Leave it to the irrepressible Dan Barry of the New York Times to coin the best analogy for hurricane/storm/squall Irene:

Up to this point, most people had experienced Hurricane Irene only through the multicolored radar maps that appeared on television. Or maybe they had seen the breathtaking, even humbling, images arriving from some 200 miles up, via the International Space Station: the photographs taken by astronauts that showed what looked like a massive swirl of mashed potatoes straddling the edge of the green plate of the United States.

The image turned out to be even more prescient than Barry could have imagined when he wrote it on Friday, August 26; in the end, Irene acted like a gumsnapping diner waitress, dumping wet glop onto the east coast, but hardly throwing the major tantrum predicted by hyperventilating newscasters.