WARNING, MICK FARREN, WARNING!
So there I am, it’s 8.40 and I’m watching back-to-back reruns of Law & Order, scratching my feet and reflecting what a thrill-packed 36 hours it’s been, what with MJ not guilty; Katie Holmes turning out to be a total idiot, 4-year-old Daudi Bamuwamye dying on the Mission: Space ride at Walt Disney World after pulling 2G, and Gov Arnold’s sneaky special election, (and how come the cops figure they have the right to confiscate protester’s banners?) and then – Pow! – the Emergency Broadcast System cuts in with a tsunami warning!

"Say what?" I cry. But the EBS warning is so fucked up, and the audio so garbled, it offers no information except that the warning is timed from 8.30 to 8.45, and it then cuts back to that cheese commercial with the black and white talking bovines before it’s even complete. I look at the cat and we both sit there. I know that a hundred foot wall of water bearing down on one is nothing to fuck with, but I’m at something of a loss. I had been wondering about a possible shake after hearing about the big weekend jolt in Chile. I believe these thing are all highly interconnected, but (like the Spanish Inquisition) no one expects a tsunani. Do I call a cab and drive the pair of us to Mulholland? The cat suggests I switch channels. Channel 9 is running news, but the weather woman with the large breasts seems to know nothing about any imminent inundation.

By 9.05, I’m starting to wonder if I imagined the whole thing, and it isn’t until the 11.00 news that I learn the tsunami warning was indeed issued, as a safety measure after a seven point something off the coast up by the CA/OR stateline. Full marks for the seismic alert, but the EBS really doesn’t fucking work, despite all those irritating tests. Americans have this fetish for being kept safe from everything known to man, but the warning was nothing short of a cluster fuck tailored to create either panic or disbelief, and if the wall of water had materialized through the French windows the cat and I would have been fucked to Bakersfield. Being drowned and turned to flotsam is not what I call homeland security.

CRYPTIQUE – Failure is no success at all.

The secret word is Tectonic