We had a 4.4 earthquake wake us up in LA this morning at 6:25 AM. Here’s what it looks like when it happens on live television:

The video clip:

While we’re at it, let’s never forget Kent Shockneck from the Whittier quake in 1987:

From the 2 golf balls on the moon to the 328 minutes it takes for sunlight to reach Pluto to the estimated 100 billion people to have ever lived on Earth, this Washington Post list will throw your mind into a tailspin.

For those of you who can’t get enough of the Malaysia flight 370 mystery. And for those who aren’t.

Season 3, Episode 2. 1961.

THROWBACK THURSDAY: My favorite song when I was about three. Oscar’s “B Sandwich” from the Sesame Street Alphabet album. All I could find was a bootlegged (heh) version, I’ve minimized things to spare you the lame puppet show. It’s about the jam only.

Season 6, Episode 1. Story by Roald Dahl. Classic Hitchcock in every sense of the term. So much so that you’ll probably see it coming from a mile away. ;D

(via tickld)

My maternal Gran passed away this morning. She was 99.

AMUSING SIDENOTE: I was her oldest grandchild. When I was about ten years old, she made a request to all of us to call her Granny, not Grandma. She thought “Grandma” made her sound too old. 😀

I received tons of emails from Gran over the last 17 years or so. She was pretty hip like that, sporting an AOL address since before there was even such a thing as Google.

Chain emails that seem so vintagely cliche now were a daily thing for me back in the early days. There were a few awesome Granny emails that were lost in an email crash back in the nineties — personal emails that gave me inside info on how she met my grandfather — and it totally bums me out that I no longer have them. But they’ll always be in my head.

I just did a quick search in my dusty old Yahoo inbox and found an email from Gran that dates back to a relatively recent August 2009. Funny to see this now, as 2009 was the year I was writing the anagram-driven Under Angels novel.

I’ll spare you the font choices and colored rubberband background, but it went something like this:

This has got to be one of the cleverest
E-mails I’ve received in awhile.
Someone out there
is deadly at Scrabble.
(Wait till you see the last one)!

DORMITORY:
When you rearrange the letters:
DIRTY ROOM

PRESBYTERIAN:
When you rearrange the letters:
BEST IN PRAYER

ASTRONOMER:
When you rearrange the letters:
MOON STARER

DESPERATION:
When you rearrange the letters:
A ROPE ENDS IT

THE EYES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THEY SEE

GEORGE BUSH:
When you rearrange the letters:
HE BUGS GORE

THE MORSE CODE:
When you rearrange the letters:
HERE COME DOTS

SLOT MACHINES:
When you rearrange the letters:
CASH LOST IN ME

ANIMOSITY:
When you rearrange the letters:
IS NO AMITY

ELECTION RESULTS:
When you rearrange the letters:
LIES – LET’S RECOUNT

SNOOZE ALARMS:
When you rearrange the letters:
ALAS! NO MORE Z ‘S

A DECIMAL POINT:
When you rearrange the letters:
IM A DOT IN PLACE

THE EARTHQUAKES:
When you rearrange the letters:
THAT QUEER SHAKE

ELEVEN PLUS TWO:
When you rearrange the letters:
TWELVE PLUS ONE

AND FOR THE GRAND FINALE:

MOTHER-IN-LAW:
When you rearrange the letters:
WOMAN HITLER

Yep! Someone with waaaaaaaaaaay
too much time on their hands!

Rest in peace at last, dear Gran. Give my love to Grandpa. <3

With Grandpa and Granny on their 70th wedding anniversary, July 25, 2009.

(via Daily Infographic)