The National Weather Service concludes its cataclysmic forecast for this afternoon ("AN ISOLATED TORNADO OR WATERSPOUT IS POSSIBLE") with

SPOTTER ACTIVATION WILL LIKELY BE NEEDED TODAY

Our very own Kaz ponders this:

I imagine something like Power Rangers. "Spotters, ACTIVATE!"

Ben Jackson, who actually is a weather spotter, reveals some of the secrets:

No helmets, spandex, or decoder rings, but we do get a hotline to the NWS office and a spotter ID code.

William Ricker alerts us that Twitter users can tweet damage to @wx1box.

Oh, and about that forecast. NECN's Matt Noyes concludes a technical overview of the impending doom with:

Due to the rapid speed of these storms, it's imperative that the meteorological community prepare the public to be ready to take shelter immediately upon hearing thunder, and keeping an eye to the western horizon. We don't often see such fast moving storms here in New England, and this will be a defining characteristic. Regardless of damage done, my concern is that we have folks understanding "dark sky" to storm on top of you may be a very short period of time Thursday afternoon.

Ed. question: Why does the National Weather Service still CAPITALIZE EVERYTHING? Are they still sending out alerts via telegraph?

Looks like you'll get the chance to do so this November. The Outraged Liberal argues why you shouldn't.

An earthquake in Quebec near the Ontario line sent tremors through the Boston area shortly before 2 p.m. A residential building at 1180 Beacon Street in Brookline was evacuated after it began shaking, possibly because of the quake, Neal Simpson at Brookline Patch reports.

Louis Cameron tweets he felt it at 253 Summer St. on Fort Point Channel. At 1:53, he exclaimed:

So my whole building just shook!? Did Boston just have an earthquake!? People are going crazy over here!

That was a minute after Emmanuel Tellez tweeted he felt the earth move in Downtown Crossing.

USGS map showing where people in the Northeast and the Midwest felt the quake (if you felt it, you can add your info).

Earthquakes are nothing new in Quebec, and typically occur either along the Ontario line or centered much farther north, up the St. Lawrence.

Boston has had its share of quakes, as well, most notably the 1755 Cape Ann quake, which knocked the grasshopper off Faneuil Hall and which later got the Boston area put on a select list of regions rated as having a high risk of catastrophic damage from an earthquake - a list that also includes California, Charleston, SC. and the area around New Madrid, MO. It's not that we're prone to California quakes - we're not - but that we do have a history of quakes in a city in which so many buildings and so much infrastructure are old and built on landfill, which can act like Jello during an earthquake.