A favorite book at our house is “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.” Written by Judi Barrett, drawn by Ron Barrett, it’s one of those children’s books that’s witty enough for kids yet goofy enough for adults.

It’s about a town called Chewandswallow, where every day, at appropriate intervals, it rains food. There are morning showers of eggs (sunny-side up, of course), buttered toast, juice and milk. Around midday, there might be brief soup and sandwich squalls, followed by drizzles of soda. Come evening, clouds of lamb chops, peas and baked potatoes roll in, often clearing for a glorious Jell-O sunset. All the people of Chewandswallow need do to be well fed is to listen to the forecast and carry the proper dishware and utensils when venturing out.

Then the weather turns foul. There are downpours of overcooked broccoli, blizzards of Brussels sprout and peanut-butter casserole. Traffic is snarled by record-breaking spaghetti. The school is flattened by a giant pancake.

Sorry about giving the ending away, but what happens is that the people of Chewandswallow, after barely surviving a tomato tornado, lash enormous slabs of stale bread together into rafts, fashion huge wedges of pizza into sails and flee to safety. They have to feed themselves thereafter, but at least they can walk down the street without getting pelted by falling pickles.

Maine had some weird weather this week. Starting early Sunday, we had the full repertoire of precipitation. Rain, sleet, slush, snow, hail – if it was wet and in a near-frozen state, it came down. At one point, I swear I was shoveling raspberry Slurpee off my deck.

Around mid-morning Wednesday, it got really weird. The sky turned ugly, the precip was some hideous mix of Slurpee and venomous reptiles, the wind kicked up and blew a $180 million hole in the two-year state budget. This “completely unexpected” calamity was caused, says Gov. King, by a “fiscal storm” set off by the by bursting of the dot-com bubble, a very messy bit of meteorology that led to the collapse of capital-gains tax revenue.

Those of you with mutual-fund investments should be pleasantly surprised to learn, in this completely unexpected way, that the dot-com bubble has burst. Here you’ve been looking at those shrinking monthly statements for the past year thinking the bubble was doing just swell but your broker was jerking you around. You may be a lot poorer than you were a year ago, but it’s got to be good to know you got there honestly.

In its defense, the King administration notes that it did anticipate a decline in this revenue in its budget, but, as it turned out, by only about half the actual amount. And, besides, federal revenue forecasters misunderestimated (thank you, Mr. President) the capital-gains impact on the federal budget even more. Plus, every state’s hurting.

Valid points. After all, the federal government is famous for its fiscal prudence and, with all those pet projects to push and mid-term elections to win, neither Congress nor the White House would have any conceivable reason to blue-sky revenue projections. And for Augusta’s revenue experts to question Washington’s would be rather impertinent.

Yes, virtually every other state is cleaning up after this storm. One difference, though, is that many states – California, Connecticut, New Jersey, Florida, to name a few – have been downsizing revenue projections repeatedly since the beginning of the year as the impact of the capital gains decline became more clear. Back in February, Maine’s budget experts, you may recall, upsized their revenue projections by $91 million. Talk about completely unexpected.

The likelihood that a stock market slide that began last spring and leveled off last fall would make mischief with government budgets now has been written about since the slide began. Unfortunately, the writing’s been in the kind of publications you wouldn’t expect people in government to read. Such as Governing magazine or the journal of the National Conference of State Legislatures. And of course the financial press has been writing about the unwisdom (help yourself, Mr. President) of governments relying too heavily upon volatile capital-gains taxes ever since the stock market boom began.

Gov. King, incidentally, says he’s been hip to that unwisdom for years and has long suggested a slice of revenue be set aside as a hedge against its decline. Those of us who like to think we follow the governor’s activities pretty closely can recall no such suggestion, but then we’re not privy to his innermost thoughts. Here’s a tip to future governors: If you have a good idea, say it out loud. Push it, promote it, give speeches about it, pound your desk and twist some arms. A strategy that works for laptops just might work for sound fiscal policy.

This storm – the completely unexpected bad numbers from the administration’s math whizzes – actually hit the governor’s desk last Friday, the day after the Legislature adjourned. The governor politely waited until this Wednesday to tell lawmakers about it, presumably so as not to spoil their homecoming dinners. What this lucky bit of timing means is the half of the $180 million hole that has to be fixed by June 30, the end of this fiscal year, can be repaired by whatever money-shuffling means the governor deems proper, without 186 elected meddlers getting in the way. The remaining $90 million hole has to be filled by June 30, 2003 by either: a) the current governor and current Legislature in a special session later this year or; b) by the next governor and next Legislature next year. There’s a tough choice.

How tough? Back in February, when the administration was adding $91 million to its revenue projection, the governor offered the upbeat assurance that “revenues reflect the economy … if revenues are doing better than people thought, that means the economy is doing better.” Now he offers the upbeat assurance that the revenue crisis does not reflect any problems in the economy and that everything will be fixed before he leaves office. There’s never an enormous slab of stale bread around when you need one.

Bruce Kyle is the assistant editorial page editor for the Bangor Daily News.