February 14, 2006

No one disputes it: The weekend snowstorm was the biggest since record-keeping began in 1869, delivering 26.9 inches to New York City in 24 hours. That's a half-inch more than the old record, set in 1947 by a swirling blizzard still described in awed tones by those who lived through it. This one will go down in the history books. And yet.

On a recent Saturday night, Dewitt Gilmore, 41, stepped onto an idling bus waiting to make the trip from Columbus Circle in Manhattan to the Groveland Correctional Facility in Sonyea, N.Y., near the Canadian border. Dressed in a flashy warm-up suit, he squeezed down the aisle past women and young children clutching pillows for the overnight trip. Mr. Gilmore, a writer who goes by the pen name Relentless Aaron, was there to sell books.

The White House sought with little success on Monday to quell an uproar over why it took the better part of a day to disclose that Vice President Dick Cheney had accidentally wounded a fellow hunter in Texas on Saturday and why even President Bush initially got an incomplete report on the shooting. The victim, Harry Whittington, a 78-year-old lawyer, was transferred from the intensive care unit to a private room in a Corpus Christi hospital on Monday. He was listed as stable, with wounds to his face, neck, chest and rib cage from the pellets sprayed at him from 30 yards away by Mr. Cheney's shotgun.

Peter Gelb's bold effort to remake the Metropolitan Opera drew praise from the opera world yesterday as a necessary jolt to what some see as a stodgy institution. At the same time, the risks quickly became apparent, with some longtime audience members and others sensing betrayal of cherished traditions. ''The Met certainly needs a shake-up,'' said John Allison, the editor of the London-based magazine Opera. ''Looked at from a sort of European perspective, lots of the arts in American certainly seem exciting, but the big New York institutions seem a bit moribund,'' Mr. Allison added. ''I'm a little bit wary of what Mr. Gelb has in mind, because I'm not sure he has enough core operatic experience. But at the same time, these plans sound on the whole quite exciting.''

When Michelle Kwan tearfully announced on Sunday that a groin injury would force her to withdraw from the Olympics in Turin, she was acknowledging a painful reality: she would leave her third, and probably final, Olympics without a gold medal. And unless Ms. Kwan's bubbly personality keeps endorsement deals coming, her early departure could also be bad news for her pocketbook. The 25-year-old figure skater's lucrative contracts with Coca-Cola and Visa are near an end -- and marketing experts say it is now less likely she will be landing big new deals anytime soon. Coca-Cola and Visa say they had no plans to use her beyond the Olympics.