"It is a slow craft in a fast world, learned through years of hands-on apprenticeships.... Each piece, including utilitarian bowls, art objects and more, requires over 100 steps..."

"... and a retinue of specialists — from shapers of the wooden bases to artisans who apply layers of lacquer to produce a veneer thick enough for artists like Yamagishi to carve or incise.... The speed of contemporary culture is also light years removed from the patience and precision required to produce lacquerware, originally intended to store paper, inks and brushes for calligraphy and for writing poems and haiku, said Hiro Minato, the owner of Design Work Studio in Nara. 'In lacquer and other hand crafts, you have to feel each moment'...."

From "After an Earthquake, Preserving a Slow Craft in a Fast World/In Wajima, Japan, where hundreds of homes and studios were destroyed, master-class artisans are struggling to keep lacquer alive and nurture the next generation of creators" (NYT)(gift link, so you can read more and see many good photographs of the laquerware and of the earthquake destruction).

"May God watch over our Afghan people. War, earthquakes, poverty — every hardship is a test from God."

Said a man named Said Meer, one of many Afghans who are returning to Afghanistan after being expelled from Pakistan, quoted in "Earthquake in Afghanistan Leaves More Than 800 Dead/The quake, near the border with Pakistan, injured more than 2,500 people in mountainous areas that rescue workers took hours to reach" (NYT).

We're told it was a 6.0-magnitude earthquake.

"The first waves began hitting the U.S. West Coast after an 8.8-magnitude quake off Russia’s coast put a swath of Pacific nations on alert."

Live updates from the NYT. Gift link, here.

ADDED: "The Kamchatka Peninsula is so known in Russia for its wilderness and lack of communication links that it has become a byword for 'remote.'... Unlike Turkey and Syria, countries that have been devastated by earthquakes in recent years, Kamchatka is sparsely populated — and the Soviet-era housing there typically has only one or two stories.... Moving around Kamchatka is difficult: The peninsula has just a few hundred miles of paved roads, mostly around major towns, and there are no roads to cross the swampland separating it from the mainland. Kamchatka has become a popular destination for tourism in recent years, with travel companies offering camping, helicopter rides and off-road tours for the visitors to see the volcanoes or admire the pristine forests and rivers.... A tour guide in the Kuril Islands, Yelena Kotenko, posted a video of tourists running out screaming from a two-story building as tiles rained down from its roof. The tourists went up the side of a volcano while a tsunami was rising on the coast, she said."

"An Earthquake Rocks Myanmar and Thailand/The 7.7-magnitude quake caused widespread damage in a country already in chaos because of civil war."

The New York Times reports, with many photographs and videos. Free-access link.

Earthquake in NYC.

Did you feel it?

"We felt three intense shocks from the earthquake in our building. People ran out into the street in a total panic."

"Some families are sleeping outdoors because they’re afraid to go back inside. It felt like a train rolling through our houses."

From "Morocco earthquake kills more than 1,000, officials say" (WaPo).

"Bashar al-Assad is laughing. Four days after an earthquake devastated northwest Syria, President Assad and his wife Asma visited sites of destruction..."

"... and survivors in regime-held Aleppo. This was Assad’s first public appearance after the natural disaster struck. He was not solemn. He was literally laughing."

From "Basking in adulation, how Assad is exploiting the earthquake/The disaster has let the Syrian dictator erase evidence of the regime’s heinous crimes, while brazenly demanding funds for reconstruction" (London Times).

"Just six miles away, across the border in Turkey, thousands of tons of relief poured in; support teams from as far away as Taiwan..."

"... answered the Turkish government’s call for help. But Syria, divided against itself and isolated from much of the world, was left to pick up the pieces alone, as it has again and again over more than a decade of war and dislocation. In the shattered town of Jinderis, at least 850 bodies had been recovered by Friday morning. Although hundreds are still missing, few believed there were any lives left to save. 'We needed help here, we asked for help here,' said the town’s mayor, Mahmoud Hafar. 'It never came.'..."

 
From "In earthquake-battered Syria, a desperate wait for help that never came" (WaPo).

"On a rare visit to this Syrian enclave, controlled by Turkish-backed armed groups, The Washington Post found communities gripped by shock and bewilderment, and very much alone. In Jinderis, fathers stood watch over the remains of their homes and told of waking up to find their wives and children dead. As hulking excavators clawed the rubble, searching for a 13-year old boy, a man asked reporters to help him contact the United Nations for help. 'Maybe they don’t know what happened in Jinderis,' he said. 'No one could see this and not come here.'"

