonics by reading my book! Jury is out on that one, yet! We'll have to wait and see if after reading, "Bringing Earthquakes To Life,". . . mom is an expert on Plate Tectonics! All kidding aside, I can honestly tell you listeners to my radio show do seem to be keeping up with it all, albeit the fact that we had been taught much of it in science class throughout our school years.
Yes, noticed the other day that I still have an, "EQ Guy MySpace," page where at one time it was the real thing! Many of my today current Facebook followers had originally started out as my about 500 friends on MySpace! Before many followers to speak of on an old server known as, "Greatest Journal," and, "Live Journal," along with a few others. Even before all that was the years when sending my writings out via E-Mail was not only popular, but a way of doing business and seems to have worked really well. . . at least got me through all those early years. Still have one or two, "Exhibits," that are in, "E-Mail Format," too! Although this has probably all been covered back in those early sections of this book, you know! Today I'm basically just transcribing a lot of stuff I had recorded back in July 2021 in the garage in a lawn chair with the tri-pod and camera on me recording and reading off the final cards written up for this book and very much to help, "Bringing Earthquakes To Life," you know!!!
This may not have been covered in those earlier chapters, the fact that today as I am writing this in the year 2021, I no longer get views even when I send via E-Mail to the same usual folks I've been writing to for now many, many years! On occasion I'll send a link to a video or blog that I'd like my old and best readers to check out and it will usually be at a time when not much else was going on so I'll see the numbers right away like if not instantly then for sure by the next day. . . and nothing! Or to be totally honest maybe one. Guaranteeing you all there WAS a time once when posting anything to anywhere would be a sure 5 or 10 and I might have mentioned it earlier in this volume, but there was a time starting out that 10 was the magic number for how many reads I expected for every days new edition. That was later found to possibly include my own cycle numbers for the amount of times I had gone back and did editing. Therefore, and I am saying this a lot these days, I tend to often times feel as though my writings are as much if not more for history than folks reading it today and tomorrow. So, there you have it! All of the EQ Guys writings all pretty much laid out for folks far into the future to figure out what he's been talking about and how all his theories and systems for predicting earthquakes work!!! That's as much my real purpose these days than having the general public following me.
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.
On another note and still along the lines of how far into the future to say to watch, is the fact that on one occasion during an edition of, "Earthquake Minute," I came up with a major earthquake out in the ocean between Indonesia and Philippines where there's a lot of water and can't be sure where this transpired, bout a 6.5 or maybe 6.8 shook out there in that region and right at the moment I had no other event to place it onto except for the fact that it wasn't all that far to the north of where Cyclone Pam had made landfall earlier. So, therefore because it was at that time considered to be about day 76 or so, now I've added Day 76 to the list in the manner I've just described or by accepting the fact that there probably is no actual number and like my seismology friend told me that day, it could go on quite some time! In this case cranked it up to Day 76, but since then, and I give a lot of the credit to our show, Day 100 and currently my stopping point is Day 109 and Day 110. Beyond that point there's generally some other sources of seismic energy and three months is starting to be too long for me to even recall all the events, let alone honestly say they had anything to do with each other if you know what I mean.
I don't know how long it's been since I sent in any material to those, "Literary Agents," that I still have all the addresses and contact information for and those remaining who have not yet, "Rejected," me officially and whom I continue to consider to be good, "Targets," for future submissions. In fact a number of these or I might just say all of them, are now days in my list of E-Mail Contacts and these days I simply write-up some sort of a quick, "E-Mail Submission," and feel that gives agents at least a chance to check out what I've been doing lately and yet another chance to not respond. . . keeping them on my list for as long as is needed into the future! Might have to give that group one more try in the very near future when I put what I'm writing right now today into what will then be my newly updated, "Bringing Earthquakes To Life"!!!
