It is only January and already the most mammoth news story of 2011 is...THE WEATHER!!!

Look at it out there. Berks is getting another coating of the white stuff, and even though it's not much more intense than a sprinkling of pepper on a bleenie, the morning newspaper is all over it like the fall of the Berlin Wall. (Well, almost; that story got an embarrassing two-column headline on Page One of the Reading Times; THE WEATHER is a one-column job atop today's front page.)

Yet, denying the significance of THE WEATHER among its core constituency, the paper yanked it from the list of the top stories of 2010 that readers could vote on, even though some votes had already been counted, replacing THE WEATHER with the passing of some state senator. Well, fancy-pants editors, let's see what happens if there is another blast of THE WEATHER on the day they hold a special election in March, and the party faithful do not turn out and Berks County ends up represented in Harrisburg by Frosty T. Snowman.

And what will happen if the mercury climbs past 90 come July? I don't even want to go there.

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