In Which paleo Schools The Meteorological-Industrial Complex

Listening to morning radio, and the host, talking weather, turned "tornadoes in the southern states" and 'snow in the Twin Cities" (para) into 'snornadoes'.  He later struggled mightily to walk it back, but I am, if nothing else, a stickler for stuff. Hence, this needed to be written.

Mr. McNeil, Mr. Wonderful,

Your mention of snownadoes was a delightful nostalgia trip for me, but then you claimed it was merely a mis-statement. I must beg to disagree!

When I was a young child, I spent many summers in Mooselick, Saskatoon, dead in the center of Canada's famous 'Snownado Alley'. Snownadoes are a particularly dangerous form of tornado - a snownado of C3 or larger (we didn't use the F scale there) could put a snowflake through a 2x4 like a ninja star, which is why the original hardy settler's homes were made of sod. And a long winter like this presents the problem that this is close to the usual time to water your home, in fact, they use the famous 'moon test', where in the homeowner had to sit bare-butted in his home for a half an hour, and if he did not lose feeling in his cheeks, it was time to fertilize or the R value of the sod would plummet, and winters in Mooselick were harsh, especially with the snownadoes, until block construction came to the tundra, and although the snownadoes made a fine stucco texture in the block for a year or two, eventually repairs had to be made, which is how we became known as the 'Concrete Patch Capital Of Saskatoon', even having the 'Skimcoat Festival' with the eagerly anticipated election of the 'Tuckpoint Princess', which my dad took me to every year, until the year Mary Jim Diefenbaker took the risque tactic of showing her thermal socks.

No snownadoes? HARRUMPH!, I say.

Love,

paleotectonics