Next thing I'm reciting into the camera that I suppose back in July 2021, I thought should be part of this book has nothing to do with earthquakes but I'll be brief! Somewhere along the way I began collecting parts to build an old, "Model-T," back when yard models started to become popular and today you see such old vehicles in lot of peoples yards so I don't feel as though I really need to explain it. Thought somewhere in what I like to call our, "Back-40," a vacant lot with some woods adjoining our house here in the Lake Koshkonong Neighborhoods would be appropriate for my newest project! So, I started out with a couple of twelve-foot long timbers, some tin, and a couple sheets of old plywood with a lot of black spray paint, and today have erected a fairly nice looking old about a 1919-1921 Model-T in the back-yard of Moms house made in my spare time!
Then one day further back about midway through this vacant lot where I had also long ago put up a, "Back-40," sign a few years ago, a tree fell on it, and even after re-building it, next the wind blew it down! Of course it was old dried up timbers in the first place, so time to put it back up there again as Summer of 2021 rolled around. Among a number of other things I'd also had at least some inkling to also build back there was a big dinosaur with lot of green paint and some logs and plywood, but that was when it hit me!
One of the other things that was, you could say my latest discoveries, was the fact that the history books show that there had once, or supposedly once, been a race of tall men! They seem to have found some evidence that they once existed but were likely killed off and that told me I might be able to assemble one out of the available timbers in the Back-40! Timber Dude is the name I call him by and the finished work now stands 15 feet tall while Paul Bunyan at Bemidji stands 18 feet tall and that was how I also came up with the name "Todd Bunyan" for my much younger and skinnier dude! Perhaps a blue ox may be added there one day, but not sure on that right this moment. What I can tell you is upon doing a pencil sketch and including my existing "Back-40" Sign, I figured his arms needed to be six-feet and legs, seven or eight feet and it was more or less a miracle that I located already fallen timbers exactly matching those dimensions. . . and this project was on it's way!!!
Along with a number of videos I shot back there as I was building it including the one either the day I laid out the original timbers or next day or so and all the way up to completed project give or take the actual video of me having to use a couple of winches to pull him up after I had fully assembled him on saw horses. As summer now turns to autumn he's having no trouble standing and up to this writing has not needed any maintenance as he stands in the back-40 holding my, "Back-40," sign standing there fifteen feet tall and smiling with his big old hat made from a flower pot and size 300 waffle stompers!!! Timber Dude kept me busy much of the Summer of 2021.
So, as it stands there's no real way to know or perhaps ever know, if any of the folks who see Timber Dude back there know the artist is actually also, "The EQ Guy," or not. Also have to add that my sister took one look at Timber Dudes head while it was still in the garage under construction and she immediately said something to the effect of asking if he had, "Rolley Eyes," or a product which is common in arts and crafts stores. . . and of course the answer is yes, and in fact I'd even taken them apart and painted them green if it matters because of the blue lenses in his groovy sun-glasses make it tough to see his eyes but there just the same, you know. Also when last Christmas came there was a box under the tree and in it, from Santa, was a set of license plates for my car from the year 1919! My only thought was Santa’s Elves must have caught wind I wanted just that and today they are out there on the front and back of that car! With the front just having been mounted now in early September 2021.
Last card and we will now be very close to updated although I have to now add a few things that have happened since those cards were written up, for now five year anniversary of those minutes where we talk on-the-air about earthquakes and have come to call, "Earthquake Minute," along with some other anniversaries that pass us along the way as well, such as the day I started there at WORT-FM. September always brings about the anniversary of the very first time I did any radio show there and this year it will be eight-years since my first what I was then calling, "Earthquake Radio Show," on The Access Hour!!! That day was September 30, 2013.
I've actually been enjoying myself such as I'm doing today writing my latest great book, made a new video today, edited a great vocal track today, and spent some time doing editing on a felt report from a 3.6 Richters Earthquake that struck Sherman Oaks yesterday. Coincidentally that earthquake which about immediately followed landfall on Friday of Hurricane Olaf at the far Southern Tip of the Peninsula of Baja California and Sherman Oaks shook on Monday and was probably even directly on or very near my theoretical line of Potential Seismic Energy now illustrated by a pic I took of my Globe/Straight-Line Tool showing said line. That pic went on to be attached to my posting of the, "Official Prediction," I also submitted early this week as well as a big E-Mail I sent to all my, "EQ Folks," or EQ Alert Friends as I like to call them.
