Elizabeth

@kitabet

earthquake aficionado & disaster studies scholar. outreach lead for PNSN; views and posts my own. now returned to the salish sea, but in the words of my former mayor, “you know first stop is always istanbul."

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Bluesky

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Elizabeth@kitabet· 8d

celebrating this joyous collision of special interests by making you bookshelf buddies (Walking will go here too once I get my hands on it)

Some books on a shelf including Sevgi Soysal’s Dawn next to John Darnielle’s This Year: A Book of Days

Elizabeth@kitabet· 8d

still have that very same (now quite battered) copy, purchased from magus books in the u-district

A hand holding a penguin edition of Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, with an out of focus tabby on a kilim on the floor in the background

Elizabeth@kitabet· 11d

Last-minute impulse trip to Victoria on the clipper. I love boats and this one leaves from pier 69 (nice).

View from the gangway boarding the Victoria clipper, Olympic mountains in the distance

View of Tahoma (Mt Rainier) and the port of Seattle cranes

View of a navigation screen showing the vessel route through the Salish sea

Large “69” in concrete on facade of the pier building

Elizabeth@kitabet· 13d

Screenshot from NYT: “At the height of the outbreak in April, a New Yorker was dying almost every two minutes — more than 800 per day, or four times the city’s normal death rate.”

Elizabeth@kitabet· 22d

She is making some combination of these classic Bath Concern faces

Cat with front paws on the edge of the bathtub looking horrified

Same cat with her ears back looking at the bath

Cat just peering over the bathtub rim with a look of perplexed affrontment

Elizabeth@kitabet· 24d

time for the official memorial rewatch

The opening text crawl of the Hunt for Red October

A young-ish Sam Neill in the opening scene of the film

Elizabeth@kitabet· 24d

Observing the pausa de hidratación with appropriate accessories

A tv screen showing Kylian Mbappé on the pitch and the “pausa de hidratación” graphic. In the foreground is a beer can in a pausa de hidratación koozie.

Elizabeth@kitabet· 27d

At the earthquake engineering conference and an exhibitor had the good sense to make better use of their booth screens. “Wow people are really into mass dampers”joked the guy next to me.

Elizabeth@kitabet· 29d

Amtrak Cascades living up to its name

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jul 4

Had to leave to go to the bbq but I’m watching extra time on my phone on the light rail with the casserole dish of dessert on the seat next to me

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jul 2

this is the only good use of pacific place mall

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jul 1

lmao me in the group chat 10 min ago while we were just waiting for the inevitable conclusion

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jun 27

Absolute scenes (lines for light rail) in downtown Seattle—my train got into King St station an hour after the match ended, but I’m walking home (or at least across downtown until I find a normal bus). The vibes were absolutely beautiful despite the inconvenience.

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jun 14

trying some anti-nazar tech for the second half, maybe it will help 🧿

Tv screen showing the AUS-TÜR match with a 🧿 taped to the top

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jun 14

supporting her countrymen/vatandaşlarına destek oluyor

brown tabby in front of a screen showing the Turkish team in a huddle

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jun 11

what about content pertaining to belly rubs

A brown tabby reclining on a yellow bedspread whilst getting belly scritches

Elizabeth@kitabet· May 14

obligatory invocation of that Tony Judt passage

screenshot of text reading: "By far the best thing about America is its universities. Not Harvard, Yale, e tutti quanti: though marvelous, they are not distinctively American—their roots reach across the ocean to Oxford, Heidelberg, and beyond. Nowhere else in the world, however, can boast such public universities. You drive for miles across a godforsaken midwestern scrubscape, pockmarked by billboards, Motel 6s, and a military parade of food chains, when—like some pedagogical mirage dreamed up by nineteenth-century English gentlemen—there appears…a library! And not just any library: at Bloomington, the University of Indiana boasts a 7.8-million-volume collection in more than nine hundred languages, housed in a magnificent double-towered mausoleum of Indiana limestone."

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 29

this dude apparently cannot conceive of the possibility that anyone riding the bus could also be responsible for getting somewhere on time (which is why the chronic unreliability of route 8 is bad and we should fix it!)

screenshot of a news radio guy complaining that the mayor making transit policy “for a corridor carrying 30,000 vehicles a day has never once sat behind the wheel…”

“as a person responsible for getting somewhere on time in traffic”

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 19

my other favorite image from 1906 is, of course, the famous shot of Louis Agassiz's statue on the Stanford campus meeting a well-deserved fate

image of a white marble statue buried upside-down in the ground in front of a building that says "Zoology," beneath the empty plinth from which it has fallen. The head of the statue is completely buried and the base is labeled "L. Agassiz"

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 19

Anyway, her family camped out in the Presidio for awhile and then she got sent to stay with an aunt in Bremerton and they met here while he was recovering at the naval hospital. They married at her parents’ home in San Francisco in 1911, not long after this engagement portrait was taken.

