Greetings from the Polar Vortex! No, that's not the name of your favorite new dubstep band. It's the terrifying swirl of arctic winter currently occupying the Midwest and poised to consume the rest of you poor bastards.
[A news cameraman shoots video of an auto parts store destroyed by a tornado in Washington, Ill., on Sunday. Tornadoes in the Midwest killed at least six people and injured at least 37 during Sunday's destructive storms. Photo by David Mercer via AP]
A half-mile wide twister touched down near Oklahoma City as a vicious storm system moved through five states Sunday. The storms continue to pummel the Midwest this morning.
Another blizzard just touched down in the U.S., hitting the nation's midsection early this morning. After hurricane-force winds whipped through the Texas panhandle, the storm moved to Oklahoma and Kansas, cutting off power to thousands and closing highways. It's already claimed two lives: a 21-year-old man whose SUV…
A powerful storm system hit the Midwest last night, and is expected to continue today: 121 tornadoes were reported. At one point, the twisters "popped up faster than they could be tallied."
Don't fret, Sarah Palin! Stay home in Arizona or Alaska, wherever you summer. Because President Obama has decided to do the Midwestern second leg of your bus tour for you. That's right: Obama will ride around on a bus, too, as part of the great White House "pivot" to a focus on jobs, which no longer exist.
The latest weather report has Midwesterners bracing for more than a foot of snow while those in the Northeast will freeze under a giant ice slick. Yes, this will screw up travel for everyone. Wake us up when it's March.
[A commuter in Chicago deals with some hair-raising weather as storms whipped across the Midwest today. Image via AP]
Storms in North Dakota and Minnesota set off tornadoes yesterday, picking up cars and leveling homes, with one tornado reportedly lasting 30 minutes. A storm chaser shot video of one tornado ripping up a farm house near Campbell, Minnesota.
Speaking of sudden tumult atop women's-mag mastheads, a reader sends in this update:
• The Onion Diet: Move to New York, eat sushi, slim down. [NYT]
• Sez Dumenco: Magazines will soon start to die, too, and Anna Wintour will lose her Town Car, and it's all Lucky's fault. Of course, he says it with words like "transactionality." [Ad Age]
• WSJ discovers people. [WSJ]
• Jack Shafer says newspapers…
The flacks at Maloney & Fox are not, we're sure they're heartbroken to learn, the first to stage a major Cornhole tourney. A reader who loves him some Cornhole sends along this pic from a recent trip to Ohio:
An actual press release sent to actual reporters by an actual PR firm earlier today:
This angry and bitter message just arrived from a University of Iowa email account:
Our excitement over Today's reporting on cornholes led us to prematurely elucidate. As you've likely already discovered, today, not yesterday, was the big NBC expose on that favorite Ohioan pastime. A reader more alert than we are sends in this report:
Several Midwestern readers — who knew we had such things? — write in to inform us that cornhole means something very different in Ohio than it does here in New York. There's even a whole website devoted to their version of the activity, which apparently involves tossing beanbags, or something like that.
We're definitely keeping an eye on the Today show this morning, after reading this article in The Cincinnati Enquirer:
