Newsbreaks for Friday

Audio version is here.

This morning, the Bay Area was struck by a small earthquake. Well, I guess somebody didn’t like the way Harry Potter ended.

The earthquake was minor—easy for me to say, right?—but officials for the US Geological Survey stuck up for it: “There are no small earthquakes,” they said. “Only small cities.”

They’re very protective of their quakes, over there at the US Geological Survey. I wouldn’t go so far as to say they ROOT for them, but…

They all cluster around the seismograph chanting, “Go! Go! Go!”

They quake struck at around 4:40 in the morning, and knocked out power to about 1,000 people. Pacific Gas and Electric said that they were investigating the cause of the outage. How’d you like to have that job? “I’m not sure, but I think it was an earthquake.”

The only major damage was reported by an employee at a Safeway in Berkeley. Two large plate-glass windows were broken. “At first I didn’t think ‘earthquake,’” the guy said. “I thought, ‘Awesome—the revolution has started!…My blog actually worked!”