© Supplied photoMysterious "rumbles" are blamed for the colapse of Sharon Hanslipês barn in Otter Point on Friday March 16, 2012.
And now, or perhaps still, The Rumbles.
Three times Thursday morning, an unexplained phenomenon rattled windows, dishes and nerves from Langford to Otter Point, even knocking down an old barn.
It sounded like sustained thunder, or God bowling. Some feared it was an earthquake, others suspected blasting, while still others thought it was bad choices from the '60s coming home to roost.
"It's still pretty much of a mystery," said Otter Point's Sharon Hanslip on Friday.
The episodes came at 9: 30 a.m, 10 and 11, the last the most intense. "It shook the house and brought down the barn."
The barn was a ramshackle old structure - a giant three-sided shed, half the size of a house - that they had planned to raze anyway. Its collapse frightened a couple of nearby donkeys, but no great damage was done. Still -
"When it brings down buildings, it's disconcerting," Hanslip said.
Whatever caused the shaking, it wasn't an earthquake, says seismologist Honn Kao of the Pacific Geoscience Centre in Sidney.
Also discounted was the dismantling of the Elwha River dam west of Port Angeles. It might be the biggest dam-demolition project in U.S. history, but there's been no blasting for a month, said the Olympic National Park's Barb Maynes.
Likewise, none of the U.S. fighter jets flying out of Naval Air Station Whidbey Island came anywhere close, said spokesman Tony Popp. "We did not have any Growlers or Prowlers in your vicinity yesterday."
With Whidbey Island sitting due east of Victoria, many looked to the base as the source when a similar bout of The Rumbles persisted in Oak Bay and the east side of the Saanich Peninsula throughout the summer of 2009.
The phenomenon abated somewhat after that, but was never adequately explained. Indeed, The Rumbles were reported near Cattle Point a couple of times Monday.
A series that shook Sooke in January was blamed on everything from supersonic jets to something called a "whistler," in which energy from a thunderstorm can travel from hemisphere to hemisphere through magnetic-field lines and create a sound. But no one really knows.
Kao is checking seismograms for clues to Thursday's shaking. Sensors in the Interior have been known to pick up mine blasts and even avalanches there, he said, but pinpointing and verifying the source can be tricky.
In the meantime, we're left with more unexplained rumbles than West Side Story.
Three interesting responses to Sunday's column on people who give their children uncommon names - such as Adolf.
Victoria's Adolf Ceska, born just days after Hitler invaded Poland, was a child in southern Bohemia, then "protected" by the Third Reich. His godmother, he says, later confessed wanting to drown him in holy water when she heard his name.
Ceska also recalled a joke about a man who wanted to change his name from Adolf Littlearse to Joseph Littlearse. "Mind you, this was in the time when telling such a joke would bring you a free ticket to the concentration camp."
Former Langford councillor John Goudy told the story of his English-born father. Although Goudy sons were commonly christened Jameson, John's father was born in 1895, the year of the Jameson Raid, a South African adventure that inflamed British passions.
So it was deemed wise to name the boy J instead. Not Jay. Not J., with a period.
Just the single letter J, subjecting him to a life of misery as he grew up filling in forms and trying to explain his name to officialdom.
The same column mentioned the most totally awesome newspaper byline of all time: Athol P. Black of the Kamloops Sentinel. That led another journalist, Arthur Black, to recall the days when his Saltspring phone number was unlisted, but that of Athol Black, who had apparently moved to the island, was not.
When listeners offended by Arthur's CBC radio program Basic Black would dial up Information demanding a number for "Arthur Black, Saltspring," the operator would reply, "I do have an Athol Black on -"
"THAT'S THE ONE!" the caller would roar into the receiver. "THE ATHOL WHO HAS THAT RADIO SHOW!"
Arthur regrets that he never met Athol P. Black, thanked him for fielding the angry calls, or presented him with a bottle of single malt before he died.
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