I didn’t get a single drop of rain from Hurricane Tropical Storm minor squall Hilary, which, as one adroit local TV news weather reader actually said on a broadcast yesterday, “is a storm perfectly designed by nature to deliver water to where it isn’t.” And I started kicking myself for not coming up with a drinking game for fatuous media coverage and cliches about the storm.

One thing we kept hearing is that Hilary was the first such storm in 80 years to affect southern California, which is naturally proof of c—— c—–. But in fact southern California has had several hurricanes degrade in to tropical storms that blew through town with minimal effect, several of which I can recall from my own lifetime, as shown in this Wall Street Journal map of such storms since 1960: