thunder cats

My belated contribution to the recent earthquake phenomenon takes a super-brief dip into the local media coverage that tickled me. And there I was at 1am on Wednesday morning, telling my husband that it was either ‘just a little tremor’ or ‘one of the cats thundering about’. Worryingly, it takes a quake of the Dudley variety to work up a decent amout of concern from me when I’m semi-conscious.

The blogging community in Birmingham is notoriously wonderful at breaking, sharing and discussing experiences; notably in the creative arts and media which I snoop far too regularly. The earthquake nudged this depth of sharing to a new level, demonstrated perfectly with this post regarding the community’s Twitter response to bubbling Earth. This made me smile.

Local news sources conveyed a range of responses that I won’t to go into as many of you will have already seen these. But one quote stuck out. It would seem a dozen people from Dudley suffered flashbacks from the last earthquake episode according to BirminghamMail.net. A quote from their article covering the story reveals that “Dudley police said 12 people in their nightclothes walked into their local police station.”. Yes, all well and good saying that, but was this incident actually related to the earthquake? Can we have some statistics on the number of times people walk into Dudley cop shops in their jim-jams when there isn’t an earthquake so I can make an informed judgement as to the relevance of this statement?

Tentative conclusion: using Twitter has the potential to remove the need to roam around in your jammies in times of geological deviations.