Any minute now, according to predictions, computer models, wetting a finger held aloft and good old-fashioned hucksterism, Minnesota is in a part of the country that might be about to experience some of the coldest weather on Earth.

This was presumably intended by USA Today to give our attention to this serious matter.

Well, it certainly did get my attention. You mean cold like in Yakutsk, Siberia? The inclusion of Earth in this forecast certainly takes us out of the metropolitan beltway and introduces the prospect of little old us being at the center of global calamity. We won’t be, but there’s no stopping young newsgatherers when they are following the script, especially when they have scientists at MIT and the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center just a phone call away.

Think Polar Vortex. I don’t even know if that should be capitalized, but it sounds so ominous — like it might make a roaring sound — it deserves the honor. In other words, some cold air in Canada is headed our way soon, principally because, according to the USA Today story, the polar vortex will dance with “sudden stratospheric warming.” The paper quotes a climatology scientist from MIT, Judah Cohen, who additionally said, “I am conflicted about exactly what is happening with the Polar Vortex.”

Not that Cohen was leaning that way, but predicting the end of the world is always a tough call.

We tried our best earlier last week to brace for a winter storm, which always lends a festive note to Thanksgiving week. The winds howled and the rain did turn to snow as snowmobile salesmen and implement dealers stood with their noses pressed to storefront windows hoping for a foot or two. One of my brothers told me that on a morning news show he was watching, motorists were advised to load their car with blankets, nutritional snacks and flashlights. If batteries were needed, he heard, most major retailers sell batteries, but check their hours! He might have been pulling my leg with the batteries bit, but it’s so entirely plausible.

The TV news drift to such pontification is unnerving. We are either thought to be impossibly dense or so desperately in need of comforting that we shall even be led by the hand to the battery shelf. Speaking of which, remember Y2K? I fell for that, hook, line and sinker. I imagined stalled elevators and planes falling out of the sky. I dutifully went to a major retailer, after checking that they were open, and bought at least $200 worth of batteries in all configurations. The world didn’t end. The batteries died of neglect. Maybe we are impossibly dense.

In any event, our storm midweek resulted in a dusting of an inch or so in my St. Paul neck of the woods. I refused to shovel and didn’t have to. What new snow there was on the driveway either blew away or disappeared due to sublimation.

Now we are admonished to prepare for the coldest weather on Earth. No need to be sour about it. Think of the good that can come from it. It could get so cold that Democratic Socialists will leave their hands in their own pockets. That’s an old one, isn’t it? Or it could get so cold that ICE agents will move off to a warmer state and the protesters who must be alerted by a hotline won’t show up and make life miserable for the St. Paul Police Department, whose officers are always held in suspicion by the least diverse city council in America and its lame-duck mayor.

We could use a good cleansing of arctic air. It keeps us inside and out of trouble.

By the way, as we prepare to be the center of Earth’s attention, it is interesting to note the record high temperature for this day, Nov. 30. It reached 62 on Nov. 30, 1922. But we weren’t around then, so it probably didn’t happen.

Joe Soucheray can be reached at jsoucheray@pioneerpress.com. Soucheray’s “Garage Logic” podcast can be heard at garagelogic.com.

Related Articles

Mark Glende: Just a simple dream, my dream of a birthday mow

Real World Economics: Cavemen didn’t need banking regulations; we are not cavemen

Skywatch: No turkeys, but many other birds in night sky

Your Money: Holiday spending without the guilt

Working Strategies: Celebrate the wins in your job search