MMMMMMMMM.

A massive, mile-wide tornado with winds up to 200 mph spent 40 minutes on the ground as it devastated homes, schools and businesses across southern Oklahoma City and its suburbs Monday afternoon.

Wow.

The crowd at the Morehouse College commencement ceremony over the weekend seemed momentarily stunned when Obama directed the gay men in the audience to be the best husband to their partners, but Obama held up one finger and stifled any dissent:

And that’s what I’m asking all of you to do: Keep setting an example for what it means to be a man. Be the best husband to your wife, or you’re your boyfriend, or your partner. Be the best father you can be to your children. Because nothing is more important.

Anyone out there who still thinks Jane Austen was a prim spinster who produced genteel portraits of Regency society? Watching Pride and Prejudice: Having a Ball, it occurred to me that the first revisionist pamphlet revealing her to be a sex-crazed nutbag probably came out the Tuesday after she died. As the presenters Amanda Vickery and Alastair Sooke reminded us, Austen wrote approvingly of “the felicities of rapid motion”. Well, quite.

The programme’s contribution to Austen Studies took an intriguing form: to re-create Netherfield Ball, the social event at which Elizabeth Bennet and Mr Darcy first meet, from the dance steps, to the food, via the guests’ likely party gear. Much of this was good fun: female guests at such events would sometimes have a cheat sheet of dance steps printed on the reverse of their fans. The food to fuel the revellers was eye-popping: the show had cooks rustle up 63 dishes, 40 sweet, many of them culled from the published recipes of Austen’s friend, Martha Lloyd. There was a quivering blob called Solomon’s Temple, and a libation called Roman punch, the Georgian Jäger bomb: brandy, lemon juice, egg whites, sugar and champagne. And whole chickens, we were assured, were to be eaten as such: you’d pop the head in your mouth and suck the eyes out. Alas, no one volunteered for this delicacy.

Wonderful.