Using the globe was probably explained earlier but today as I'm writing remains one of the many things I do throughout a typical day in my now lifetime past time of, "Bringing Earthquakes To Life"!
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.
Now getting much, much closer to the end of my years, it seems unlikely that will ever change! That along with our annual radio station festival, "Block Party," which was Sunday (September 12, 2021) at Warner Park, where I couldn't tell you how many people called me, "The EQ Guy," or I was even introduced on more than one occasion in that manner, too! "I want you to meet The EQ Guy," someone would say to everybody and I have to admit right here and now to feeling a little bit proud to be called by that name and feel almost like I've earned it! Still part of me always wants to say I'm also Dee-Jay Les Luster, from, "Les Lusters Rock Show,". .. .but I suppose if not so much today as maybe someday my job as The EQ Guy could or might just turn out to be more important than my Dee-Jaying!
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 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"!!!!!
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.
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. For the foreseeable future it looks like that is the system I will continue to use and I want to personally thank everybody who follows me or stops by and checks out the very latest in what’s happening with earthquakes all around the world. I am also presently putting together a one-hour radio show, too, and am presently checking into getting some audio clips that I want to use. That show will air September 30, 2013 on my local Back Porch Radio Station WORT-FM 89.9 in Madison, Wisconsin on their, “Access Hour.” I am calling my show, “The EQ Radio Show,” and have thought about using the name of this book, or, “Bringing Earthquakes To The Radio.”
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.
Kind of a rough part of now having taken my earthquakes work to the radio 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. Then there was a day when quite some time after landfall of Cyclone Pam suddenly a lot shaking took place in that very region and seemingly long after I might normally have discontinued watching all together. 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 and wouldn’t you just know rescheduled for Friday!!!
Up to that point I’d even had a month to try and get anybody lined up for just such a thing possibly happening! Then when the reality of not having anybody to fill my Friday shift in for me meant having to quit the great, wonderful movie job and head straight back to Wisconsin to fill that Friday shift myself!
While I was out a couple hundred dollars plus the experience of yet another days pay I managed to make the best of it, and actually as you might figure, had a lot to say when I got back to Madison for my regular Friday shift there among all my Community Radio friends, too! Melancholy about being supposed to be at work, at my real job, and at least just a little mixed up about all the houseabouts of nobody offering to fill in for me, no union, and no way out for a guy like me who was NOT always available to work that volunteer shift on Fridays!? Lot of money went down the drain the day I missed a day of film production and was actually a no show, albeit a crowd scene with like probably around a hundred of us. 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 that I’m doing radio. Although never gave much thought to what was a priority: radio, or TV and Motion Pictures?
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 on radio and now having over a million views on my, “EQ Blog”!
One day there was a particular big alert which I had going for California, and that was when I decided I might ask one of our guys there at local Community Radio if he knew any guys at our Los Angeles, and San Francisco stations? He shook his head yes, yes, yes, and told me he knew several folks out there at ALL those stations and that all I had to do would be send a copy of the latest, “Network Earthquake Minute,” to him via E-Mail and he would simply forward it to them out on the West Coast.
Well, inevitably my equipment needed to be, “Type Accepted,” for that job, but with the right mic, and a download of, “MP3 Player,” I was in business since as he told me ALL their shows files run in “MP3 Format” and I’d been running in, “.wav”, format which I guess is just too large of a file for them to work with effectively.
For quite some time afterwards I’d do just that. . . . .although mostly on occasions when such an alert covered our friends there in California. Well, I recall having one or two what you could call near misses there but most notably did not send a big one out and had a big earthquake hit somewhere in the California Region so I might today be sending to these guys a little more often, and since I added WCBN-FM, Ann Arbor, I’m producing and submitting them on a more regular basis, now, under the more basic name of, “Network EQ Minute.”
I’ve gone on to name these projects “Pacifica Earthquake Minute” and tagged many with just that for a sign-off or outro, too! “For the Pacifica Radio Network, this has been Earthquake Minute, and I’m the EQ Guy.” Now checking back through those E-Mails it looks like late January, Early February of 2015 with one talking about the Superbowl, which was played at the new field in Santa Clara that year and perhaps just a little alert for that region, too! Also note I will probably discuss this later, too.
