This image was lost some time after publication.

An earthquake is just an earthquake. But the tech press corps is desperate to make a commonplace natural event, like today's shaking down in Los Angeles, into a story about their favorite companies. Take Twitter user MissRFTC, who was in mid-pelvic exam when the earthquake struck, and announced this to the world. An hour later, MissRFTC was on the phone with "a senior writer from CNET." (Our first guess was Daniel Terdiman, a CNET reporter who often writes about the Internet's quirky culture, but it turns out it was the utterly straitlaced Dawn Kawamoto, better known for hardnosed reporting on Hewlett-Packard board scandals that led the computer company to sic investigators on her.) We're not sure who worries us more: The compulsive oversharer who felt obliged to Twitter about her 15 minutes in the stirrups of fame, or the reporter who thought this might be a story. But mostly, we're jealous we didn't pick up the phone first.