“Those cardboard cutouts sure can look real from a distance.” Photo: Jordan (MN) Police Department/Facebook

Minnesota seems to have passed the winter in a near-constant Weather Event, with February weighing in as the state’s fourth snowiest on record and March creeping in “like a snowy lion,” to quote one Minneapolis news outlet. Pitiless cold has exploded toilet tanks, and doubtless cooped people up inside for a little bit longer than is healthy.

You might expect that Minnesotans, infamously hearty and accustomed to absolutely brutal winters, would be immune to snow hallucinations, but no: On Thursday, a concerned citizen of Jordan, Minnesota, called the police to request a welfare check for an “adult male” they saw “standing motionless outside and near a home wearing no coat in the cold and hugging a pillow.” When police arrived on the scene, however, they quickly identified the interloper as a cardboard cutout of Mike Lindell, CEO and inventor of the infomercial-famous My Pillow.

“Those cardboard cutouts sure can look real from a distance and the caller certainly was not wanting to get too close thinking who is this deranged person standing outside in the cold hugging a pillow,” the Jordan PD explained in a Facebook post. “Always better to call the police.”

That explanation leaves a bit to be desired, because who decorates their (I’m assuming) lawn with the life-sized image of a home goods mogul? Well. Lindell’s unlikely success story — according to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, Lindell is “an addict turned pillow magnate who went from crack house to the White House,” the CEO being among Donald Trump’s more zealous supporters — lends him a lot of celebrity in his home state. At the 2018 Minnesota State Fair, for example, “The MyPillow inventor’s mustachioed face [was] everywhere: on signs, on sticks, on bobbleheads, on life-size cardboard cutouts and television screens playing his ubiquitous infomercials,” the Star Tribune reports. So I take it this kind of ornamentation is not uncommon.

Anyway, seems like a honest mistake that could happen to anyone, just another one of winter’s myriad delights.

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