five feet high and rising

yesterday was anything but a day of rest. i had hoped to be buried in writing for school and other projects but the day was totally overtaken by dramatic turns. my stepmother (who has been in hospital recently but back home and apparently doing well) collapsed yesterday and was rushed by ambulance to A&E. seems she has reacted very badly to medication she was on. things seem to stabilise over the day but we're waiting for more news. it's been stressful. especially for my dad. UPDATE: she's better than yesterday. sitting up and chatting.

meanwhile my attention was being pulled to Nashville as the thunderstorms kept rolling in and i tried to keep track of the flooding. i think the scale and impact of the damage has yet to be fully realised and going by the impact of severe flooding here in Ireland and Britain over the winter, it is likely that things will likely get worse before they get better.

i've been disturbed at just how poor the mainstream national media coverage has been of the floods. for those living outside of TN without access to local news channels, the best on the ground coverage is coming from the Nashvillest blog and The Tennessean. both have been exemplary.

i joined twitter about a week ago. thought i'd give it a trial spin. very glad i did now. i really hope twitter doesn't go the way of facebook as it attempts to monetise what they've got going on. any thoughts of my returning to facebook have been squashed by their recent and invasive 'connections' developments which are clearly designed to serve their customers (ie companies seeking marketing data) and not the user (ie individuals with a facebook profile)
there's really good advice for facebook users at this EFF site with helpful translations of facebookspeak to explain just what the 'connections' and 'like' button are actually designed for. personally, i found scouring the red hyperlinks on their site a disturbing read. 

compared to the mainstream media twitter has proved an incredibly adept piece of social networking. i was deeply suspicious of twitter when it first appeared, but in a crisis, at least for those with privilege of online access, it's been an incredible source of information.


here's a strangely beautiful video made over the weekend:





LB