When he ultimately moved to another job, I caught up with him and reaffirmed that I might still submit to them via him, and he simply gave me his new E-Mail address there. More recently I’ve sent them to a lot of my own old friends, too, and then realized a lot of them are actually NOT in Pacifica! Most recently now, I’ve sent the very most recent Pacifica Earthquake Minutes out tagged, “EQ Alert Radio Network,” no longer as of this writing use the Pacifica Moniker due to expanding and that mid-week version currently either using, “EQ Alert Radio Network,” or I’ll refer to it as, “Network Edition,” since other potential stations who I’ve submitted it to may not be Pacifica Stations.
About that time in my life I was getting lot of people who would hear my voice and say they knew me and recognized me from the radio and more often now would say so! Yes, about every so often now these days I’m no longer all that surprised when someone says to me, “Hey, I know you by your voice! You’re The EQ Guy”!!!
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.
One day a band had been playing live on the air from there inside the main control room and I walked in at my usual time. Well, in addition to guitar cases all lined up against the walls and assorted other band equipment, on this occasion the actual band themselves were still there in the studio finishing up their interview part of the show.
So, I scooted to one side of all the guys and in between the guy on the end and the Dee-Jay, where I was next to get ready for my show. Naturally the subject of earthquakes came up and it turned out the guy on the end right next to me was originally from Ecuador.
This line of discussion all began as the result of huge Cyclone Winston having just made landfall on February 19-20, 2016 at Fiji. . . . .and a big alert we’d been watching for at around Ecuador.
On this occasion, now in the studio, there, I went on to try to describe about where exactly I thought the epicenter of a really big upcoming Major Earthquake might be. Well, today I can tell you the dude I was talking to literally KNEW every town in that region and might even have indicated knowing or having some people there! A much better situation there, then my up to that point target I was giving, or predicting I suppose of Quite, or Riobamba, Ecuador, due to those being about the nearest bigger sized towns to where I was watching. Like I always up to that point had done, I have to pick the name of a town and Riobamba was near there although further research showed the fault line near Riobamba actually ran East and West and this potential earthquake energy was coming from the west so probably not even going to shake, there!
Ecuador got a 7.8 on about Day 55 after that landfall of Cyclone Winston at Fiji, and although I never did see that dude ever again since that day, I’m satisfied knowing an actual dude from an actual place where we were watching for an earthquake came to know that we are definitely, “Bringing Earthquakes To Life!”
The next great story that also happened in that studio was one time when the Dee-Jay was absent one week and so on this occasion instead of preparing a show which back in these early days might not have even hit the airwaves, I spent the extra week preparing some predictions to surprise everybody when he gets back the following week and today. . .that day is now known as “Five Prediction Friday”!!!
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!
Card says name those predictions, but if I haven’t already I do wish to say I considered 3 out of 5 to be about the result of those 5 predictions, although updating I’m currently looking at calling it 5 for 5 and I’ll explain that later. Still saying I felt it necessary to add Seattle just because that city DID show-up along the straight-line left from the landfall of Hurricane Newton at the tip of the Baja California Peninsula and couldn’t take any chances that they may get something as the result of all that! Today as I write, I’m quite sure of the fact that something must have shook, but don’t have it in my notes. Maybe not. . .because it would have had to cross that Tectonic Plate Boundary, there! Although lot of shaking DID just so happen up around the Vancouver Island Region during that time!
Taken from the actual script posted at my blog back in the day, here’s those 5 Predictions from “Five Prediction Friday”: So, without further adieu. . . Let’s get started, shall we!!!? Number ONE!!! Seattle, 6.5 on September 29, 2016. . .TWO: Italy, 7.6 on October FIRST, 2016. . .Number 3: Ecuador/Peru/Iquique, Chile around October 19 at a 7.1, NUMBER 4: North Island of New Zealand, shaky place there, 7.8 Richters on or about September 30, 2016, And. . .FIVE: The Caribbean and The Sandwich Islands!!! 7.1 around October 17, 2016. . .And THERE. . .YOU HAVE IT!!!!! Be Watching!!!