"A powerful 7.8 magnitude earthquake rocked wide swaths of Turkey and Syria early Monday, toppling hundreds of buildings and killing more than 1,300 people. "

"Hundreds were still believed to be trapped under rubble, and the toll was expected to rise as rescue workers searched mounds of wreckage in cities and towns across the area. On both sides of the border, residents jolted out of sleep by the pre-dawn quake rushed outside on a cold, rainy and snowy night. Buildings were reduce to piles of pancaked floors, while major aftershocks, some nearly as strong as the first, continued.... It struck a region that has been shaped on both sides of the border by more than a decade of civil war in Syria. On the Syrian side, the swath affected is divided between government-held territory and the country’s last opposition-held enclave, which is surrounded by Russian-backed government forces.... 'There are so many other people who are also trapped,” [Huseyin Yayman, a legislator from Turkey’s Hatay province]. 'There are so many buildings that have been damaged. People are on the streets. It’s raining, it’s winter.'"

 AP reports.

"He was in search of rocks whose shape and placement gave him a sense of existential comfort instead of dread."

"'That was the one that started me thinking about this,' he said, arriving at a bobsled-size boulder perched near the edge of a shallow cliff. 'That must say something important about the amount of shaking that occurred since it was put up there. If there was a lot of shaking, it would have fallen.' A hiking companion couldn’t resist a futile push. The boulder was deposited there, of course, by a glacier. 'Everything here reeks of the Ice Age,' Menke said. The last of the glaciers melted in these parts around fifteen thousand years ago. Auspicious."

From "Predicting the Earthquake That Could Wreck New York/A geologist heads to the hills to study precariously perched boulders, which could provide clues to the frequency of the rare major quakes that shake the region" (The New Yorker).

"As the search continued, rescuers pulled a five-year-old boy from the rubble, who had survived because he was protected by a mattress."

"In a video of the rescue posted by a local fire department, Azka, who had been trapped for two days, appeared conscious and calm as he was lifted to safety. '[Azka] is fine now, not wounded,' his relative Salman Alfarisi, 22, said.... 'The doctor said he’s only weak because he’s hungry.'"

 From "Five-year-old boy pulled from Indonesia earthquake rubble after two days/Azka, whose mother died in disaster, probably survived due to being protected by a mattress, while 40 people remain missing in Cianjur" (Guardian).

Rescuers remain hopeful that more survivors will be pulled from the rubble, but they are “running against the clock”, according to Deni Kurniawan, a rescue team leader for the Jakarta-based NGO Human Initiative.

“We hope we will [have] more miracles,” he said. “Yesterday we were told that a pregnant woman was inside her house. Our team found her, but we lost them both, her and the baby. It’s a really distressing situation. “The earthquake happened in the day time when mothers and children were at home, and the fathers were working in the rice fields. Most of the casualties are mothers and children.”...

While the magnitude would typically be expected to cause light damage to buildings and other structures, experts say proximity to fault lines, the shallowness of the quake and inadequate infrastructure that cannot withstand earthquakes all contributed to the damage....

[Karlo Purba, the Indonesia programme director of the Adventist Development and Relief Agency (ADRA) said] “[T]he problem is poor construction. Earthquakes don’t kill, poor buildings kill.”

"Afghanistan was rocked by its deadliest earthquake in decades on Wednesday when a magnitude 5.9 earthquake struck the country's east, killing more than 1,000 people..."

"... and wounding many more, according to a regional official.... This comes as almost half the country's population -- 20 million people -- are experiencing acute hunger, according to a United Nations-backed report in May. It is a situation compounded by the Taliban seizing power in August 2021, which led the United States and its allies freezing about $7 billion of the country's foreign reserves and cutting off international funding."

 CNN reports.

I have 9 TikTok selections for your amusement tonight. I think they're all just exactly right, but you can tell me what you like best.

1. A strange device for popping popcorn.

2. A father's amazing skill at earthquake detection.

3. Hospice Nurse Julie went on a terrible date.

4. The self-dramatizing horse.

5. Son House sings "Death Letter Blues."

6. The first guy who comes up with the idea of going to the beach as an activity.

7. The cat on the Fancy Feast catfood can isn't fancy enough. (Later: Purina expresses thanks for the new design.)

8. Getting your hair braided in Ghana.

9. The rosy maple moth.

"I’ve never been a prepper, not even of workweek meals portioned into Tupperware or for the written part of my driver’s exam."

"I didn’t inherit my dad’s apocalyptic preoccupation. I always figured that if the big one hit the Cascadia subduction zone, I’d rather go down quickly than draw out the inevitable while eating dehydrated food and becoming dehydrated myself. But the realities of climate change are slapping me in the face... They’ve forced me to reevaluate my indifference toward prepping. But I do not know where to start.... I’m reminded of the clip-on crampons I bought after a winter storm four years ago, when I’d slipped and injured my wrist. They are still in their packaging, a waste of the money I don’t have much of, and a waste of steel and plastic that will end up in a landfill.... Despite my father’s insistence and my mother’s example, I still haven’t packed a bug-out bag. Perhaps I can’t bring myself to truly prepare for the worst-case scenario. It’s not lost on me that this has been the problem all along: We, collectively, have been unable to internalize these possibilities for the future, our future." 

From "My dad’s prepping for the end times. Climate change makes me think I should, too" by Karleigh Frisbie Brogan, who lives in Portland, Oregon (WaPo).