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Message: <blockquote data-quote="bruin" data-source="post: 1054174" data-attributes="member: 12587">OODM: Uh, ok, looks like we're charging boldly forth without Vorlon then.  But before you guys get very far on the ride back...John chauffeurs you in his roomy Lexus as you all head back to Boston.  The host on the talk radio is talking about the ten year old boy who went missing in the North End and complaining about the fact that the police haven't found him yet.  Suddenly, you hear screams coming from the radio.  About a half a minute passes, and the radio host, a woman in her thirties by the sound of it, comes back on."Whew!  Everythings back to normal now.  Sorry folks, but the tremors have come back to Boston, as you probably just felt yourselves."[OODM: heavy, unrealistic fictionalizing follows]All of you are aware of a phenomenon that has been present in Boston for centuries.  Once every seven years, usually in the first week of August, a short tremor hits Boston, followed by an identical tremor exactly one week later.The host goes on with the co-host for a bit, talking about the shock, then she announces that a special guest host, an expert in seismology from MIT, is going to be joining them.You don't catch the man's name, but apparently he's a professor who's spent the last 20 years studying the weird tremors and their fixed periodicity.  "Why yes, Barbara, the Boston Tremors are the greatest enigma of known seismological events.  Nowhere in nature do you see earthquakes like this happening on a fixed schedule of years and weeks.  Back in 1996, when the last set came, we noticed that, although the earthquakes feel as if they are 4.0's in Downtown Boston, the actual reading from our instruments is barely a fraction of that.  We don't see a fixed center, but a multitude of tiny tremors, all occuring relatively close to the surface at exactly the same time.""And the oddest thing?  An friend of mine, an astronomer at Harvard, noticed that the pattern of the tremors coincide  exactly with the orbital patterns of earth and a distant M-class planet.  Every seven years, on the exact same day the two planets are at their minimum distance from each other, the earthquakes begin, and exactly one week later another batch of tremors occur.""What puzzles us is not so much the periodic nature of the planetary orbits, but how any seismological activity could be dependent on it.  The only other phenomenon in nature which really fits the pattern is the migratory patterns of some animals."Barbara, the host replies, "but what type of animals could cause such tremors?""None," replies the expert.  "Unless there's a whole herd of colossal earthworms that migrate to Boston every seven years, for a week, at the beck and call of a distant planet" he laughs at his joke.  She laughs. They laugh.  You laugh.  Everyone laughs.Neal knows there was a myth among the local Indian tribes centuries ago concerning just such a set of colossal underground beasts, and they claimed these beasts were the source of the tremors.  They had no physical description of the beasts, however.[OODM:  I'll update the checks you made in a while]</blockquote>

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