Predicting the weather in Britain is almost useless. It’s going to rain. Sometime. Somewhere. It’s not surprising, then, that Guardian Washington correspondent Martin Kettle took a dim view of stateside meteorological hysteria in a March 9 article about last week’s winter nonevent. His snarky attack on misplaced snow commotion (titled “Storm warning over nothing”) observed that the sun was shining by noon in Washington, D.C., on the Monday afternoon that the nation’s capital was due to be snowed under, and noted that “[t]hese false alarms are one of the regular collective dramas of modern American life.” Kettle trotted out a rhetorical flourish to cap his rant against the runs on milk and bread at local grocery stores: “It’s [Americans] against the elements, proving to the world that the American dream is undaunted and that the Star Spangled Banner still waves through dawn’s early light, and the disappointingly brief snow flurries.” —Richard Byrne