Here on the East Coast of the United States, we are anxiously awaiting what may either turn out to be the snowstorm of the century (weather.com's front page says:

Stormy weather pelts the South, heads for
the East Coast this weekend

Severe thunderstorms and flooding rain in the
South are the first attack of a system that will
bring a major snowstorm to the Northeast and
Mid-Atlantic.

or nothing at all, since all the same site says on its hour-by-hour forecast for my area is that there's a chance of snow showers for a few hours between Sunday night and Monday morning. Weather.com is the online presence of The Weather Channel (sidenote: I note with interest and not a little incredulity that their UK equivalent folded after only a few months of broadcasting on cable. This amazes me since the weather is one of Britons' favo(u)rite topics of discussion, and British weather is notoriously fickle and hard to predict. This being the main reason that British & European weather forecasting technology is the best in the world, and is probably also why the techniques for scientific weather forecasting were invented by a Brit, Lewis Fry Richardson. But I digress ...) and THEY are saying that the coming storm, which, incidentally, is now being predicted by more and more of their computer models, even those of which were previously saying it WOULDN'T happen, will "rival anything the East Coast has seen in the past Century".

It would be understandable if, say, Fox and CBS, or NBC & the Weather Channel disagreed, but the Weather Channel can't even maintain a consistent story across its various media outlets.

This may all seem like a storm in a teacup (had to try and work in that particular meteorological metaphor somewhere) to the Brits, since I believe that pretty much all weather forecasting in the UK is still done by the Government-run Meteorological Office, from their Cray server farm in beautiful Bracknell, the city of roundabouts. Here in the US, the spirit of free enterprise reins (rains?) supreme, and there are numerous, competing weather services, ranging from the Government's National Weather Service (which makes it sound as though they control the weather - and maybe they will one day what with all the talk of chemtrails and HAARP) to privately run outfits like Accu-Weather. Heck, every local news station it seems has its own super-duper Doppler radar system to show you animations of green and blue blobs moving around a map.

Anyway.

So, by the time most Reprobates read this (if, indeed, they bother), we will know one way or the other whether this turns out to be the Storm of the Century, or whether it will all just blow over like so many blowy-over things.

We apologize for the lack of a closing parenthesis.