The .01 inch of rain that fell at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport is getting ridiculous national media attention. Sure, it broke a 48-day no-rain streak, second longest ever here. But now is usually what passes for the semi-dry season, anyway. It’s not like there was flooding or loss of life. There was so little rain–a single rain drop is a lot thicker than .01 of an inch–that many streets around town weren’t even completely coated.

Still, I got calls from family members on the East Coast who said they heard about the rain on New York radio. A trip around the Internet showed stories about Seattle’s .01 inch of rain on the Web sites of such outlets as The Washington Post, Fox News, the Miami Herald, the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. A Google search of everything put up on the Web in the last 24 hours with the words “Seattle” and “rain” produced 32,200 hits.

At least this time, notably missing–to me, New To Seattle, anyway–was the kind of snark the national media displayed when a six-inch snow storm shut down Seattle for three days in January.  “Snow wimps,” declared a typical headline in the Los Angeles Times.

Instead, the various media sites are now playing this latest weather event–if it even could be called that–as sort of a man-bites-dog story. But when you think about it, this is really a dog-bites-man story. Light rain in Seattle is a story?

On a slow news day, I guess anything can get coverage.

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