A visual gag being forwarded on the Internet shows a bottle cap as the “new Kansas rain gauge.” Wednesday night’s downpour of less than two-tenths of an inch won’t stop the cyber commentaries and won’t change the news that across the nation, this year’s drought is being called the worst since the Dust Bowl days in the Depression.Long before the Dust Bowl, American essayist and novelist Charles Dudley Warner (1829-1900) made the observation, “Everybody complains about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” (The quote is also often attributed to his friend, Mark Twain, and both used versions of it over the years.) Even if no one is doing anything about the weather, it’s good to know that good government has done a lot about its effects. On April 27, 1935, Congress established the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resource Conservation Service) as a permanent part of the Department of Agriculture, to protect soil and moisture resources.