Like the man said, "It's okay to eat fish cuz they don't have any feelings." Maybe. They probably felt the 7.0 earthquake 80 miles off the coast of northern California Tuesday night. I'm sure someone in Crescent City had visions of his garage swept away in a tsunami. Picture a man, Snoopy-like, riding a pitched roof out to sea.

Please write and let me know what coverage you've found of this large temblor. Will it be ignored as effectively as the Downing Street memo?

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Garages: if not for them we may not have Apple Computers or Hewlett-Packard, both invented while the family car was apparently parked on the street. At twenty years old, Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak fiddled away in a garage, inventing the Apple. How it is that garages spawn such legends about work and innovation? Is there poetry in technology? In a garage? Perhaps. I surprise myself even to think it. I'm the luddite who still frowns at the telephone.

But without garages and electric guitars (tinkered into existence by Les Paul) we would not have garage bands. Iggy Pop may never have gone on to grind against the broken glass -- or become the soundtrack for a cruise line commercial. Nirvana may never have stumbled into loud and soft. Jack White may never have invented (or re-invented) the new pop. Or kept his ex-wife on board just because she was there at the beginning.

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In Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford, he romanticized the individual's quest for meaningful work:

You have to trust in something -- your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever -- because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference.

He offered the freshly-minted graduates wise reflections; megalomaniacac or not, he's one of the great figures in technological innovation. His fuzzy proclamations of faith might carry some water.

A theme: for him, dropping out of college made all the difference. Of course, those graduates no longer have that option.

Perhaps a listener might pull that IPod out of their ears and flee to the next garage -- before it is swept away in the rising tsunami that nobody heard about.