I was originally hired at Community Radio specifically to work in their, “Promo Department,” on Tuesdays and ever since that first night have been running into the team from a Spanish language show that airs there on Tuesdays at 7pm after the news and before the, “Wilson Brothers,” there.
Well on one occasion a lady was leaving the show and leaving Madison, Wisconsin for Santiago, Chile and just so happened to be at the very moment we were watching Santiago, Chile for a BIG Earthquake. So there I sat in the lobby at the station as they were all saying their, “Good-Byes!” I happened to ask if she had been in any of the big earthquakes there and she told me she was actually in Madison attending college when that last big one struck which would have been the year 2010, or 2011.
Well, I reported to her, because you are headed down there right now, right into the middle of a big alert for that very region! At that point she gave me a little look of question on her face and so I filled her in on the fact that it should be a big earthquake and could surely hit about the time she arrives down there!
That big earthquake did strike and the lady was actually not heard from for I believe over a week because I seem to recall talking about it on at least one, “Earthquake Minute,” show. She did eventually get in touch with someone from that, “En Nustro Patio,” show that she was fine and that was the end of it all. Haven’t ever seen or heard from her since and not really any more really major earthquakes there, either.
After having been there a while, and seeing most all of our station apparel showing up on different people, naturally I knew eventually I’d have to invest in a hat or a shirt or a little something so that I could also wear the wear like pretty much everybody else, there seemed to at some point be doing there, too! Well, I’d been sure doing enough, “Pledge Rapping,” and many, many times been the voice of all those, “Premiums,” there and so had many opportunities to pledge a few dollars and wear something around the place proudly!!!
It wasn’t until I happened upon the, “Democracy Now,” website and got a close look at all of THEIR great list of stuff one can get with a little donno, that I found something that really knocked me off my feet and I KNEW right then and there I had to have!!! THAT was the day I first laid eyes on a, “Democracy Now,” Hoodie!!! Now seen in LOT of my pictures! Especially those selfies I’ve been known to take there in the studio when I’m there at work on Fridays! Yes, it’s getting to be a rather now famous image of me where I have lined up the Democracy Now logo just right in the corner of the pic of me probably at the mic there in the studio! Possibly with the turntables, CD Players, Computer Monitors, or Cassette Deck, and Guest Microphones in the background of that shot or of the, “Selfie,” if you will.
Of course my Friday Shift on Democracy Now might have came first, but currently isn’t the only time I’m in the studio at the, “Audio Console,” doing my radio thing! May is also the times when I’ve been selected for a, “Substitute Dee-Jay Shift”! Glorified today by a lot more of these in-studio, “Selfies,” that you could say I’m now famous for! Yes, they go out attached to virtually every E-Mail on the subject and lot of them to guys like Casting Agents, too! No currently what would be considered a regular substitute on a number of shows, there basically anywhere that a rich diet of oldies and some good-old time, “Hard Rock,” can fill the bill, if you know what I mean! With one of my most recent and just about all time favorites as I’m writing this being the moment my phone rang or got an E-Mail, whichever, asking me if I wanted to Dee-Jay on New Years Eve!!!?
Great Show that turned out to be and one of my fav highlights that I especially produced for that show actually became a hit, too! That would be when I located a Karaoke Version of an old song titled, “Those Are People Who Died”! So, I took the list of names of people who died in the year 2020 and read the list over the Karaoke Version and when I read just the plain old list I got about half-way through the second verse of that song and was thinking about adding some stuff but wasn’t sure because my original idea had just been names. Maybe I should just shorten the musical piece and fade it out at the end of the list was my first idea. At one point I’d also entertained the idea of giving a little more detail along with one or two of the guys names! Examples are Roy Horn. . . . .wanted to say, “Of Siegfried & Roy,” but initially thought that could make the piece too long. Well, as it turned out adding those such taglines to ALL the names produced an almost perfect length piece that worked very well, even from the first rough draft. They even liked it so much hearing it on my New Years Eve Show they played it again on the following Friday’s Show!
