STORM UND DRANG:

Forecasters at many local TV stations seemed, to paraphrase E.B. White, almost to be rooting for the storm on Sunday and Monday. "Local weather coverage has assumed tabloid proportions," TIME's Sam Allis reports from Boston, where television stations have promoted the storm and even recent, lesser bombardments "as if they are events of biblical proportions. One tunes into the eleven o'clock news to find scary, Siberian-like numbers written across a regional weather map. Only later do we find out that the minus forty-one registered in Worcester is, in fact, the wind-chill factor."