A small earthquake shook the San Francisco Bay Area this morning. According to the United States Geological Survey (USGS), the magnitude 4.3 tremor was centered eleven miles north of Morgan Hill and 16 miles southeast of San Jose, along an unnamed fault line.

I plugged the USGS coordinates into Google Maps. It showed the quake wasn't far from Joseph D Grant County Park.

When the earthquake struck, I was sitting at home in Morgan Hill. After a second of shaking, I was no longer sitting, but was suddenly standing in the doorway, waiting for shaking to end, which it did, a second later. The whole event was so short, nothing hanging from the ceiling had time to swing and nothing on the shelves had a chance to find the floor.

After double-checking the house to make sure there was no damage (I'm paranoid like that) and checking the cat (she gave me an annoyed look, yawned, and curled up to take her late morning nap), I hopped online to see if the web had noticed the rattler.

I thought one or two folks might mention it in their own good time, but the reaction was widespread and instant. The small quake was big news, at least for a few minutes. It started on Twitter, rumbled across the USGS site, and radiated out to various media outlets, including the Mercury News. It also appeared miles away, in the most unexpected of places: The Huffington Post.

Major historical events have a tendency to inspire people to create great works of art. This morning's quake and the web's reaction to it had the same effect on me, only on a smaller scale -- a much smaller scale. I created the following tour de farce to commemorate today's non-event.