At 2.28pm, this entire country stopped to pay it's respects. Car horns, fog horns, ships hooters, fire, police and ambulance sirens sounded for three minutes. Everyone else stood still and quiet.

I'm not supposed to talk about China, but you have never experienced anything like mass dignified grief on this scale.

The Dalai LLama said, "I hope I can go to the Olympics.......'

HE IS A FRUIT CAKE!!!!

He's my favourite, too.

The Daily Llama?

Daly and Lormor....experienced goal scorers in the traditional centre
forward mould!

I should have known ......bounders ........if I didn't know your hearts were in the right places....

Sorry, but with all that racket going on then how would you know whether or not everyone else stood still and quiet?

'Cos I got stuck up three and a half thousand before they were allowed to move.....

How else, stupid.....

I'm not sure you get too much warning of an earthquake, it's not like a discarded fag........like Graeme Norton....

I would have thought that the ground and buildings starting to shake was a bit of a clue?

They were saying there might be after-shocks. Is that still a possibility?

It most certainly is.

Then 2.5 million buildings fall down in 4 minutes. Probably something to do with the bleedin' QS's cutting corners. Again.

But yes, they should have sounded the sirens, just to add to the confusion...and referred to the Risk Assessment.

Least they didn't drop a crane in the river....

Two 5.4 yesterday and a 6.0 Richter today. 3 more deed and 100 rescuers injured.

Or a previously known fault line which was the reason why the area was barren?

Aren't fault lines too deep to be affected by surface activity?

('Barren', by the way...you lot are obsessed with football... )

Maybe in some instances, but have you seen how many people there are kicking about in China?

No.

This area is a mountainous rural area. Towns like Yingxian are 110,000 people strong. 90,000 dead. Beishan was 700,000, 90% gone. It's not a boom area. The steel and the building is going on in the big cities, Shanghai, Beijing and like where I live. Most of these buildings were 2 or 3 stories.

If the implication is well, it's all their own fault, well, never mind eh??

Easy tiger- that certainly aint the "implication" from my chair.

The area is so historically inactive they have their Nuclear Research Labs up there. That building is recent so it remained intact but is at a crazy angle.


Old buildings, very violent earthquake, disaster, quid pro quo.

I know it's hard to relate, this shi t simply doesn't happen in the UK, remember when it did three years ago?? Epicentre Hull?? Remember the tornado in Birmingham?? Just multiply by 5000000

Mr Rules.....if it's not a personal observation, you aren't known for your tonsorial luxury.

So why would you care about the shampoo??

And if Mr Pott did indeed fall through a roof in Wombwell, he'd now be employed by Barnsley Council as a 'Roof Entrant Opportunity Outreach Consultant, With Added Duties As A Mobility Advisor and Counsellor' on about 90 grand a year, for 20 hours a month, assuming the fat bastad ((c)ADG) broke his back.

I'm devastated by disasters like this. Honestly. I'm physically shaken when I learn about them and fail to see how people can remain indifferent.

Nonetheless, I have to ask the question: this is not the first disaster in China by a long way -- and I don't just mean earthquakes but influenza, floods, and all the rest -- so how come the only time we see the government putting on any kind of public reaction is during the Pekin Olympics year?

Well it's quite easy, not to be patronising, you take 1.3 billion people, a big country, a diverse landscape, several thousand cultures, divide it by the worlds disasters and a fair proportion will strike China.

The Southern states of America will testify to the truth of that.

to go with a common urban myth

did they all jump off a chair at once?








Sorry