Fun facts from the Beige Book

The Federal Reserve was out with its eight-times-a-year regional look at the American economy on Wednesday. Sure, fine, call me a dork if you will — but I do love me some Beige Book.

The Wall Street Journal’s Real Time Economics blog read it so we don’t have to. The choicest nuggets…

• First of all, the weather in the Northeast: restaurant revenues in the Boston area were down 30 to 40 percent with all that snow on the ground.

• Apparently, it’s been raining a lot in Mississippi and Alabama: really wet ground there means farmers are behind on their corn planting. They might switch ’em over to soybeans, in fact.

• And, from the “yes, it is a tech bubble” category: backlogs for architectural companies in San Francisco are the biggest they’ve been since the recession.