CURIOSITIES:Weather can get much worse

It rained Friday. Woo woo. We got a very impressive half an inch of rain, and as usual, it was a big major deal — two days of Storm Watch beforehand, hourly reports as the half an inch headed south from San Francisco, then Santa Barbara, then Ventura, then all the follow-up stories that night that said, "It rained today, half an inch."

Maybe it's because I'm not from here, but I will never figure out why we get so knotted up about the weather, which is about as wimpy as weather can get and still be called weather.

Is this the best weather in the world? Most people think so.

But it did get me to thinking, which is never good: If we have the best weather in the world, who has the worst weather in the world?

Depends.

You want rain? I'll give you rain. Go to Cherrapunji, India. (I have no idea where it is either. Try Google Earth.) How wet does it get in Cherrapunji? Really wet.

The fact that our average annual rainfall is 12 to 13 inches does not impress the average Cherrapunjiite. They get about 508 inches, which unless my math fails me, comes to about 42 feet of rain a year. You can run those sprinklers about once a decade in Cherrapunji and still have a really nice lawn. Two hundred straight days of rain is not unusual, and their record year was 916 inches, which is 76 feet of rain in one year, which is a lot. Wedding planners in Cherrapunji do not recommend an outdoor ceremony.

If Cherrapunji is the wettest place, what is the driest?

The driest place on earth is the Atacama Desert in Chile. You know how we are totally stressed because we've only had about 2 inches of rain this year instead of our normal 12 inches? That does not impress the Atacamadians.

The Atacama Desert gets a measurable rainfall about once every 100 years, and there are areas where it's believed no rain has fallen for centuries. I would call that a drought. Not a lot of problems with mold though.

The hottest place on earth? This one's a toss-up.