Sometimes I’ll even run some of my other little features that I like to produce on the side on the shows when I sub such as, “Global Warming Dude,” “Bad Cop Stories,” and yes, from time to time I’ll even include the very latest, “Earthquake Minute,” as part of a show I’m substituting on. Mostly when there is what I feel to be something really important going on in the world of Earthquakes such as a report on a big one that might have just struck, or one that may be about to hit somewhere and one we are watching very closely for, too! Then, there is the constant issue of never really being sure if I should become, “The EQ Guy,” right in the middle of what might otherwise be a fabulous edition of my, “Dee-Jay Les Lusters RockShow”? When I did do it I’ll sometimes, “Hand it over to The EQ Guy,” and maybe have my old buddy, “EQ Guy,” hand it back to me. . . . .sneaky like, you know! Although that handing it over thing has since grown old and don’t really use it any more, geeze, though!
All the while trying to do some of my best radio stuff by trying to sound more like EQ Guy and in perhaps kind of a little different voice, “Dee-Jay Les Luster,” both back and forth at the same time which up to this point hasn’t ever really worked all that great! Or at least hardly enough to make me feel like I got the voice change thing down for when I might really need it someday!
Anytime a windstorm strikes the Western Australia Region is when I’ll usually put out an immediate alert for at least that part of Australia, but sometimes all of Australia and often New Zealand, too! Very often, and any more they can virtually be counted on to then produce a good-sized earthquake! I’m talking about more specifically one right there around the Western Australia Region where big windstorms often make landfall, although they’ll sometimes make landfall over along the far East or Northeast Region, too, more up around Darwin and Queensland.
One day this happened and for whatever reason, I’m going to say because of the proximity to the nearby Australian City of Perth, exactly that happened in the hours before I began preparing for my next show!
This isn’t something I like to do very often either, but actually going out on a limb and attempting to put a name on something like this is just a once every so often affair. . .so this time I did just that! Not really being sure how it would go over with the listening audience I made a reference to this particular earthquake that shook the Western Australia Region and that would have been the very first time I coined the phrase, “Perthquake”!!! Yes, an earthquake that struck close enough to Perth, Australia and I seem to recall this particular one actually shaking Perth and lot of felt reports from there, too!
Today, as you’re reading this, now many times I’ve used it for most any earthquake that strikes especially more towards that Western Australia Region.
If we’re all finished talking about Perthquakes then I’ve got yet another really great story about the inside story of how my, “Earthquake Minute,” Show works or how it ends up working sometimes!
We pretty much always manage to fit my show into the final moments of Dee-Jay Jaguars, “Who Cooks For You Show,” on Friday, but for whatever reason it can at times come down to the final minutes and whatever was going on live band interview, long winded segment, or whatever and your buddy the poor old EQ Guy just comes up short there at the end and we go right to Democracy Now.
Until one day, and it might have been a day when I had something that I maybe felt was just a little more important that I still deep down inside wanted to announce or somehow squeeze onto the air there was happening. I had often entertained and might have even at one point just doing Earthquake Minute somewhere inside my 59 minute window along with my regular Democracy Now shift.
Then one day my Great Friend Dave Watts just so happened to show up in the studio a little early and maybe this was on one of those days when I was both not on-the-air on Jaguars show, AND might have thought it was something a little important that day! All those things finally combined one day I asked Dave if I could do an Earthquake Minute on HIS Show? That because we probably didn’t have time or for whatever reason and we’ll probably never know because I have no idea when this first time on his show happened and I’ve now done a few, there!
Of course he was glad to help out and it went well, too! Dave Watts likes to do his usual start out his show right at 6pm, plays one song and throws it right to me, at the end when I do my now Grand Earthquake Minute Outro, “That’s Earthquake Minute,” he goes straight into music!
Always there on my left as I’m doing my Earthquake Minute on Dave Watts show, “The Blues Cruise,” is a man we know as, “The Professor,” like he’s an actual professor of Blues Music, and he brings some CD’s and tells us a little about some of the greatest blues artists and has a new one each week. Bill also extended a note of sympathy to me upon the death of Doris Day. . .because he knows my name is Les Brown, you understand!
