The New York Times trots out its trusty rewrite man Robert D. McFadden every time weather happens around these parts, and the current storm is no exception. Observe:

Coming on a weekend, the storm had a relatively light impact on most residents. Many shops and restaurants that normally would have been open yesterday were shuttered, but without jobs or schools to attend, many people spent the day indoors with the Sunday papers, relaxing with music to go with the silken lash of rain hissing at the windows, dripping on a lazy afternoon.

You know, nevermind that though there's a foot of snow upstate, the storm was radically anticlimactic in the New York City metro area.

The day was, in a way, like great theater: the drama of the approaching storm, the searching wind at the panes and rain dancing on the pavement, the smudged sky, the iron-gray day like a movie in black and white. The overcast was solid, great plates of corrugated iron fused from horizon to horizon, and the streets glistened in the rain: a metallic futureworld.

Of course, that's par for the course for McFadden, whose ability to synthesize the reports from those on the scene (in this case, 13 reporters) into the most delightful conflagration of mixed metaphors and similes is legendary. Thing is, he never seems to tire of it. As Jeff Bercovici chronicled last year, McFadden's been at it for years; in January 2005, he wrote:

[F]or those so inclined, it was a chance to relax indoors, snowed in with Bach, Brubeck or a good book, cozy behind panes embroidered with frost. For those who ventured out to play hooded, booted, muffled to the eyes the storm offered glimpses of nature's beauty: empty streets turned into white meadows, black-and-white woodlands painted in moonlight, snowflakes glittering like confections in a bakery frosted, glazed, powdered, sugary and in the parks children, romping, padded like armadillos.

So in 2005, we got Bach; this year, we got a metallic futureworld. We can't wait for the summer heat wave.

East Coast Storm Breaks Rainfall Records [NYT]

Earlier: The Unintentional Poetry of The 'New York Times': Every Winter There Is Snow, And This Weekend Was No Exception