The Daily Blog

Widespread White Christmas Expected Across US.

For the second consecutive winter, a cold and stormy December has set the stage for a white Christmas across a significant part of the U.S. While snow cover is not likely to be quite as extensive as it was last year, a late-week storm might cover the ground in a magical white in parts of the East by the end of Christmas Day.

The depth of the current snow cover will guarantee a white Christmas in the Rockies and interior parts of the West, as well as in the northern Plains, much of the Ohio Valley, the Great Lakes and interior parts of the Northeast.Snow cover is spotty or completely lacking in parts of the mid-Atlantic region and coastal Northeast, but meteorologists are watching a late-week storm that could change that. Computer models are projecting a storm to move from the central Plains on early Friday to along the New England coast by later on Saturday, spreading snow along its path.

If this storm track materializes, fresh snow would be dumped from Iowa to parts of the Virginias, with a brand-new snow cover a possibility for the major cities along the Eastern Seaboard, from Washington, D.C., to Boston.Early-week storms moving through the West will increase the snow cover in the mountains of the West and Desert Southwest, expanding snow cover into some regions that are bare.

Even with the additional snow this week, snow cover was a little more extensive last Christmas when the combination of Arctic cold and a southern storm produced an abundance of snow.

Snow cover on Dec. 25, 2009, extended farther to the south in the Southwest and Plains than it will this year, with snow on the ground as far south as Dallas. Snow cover was also deep in the Virginias, Maryland, Delaware and southern New Jersey, following the first of a couple of monster snowstorms in what turned out to be the snowiest winter on record.Typically, a white Christmas is a virtual certainty in the high mountains of the West, the extreme northern Plains and interior parts of northern New England, with a likelihood of greater than 90 percent. The likelihood drops to just 5 to 10 percent along a line extending from the Texas Panhandle to southern Virginia.

This year, a white Christmas is likely in much of the region, where there is just a 26 to 40 percent chance on average.

A white Christmas is generally defined as having an inch or more of snow on the ground.

T.I. Covers VIBE, Says Drug Use Started After Trip to Dentist.

As T.I. lingers in prison for a probation-violating drug bust, he is still creating a big media presence in the lead-up to his next album ‘No Mercy.’ The ATL rapper is covering the December issue of VIBE and speaks frankly on his history with drug use. He says that a series of dental surgeries and subsequent use of pain killers due to his rough schedule is responsible for the hold of drugs on his life.

“I had a lot of work done to my teeth,” he explains in a frank interview. “Oral surgery, extractions, six, seven, eight root canals. Between January to February. As soon as I got out, I had a lot of stuff done. In the joint, you eat s—- that is unhealthy for you. I had fillings that fell out and stuff that had to get dealt with. Of course for the pain they gave me oxycontin and hydrocodone.”

He claims that he cut off all drug use, including marijuana and alcohol, in October 2007. He mistook the legality of painkillers as a different sort of substance than those illegal mainstays and eventually developed a certain dependency.

“I had cut off everything — weed, alcohol,” he continues. “Then I get these pills and I start taking them for the pain at first. And then I’m like, Wait_this s—- makes me feel good. And it’s legal. After the pain went away, I kept taking it. I had like five, six prescriptions. So I had, like 80 pills. Everybody else might have a drink or smoke a blunt, I took a pain pill. Times when I had 18-, 20-hour days, I’d take a pain pill. And eventually I developed — I guess — the beginning stages of dependence.”