News reached a new low on the Google News aggregator today, and Alaska was there.

Actually, Alaska was at the head of what some on social media latched onto as a penile weather map showing a typical fall storm heading northeast across the Gulf of Alaska, and somehow that became news.

“Hurricane Walaka is thrusting its way across the Pacific and toward Alaska,” the Huffington Post’s Ed Mazza so cleverly wrote.

“Thrusting….”

Har, har, har.

“…Weather maps showing the storm’s path have aroused some jokes on social media ― because it’s hard not to see a penis in the projections generated by NOAA’s Central Pacific Hurricane Center,” he added by way of explanation in a story that contained not one, not two, but three graphic depictions of the “penis” plus screenshots from various social media posts with graphics of and comments on the penis-a-cane pointed at Alaska.

It appeared to be all jokingly good fun for social media, but strange news for the “news” to be reporting given the penile crisis surrounding the confirmation of a nominee to the Supreme Court accused of drunkenly waving his around at a college frat party.

Could Huff Po have been in the middle of its own drunken frat party where Mazza decided he could create his own, new internet version of  Edward R. Murrow’s “See It Now?”

“Weather maps are often computer generated and sometimes unusual shapes appear,” Mazza added at the end of his news report. “In January, one weather map made it look like Texas was having relations with its neighboring states.”

This information was, in turn, linked to a gallery of “cloud penises,” none of which looked much like Texas having relations with its neighboring states.

But whatever.

People surely clicked on the images. How could anyone with a sense of curiosity not? There had to be more to this than just trolling the news, didn’t there?

There wasn’t.

There was just a map of another tropical storm dying far out of sight in the Pacific Ocean. and of clouds. The storm isn’t wasn’t expected to bring much weather to Alaska or anywhere else. It appears destined to go limp in the Pacific.

But it popped up anyway on an easily excitable Huff Post.