Tonight's top story on the local news: SNOW!

SNOW! SNOW has been spotted fifty miles away, mainly to the north and along the Canadian border in the higher elevations of the mountains.

One town just south of the Canadian border actually saw flurries on the interstate in the evening. SNOW ON THE INTERSTATE! AHHH!

Local news is a very funny thing in the Seattle area. The most-watched local news is a television station that, whenever possible, has the weather as its lead story for every broadcast. If it rains, it's newsworthy because, well, it's rain. If it doesn't rain, it's newsworthy because it didn't rain. Snow is cause for a special edition of the news (even though it snows here every winter; we live in a snow-capped mountain range, for crying out loud), as are thunderstorms, hail, sleet, warm temperatures, cold temperatures, el nino, la nina, the "pineapple express", high winds, low winds, no winds, and average winds.

I'm not making this up. This is the kind of thing that sounds too goofy to be true, and yet it amazes me how reliable it is.

When the Seattle Seahawks made it to the NFC Championship game last year (for those readers who don't follow football, this was the game to determine who would go to the Super Bowl), I was curious to see how they would work the weather into the lead story. And they did. On the night before the game, they talked about how the stadium was preparing for the game. The lead story was about how they had painted the grass with the "NFC Championship" logo and had to use special fans and tarps to enable the paint to dry despite a light drizzle.

Yes, that's right: the night before finding out if the Seahawks would go to the Super Bowl, the lead news story was not only about the weather, it was also about WATCHING PAINT DRY.

I'm sure Seattle is not the only town in the US where so little of note is happening that the weather is always the lead story. But what amazes me is that this is true even though Seattle's weather is so inescapably boring.

To paraphrase the allegedly Chinese curse: "may you live is mostly cloudy times, with occasional flurries along the Canadian border."