Framed photo of a couple in Edwardian clothing (her a white dress with a dark belt, him a dark suit) gazing at each other.

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 19

He didn’t actually experience the earthquake himself, although my great-grandmother—his future wife—did. The navy sent him in the aftermath. An excerpt from a typewritten “biographical sketch” he composed some years later:

Another trip to Magdalena Bay for target practice, upon the completion of which I was detached from the Chicago and on 16 March 1906, reported for duty on board the U.S.S. Princeton. My tour of duty on the Princeton was short but interesting. It included a period of about three weeks patrol duty at San Francisco, immediately following the great earthquake and fire that wrought such terrible havoc to that wonderful city. Then we moved to Portland, Oregon for the Alaska-Yukon Exposition. While there I was placed on the sick list and soon found myself at the Naval Hospital, Navy Yard, Puget Sound, as a patient. After about a month in the hospital I was detached from the Princeton, ordered home and granted six months sick leave.

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 19

It’s April 18th, so time to repost some of my great-grandfather’s photos of San Francisco after the 1906 earthquake

A black and white photo of a row Victorian houses tilted at odd angles presumably due to liquefaction, labeled “Peculiar Effects of Earthquake”

A ghostly black and white photo of people and a cart walking down a street where the buildings are all damaged and some just have the facades standing, labeled “California Street”

A black and white photograph of the burned-out shell of San Francisco city hall with the dome still mostly intact, labeled “City Hall”

A black and white photo of people and makeshift shelters in the earthquake and fire-damaged city, labeled “Refugee Camp”

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 17

too many choices so I’ll go with the best one I’ve taken this week

A tabby lying on a brightly patterned rug, half-lit by a parallelogram of bright sunshine

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 11

Started crying in the club (brewpub) when we saw the parachutes deploy

Tv screen above a bar showing the Artemis II capsule with striped parachutes against a blue sky)

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 10

I like big buttes and I cannot lie.

A mesa and butte above the town of Golden, Colorado.

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 8

The cat distribution system comes to us in our times of need (and those of us it brings tabbies are blessed)

A brown tabby lounging on a yellow bedspread

Elizabeth@kitabet· Apr 3

no wonder

screenshot from NYT live feed noting that astronaut Jeremy Hansen “asked for guidance on the appropriate way to clean the inside of the Orion capsule’s windows. The crew has been touching them too much while gawking at the earth and now they are dirty.”

Elizabeth@kitabet· Jan 2

Left it until late in the day this time, but it's been my tradition for the last 15 or so years now to read and post this poem every New Year's. Happy 2026, everybody. May this be the year.

The first two stanzas of Martín Espada's poem "Imagine the Angels of Bread":

This is the year that squatters evict landlords,
gazing like admirals from the rail
of the roofdeck
or levitating hands in praise
of steam in the shower;
this is the year
that shawled refugees deport judges,
who stare at the floor
and their swollen feet
as files are stamped
with their destination;
this is the year that police revolvers,
stove-hot, blister the fingers
of raging cops,
and nightsticks splinter
in their palms;
this is the year
that darkskinned men
lynched a century ago
return to sip coffee quietly
with the apologizing descendants
of their executioners.
This is the year that those
who swim the border’s undertow
and shiver in boxcars
are greeted with trumpets and drums
at the first railroad crossing
on the other side;
this is the year that the hands
pulling tomatoes from the vine
uproot the deed to the earth that sprouts the vine,
the hands canning tomatoes
are named in the will that owns
the bedlam of the cannery;
this is the year that the eyes
stinging from the poison that purifies toilets
awaken at last to the sight
of a rooster-loud hillside,
pilgrimage of immigrant birth;
this is the year that cockroaches
become extinct, that no doctor
finds a roach embedded
in the ear of an infant;
this is the year that the food stamps
of adolescent mothers
are auctioned like gold doubloons,
and no coin is given to buy machetes
for the next bouquet of severed heads
in coffee plantation country.
If the abolition of slave-manacles
began as a vision of hands without manacles,
then this is the year;
if the shutdown of extermination camps
began as imagination of a land
without barbed wire or the crematorium,
then this is the year;
if every rebellion begins with the idea
that conquerors on horseback
are not many-legged gods, that they too drown
if plunged in the river,
then this is the year.
So may every humiliated mouth,
teeth like desecrated headstones,
fill with the angels of bread.

the remainder of the poem (full alt text in first image)

Elizabeth@kitabet· Dec 11

Happy birthday, have a little bit more

Elizabeth@kitabet· Dec 7

oh man, so many—passages from Heaney, Hikmet, Bishop and more come to mind—but this year in particular I’ve spent a lot of time with the last stanzas of “Witchgrass” echoing in my head