Yesterday an explosion ripped apart the facade of a Chelsea office building, injuring more than 40 people and causing an uncomfortably familiar havoc amid the hustle and bustle of a rainy New York midmorning. It was the perfect opportunity for the Sun to prove its local-news mettle. And yet, inexplicably, the Sun failed to go with anything more than a front-page photo. It made the front pages of the Post and the Daily News — hell, even the supposedly local-news-phobic Times had a piece. But the Sun staff, apparently, was busy elsewhere.

Busy with what? The lead story, "Crackdown Begins on Tax Cheaters with Two Houses," tells how the city is going to begin penalizing residents who claim their country homes as their primary residents to avoid higher taxes. Local news, we suppose, but ... well, not the sort of thing most readers can exactly relate to, much less sympathize with. Not in the same way they sympathize with 40 people caught in a fiery office explosion. But that's picking nits. Rachel Kovner turned in a five-column, above-the-fold item on efforts to bring ROTC back to Columbia. An interesting piece, but Smarternysun suspects she wasn't exactly burning the midnight oil on that one, gathering last-minute scoops. Other front-page stories — to their credit, for once almost entirely Sun originals — cover such scorchers as Julia Stiles' upcoming role in "Twelfth Night," a new Spanish-language "I Love NY" campaign and the continuing saga of Forgea, the dog trapped on a freighter in the Pacific Ocean. Ira Stoll's got a not-half-bad piece on the suspected murderers of a Brooklyn man holed up in the Church of the Nativity. But given that there's nothing pressing here, either, it's a wonder why Mr. Stoll didn't have an extra hour to sneak out of the office and take a peak. On the other hand, it was raining.

Smarternysun has a sneaking suspicion that the Sun might not have deemed the story of sufficient interest to its upper-income target audience. After all, neighborhoods like Chelsea come and go — the home of the area formerly known as Silicon Alley, it's so 1999 — but the Upper East Side remains. Still, the angle is there — the explosion took place next door to the offices of Talk Miramax Books. Though, given that Tina Brown threw the Sun a nice launch party, perhaps this wasn't something the paper wanted to dwell on.

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WIRE WATCH: Of 26 news stories, seven were Sun originals, a relatively healthy number. Three came from the Daily Telegraph, one from the Jerusalem Post and the rest from AP and Bloomberg. All in all, a good show.