Possibly the least informative reporting ever produced in all of history

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Well, at least as of 7:00 this morning (8/28), when this live webcam from midtown Manhattan showed nothing but a big moosh of raindrops. Probably, judging from the maps and satellite pictures of hurricane Irene, it won't show much else today. The center of the storm is still south of Philadelphia right now (see above), well south of New York City, and the rain it's producing extends into northwestern Massachusetts, where it has been raining steadily for at least 8 hours now and where it is still, at the aforementioned 7:00 AM, quite dark. There is very little wind as yet where I am, which is just fine with me. Wind predictions, in fact, have been significantly downgraded since last night and Irene itself is on the brink of becoming not a hurricane, any more, but merely a tropical storm. So it appears our chance of having both a hurricane and an earthquake in the same week, like much of the rest of the East Coast, has been lost, and now what we're going to see here will be a big, big, windy rainstorm but not much more.

The best part of this thing is, you don't have to shovel rain.

Later: 10:30 AM, much less rain. The skyline of the city is visible. A big improvement. But still, there isn't much to see except, well, it's a rainy day.

Here, although the center of the storm is due to track right over the house in three to four hours, we're not seeing any wind to speak of, although it's been raining now, substantially and steadily, for nearly 12 hours and shows no sign of stoping any time soon.

I wish it would stop so we could all go out and play.