[Your Disaster Here]

Maybe you're living in a cave, or your electricity and DSL connection are out. But for those of us in the media-laden wired world, it's been impossible to tune out today's 100th anniversary of the San Francisco earthquake.

And apparently, we can't just observe, reflect, and carry on. Not with emails like this, which began arriving last week:

So, the anniversary of the 1906 earthquake begs the question, "How prepared are we for a disaster?" Mike Ivanov of Mimosa Systems is a storage expert with experience working with the world's largest backup, recovery and disaster recovery products. He can talk to you about how companies are planning and new and innovative ways companies are approaching disaster recovery.

It's not a new tack, unfortunately. Terrorist incidents, natural disasters, and courtroom headlines provide constant fodder for this sort of opportunism. Nine-eleven, Katrina, WorldCom fer gawdsakes, man, don't let this happen to you!

I doubt this is specific to the storage industry. Still, I also doubt the Food Network gets innundated with pitches when a new famine sweeps Africa or Asia.