The Storm, as Presented

Corin, in As You Like It, had noticed that "the property of rain is to wet". On Saturday we got to see the television stations demonstrate this at length, varying the rain now and then with storm surge and blown foam. The pictures were great, and we were impressed with a neighbor's composure as she reported from Calvert County. Yet I could see the rain better still from my porch.

We needed accurate forecasts of the rainfall, the wind speeds, and the duration of the storm. We got them all, as a tidy signal embedded in a volume of noise. I could happily have spared

• One station's report on the relation of wind speeds to height, how a wind that blows 50 mph at ground level blows 100 mph some tens of stories up; do you think that the engineers who built New York and drew up its construction codes hadn't thought of that?
• Many minutes of broadcasts from Ocean City and other beach towns.
• Our elected officials' visits with the local news desks.
• Radio reporters working their way through Roget to tell me of Irene's "ire" and "wrath".