Coincidentally, as I’m writing this the evening of Friday, July 2, 2021 was the very first night they did The Blues Cruise live back in the studio there at WORT-FM in Madison after over a one year hiatus! The two have also now, starting on February 22, 2022, done an occasional, “Sports Minute,” with the extra seconds after I run Democracy Now and before I introduce, “Labor Radio”! With Dee-Jay Jaguar now doing his show live at 2pm, now Dave and Bill back together at 6, that only leaves Me and hope I’ll be back in the studio with my 3 great friends very soon! Update: I returned the following week or so, there, and it’s all good, now!!!
Also, on the subject of earthquakes and guys there at the station, I happened to ask one particular person if he had ever been in any earthquakes and that leads us up to my next great story! Not knowing a whole lot about each and every single person there at the station, it turned out I never really know anything about this dude! I say that because when I asked him about earthquakes that day his answer was, yes, he’d actually been in a couple good-sized ones, too!
The biggest one I recall him talking about was a big one that struck while he was in Lima, Peru during a “Spring Break” or off on Summer Vacation in the late 1980’s. Quite a story, lot of shaking and I later located the facts, too, such as the magnitude and probable date.
That wasn’t the end of it, though, since this dude was also in a big earthquake up in Seattle! Said he was actually living in Seattle at the time and gave a very descriptive recollection of how the ground actually ROLLED! Much the same as in a lot of other descriptions of big earthquakes made by the people who have been in those other ones, too.
Jumping back to the story about putting my Earthquake Minute show on at around 4:30 then was one particular substitute Dee-Jay Guy who had yet another very different idea on how we might do it! Just going about his usual D.J. thing that day when I came along and when the subject of how to fit me in towards the end he must have gave it a moment of thought, then came up with the idea to just turn the whole thing over to me at like :29 after! That way the board, the studio, and basically the whole show was mine beyond that point anyways. That was the day, “Dee-Jay Endless,” just got entirely out of my way, so to speak, and I basically just took over at around 4:29pm, gave the I.D., my introduction, did my Earthquake Minute and proceded to introduce Democracy Now when I was all through, there! Tony was also probably out the door by then, too! Same as most guys who get done and it’s my turn, I find myself saying my Good-Byes at the same time as I’m about to go on-the-air and I suppose it’s part of the trick of doing radio is to get that hand-over just right, too, and Tonys idea worked great!
My notes say the date was January 24, 2020 and that would have also been the particular day when I just so happened to bring two kinds of mini-donuts there to work for myself and the guys like I’d been known to do on occasion.
Upon one of the guys entering the studio, there, on that day my open was, “Have a donut, whomever, got BOTH kinds!” Of course what I meant was store brand and brand name and that gives the guys a choice. WITH Dee-Jay Endless right there behind me, I immediately heard him bust out just a LAUGHING!!! Yes, I tell that one a lot and have probably told it many, many times over the years, too! It’s a line I took straight from the movie, “The Blues Brothers”! Used it in the saloon which in the movie was called, “Bobs Country Bunker,” and the lady bartender who was referring to the music says they got, “BOTH kinds, Country. . . AND Western”! When I used it to describe the days menu of donuts, Tony caught on instantly and his laughter will just live on in my heart forever!!!
That movie just played last Summer and turned out to be the hit of what we today call the, “Coronavirus Summer,” the Summer of 2020. The place was the McHenry, Illinois outdoor drive-in theater and the band, “Blooze Brothers,” played till dark, and I heard they were also playing over that movie theater sound system, too.
At dark the band wrapped it up and then the, “Blues Brothers Movie,” showed up on the big screen there at the outdoor!!! Hit of the whole summer, too, especially since the band reported not playing lot of shows Summer of 2020!
At this point I think I’ve more than established the fact that I’ve gone into the business of Quake Chasing. 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.
All of this next lead to preparations for my 2014 EQ Radio Show, 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, I’m also working on my next EQ Radio Show planned for April 6, 2015 or my 2015 EQ Radio Show. Coincidentally that date my 2014 show was moved to or September 8, 2014, just so happened to be the very night of the September 2014 Full Moon the exact moment of which was like thirty-eight minutes after my show ended. 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.
*************************Complete On October 11, 2023!! THANK-YOU!!!!! EQ Guy
