And now for the Tweather

I'm a little bit obsessed with the weather.  I follow loads of extreme weather sites, the met office, weather forecasters, volcano and hurricane watch Twitter accounts.

This morning one of the earthquake and tsunami sites posted that there had been an earthquake of magnitude 5 near Tokyo.  This isn't very unusual.  There are about 5 earthquakes of that sort of magnitude a day but not often near such built up areas.  I was also interested because I have a friend in Tokyo at the moment.

So I checked the hashtag and it was the first time I have ever felt sorry for a natural phenomenon.  You can't rely on Twitter for accurate weather reports.  In the last storm that hit England, you would have encountered a mix of people who were disappointed with the lack of devastation (I think they were hoping for a re-enactment of The Wizard of Oz) to people who were devastated because trees had fallen on their houses and everything in between.  The only way to really decide what was going on was to get out there and find out for myself.  I discovered that it was mainly OK but there were some really strong gusts (I don't like the word gust but I can't think of a better one) that were enough to push trees over.

I was hoping that Twitter would give me an early warning about whether people were OK.  Twitter was very vocal about the quake and apart from a cute picture of a scared panda clinging to his keeper's leg most people were saying that it was a bit shaky but not too bad. I will admit, that not being able to read Japanese did put me at a slight disadvantage because I have no idea what the words say.

The worst thing about this Earthquake, though, was that it angered One Direction fans.  You think being in an Earthquake would be scary.  That's nothing compared to angry 1D fans on Twitter.  How dare this natural phenomenon threaten their boys, the love of their lives, the only reason they have for living?  Then to make matters worse the pop lads didn't seem to understand their fans concern and didn't immediately Tweet to say that they were alive.  That must mean they were dead, damaged, hurt or had had their thumbs blown off. I like to think they just slept through the whole thing after a heavy post-gig party but I will probably never find out, as I'm not interested enough in them to follow them on Twitter. (They are probably lovely people with great singing voices. Please don't hurt me!)

I am pleased to tell you that my friend posted her safety on Facebook, although she did have to sing, "These are a few of my favourite things," to get through it.  I love that there is always a song for every occasion.  I wonder what the One Direction lads were singing?