TODAY: Singapore girl survives Rita

Seven days before her wed­ding, blog­ger caught in the Hous­ton frenzy

Some blog­gers find them­selves in harm’s way; cra­zier ones put them­selves there

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CALLING HOUSTON: THE UNINVITED WEDDING GUEST

Sin­ga­pore­grrl, (singaporegrrl.blogspot.com) a blog­ger liv­ing in Hous­ton, was sched­uled to be mar­ried next week.

As you can imag­ine, her plans were some­what altered — she spent the most of last week pack­ing up and “watch­ing Rita”.

In tones of bewil­der­ment and agi­ta­tion, Sin­ga­pore­grrl wrote: “Bloody hell. Sin­ga­pore­grrl has never expe­ri­enced a hur­ri­cane nor does she want to expe­ri­ence one. Espe­cially not seven days before her wed­ding. Seven days, people.”

Prepar­ing to leave her house for another shel­ter, she said: “The city seems to be freak­ing out. It took me half an hour to find a gas sta­tion that had gas today … it’s like the bloody apocalypse.”

I eagerly checked her blog for updates, and thank­fully, on Mon­day, there was a post on how Hous­ton was spared most of the storm’s wrath. While things were still chaotic, plans for her wed­ding were more or less on track.

She reported: “So now, I’ve had time to recover from the stress of the flip­ping hurricane.

“I can now focus on the task at hand and that is the fact that I will be get­ting mar­ried … The folks are on their way to Hous­ton as I type this. A thou­sand and one things to do this week.”

On behalf of those of us who have been fol­low­ing her site, con­grat­u­la­tions, Sin­ga­pore­grrl! We’re look­ing for­ward to read­ing about your wedding.

WHEN BLOGGING BECOMES A LIFELINE IN CALAMITY

Yes, any major event, espe­cially a threat­en­ing hur­ri­cane, is blog-worthy mate­r­ial (visit blogsearch.google.com to see the slew of blog sites doc­u­ment­ing the storm). News­rooms weren’t immune to the hur­ri­cane either.

From Boing­Bo­ing (boingboing.net) comes a story of how a local news­pa­per in Lake Charles, Louisiana, opened a blog account so that its jour­nal­ists could con­tinue to file sto­ries from wher­ever they had been evac­u­ated to.

Lake Charles was one of the towns hard­est hit by the storm and the news­room at the Lake Charles Amer­i­can Press (tem­po­rary site at american-press.blogspot.com) suf­fered a power fail­ure on Fri­day. The paper was quick to open a blogspot (www.blogger.com) account.

Choppy, but up-to-date news reports con­tinue to be churned out by reporters and eye­wit­nesses who send in their accounts via email.
Swiftly-produced reports dis­pelled inac­cu­rate reports or rumours — such as those of high­way over­passes col­laps­ing — and even now con­tinue to relay instruc­tions from the local author­i­ties as to whether res­i­dents can return home.

RISKING LIFE AND LIMB FOR THE SECRET BEHIND ‘CODE 11’

It was a dif­fer­ent kind of high water and no one was hurt when blog­ger Sausage of Haro Sin­ga­pore (harosingapore.blogspot.com), hap­pened to be at Wisma Atria last week when a com­mo­tion broke out.

He recounted: “Secu­rity guards were shout­ing into walkie-talkies and going ‘Code 11. I told you all it’s a Code 11 already and no one is doing anything’.

“Was a fight going on inside Wisma Atria? What was the secret behind Code 11? I had to investigate … ”

Armed with a cam­era and a keen sense of obser­va­tion, he inves­ti­gated and found a sec­tion of the base­ment was flooded, incur­ring the ire of secu­rity staff as he snapped pho­tographs as evidence.

“I stood there and snapped and snapped because I had to doc­u­ment the truth about what hap­pened here today!

“Sud­denly, I heard: ‘OI! OI!’ “One of the skin­head guards was point­ing at me. I got scared because he was dan­ger­ously close.
“I was risk­ing my life to take these pho­tos. Like the war pho­tog­ra­phers in Time magazine.”

Sausage con­tin­ued: “He stood next to me. I was too close to snap a pic­ture of him. I was really scared because he was taller than me.
“Was he going to beat me up?

“There was a big crowd gath­ered behind me. I didn’t know if they were on my side or going to do the Sin­ga­porean thing and lend ‘eye-power’ instead.”

So he beat a tac­ti­cal retreat — but not with­out pon­der­ing: “Was I too close to uncov­er­ing the truth behind Area 51?”

Mr Miyagi aka Ben­jamin Lee has been enter­tain­ing read­ers at miyagi.sg for over a year. As a blog­ger, he finds that even get­ting caught in the rain is some­thing to write about.