Richard told you earlier this year that The Weather Channel was for sale. Now it looks like recent rumors that NBC was going to be the one to buy the TV network are true. Reuters says that the deal should be closed in the next few days, and the reported price is between $3 billion and $4 billion.

If you haven't noticed, weather is the most important part of a newscast now. I was just talking to my roommate about this yesterday. Every single local newscast opens with news about the weather. Not just tornadoes and hurricanes, but bad rain storms that might pop up later in the day (wow, rainstorms in the summer - shocking!). Weather is the lead story (death, war, and the election can wait), the follow-up story, and the actual weather segment halfway through the show is given another good 7 or 8 minutes.

You know, Andrew, the blogosphere tends to only focus on the negative and the sensationalistic, so I thought I'd point out a celebrity doing something nice for once: Kirstie Alley --who will next be seen in the original Lifetime movie Write & Wrong playing a screenwriter who enlists her nephew to pretend he wrote her scripts when she finds out the industry considers her too old-- has been in her hometown of Wichita, Kansas providing food, clothing and pet supplies to those affected by the tornadoes and storms that hit the area recently.

The AP article points out that Alley enlisted some of her fellow Scientologists to help out, though I don't see that as significant. There could be a band of yodeling leprechaun-worshiping welders serving up waffles and pants for the people there and I wouldn't care at all as long as they're helping out. As devastating as these events can be, it does tend to bring out the best in people, and there ain't nothing wrong with that.