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You are here: Home / Popular Culture / The Rat Sees His Shadow

Reader Interactions

43Comments

  1. 1.

    Punchy

    Wow. A trifecta of fucked up; Orlando (right wing nuts-ville), the TSA (nuff said), and Air Marshall Program (the most corrupt division in govt).

    Imagine that…they hate gays, minorities, and women. Color me shocked.

  3. 3.

    Morbo

    How dare you, sir! The noble groundhog will not stand for such an insult as a comparison to such plague-bearing vermin.

    And they won’t stand for being compared to rats either.

    (Edited because I couldn’t resist, thanks, DougL)

  5. 5.

    Shell

    Does the whistlepig ever NOT see his shadow? I’m hard pressed to think of a year when he hasn’t.

  6. 6.

    dmsilev

    There was a story in the paper yesterday decrying the annual cruelty-to-groundhogs ritual. Something about it not being nice to disturb a hibernating animal.

    -dms

  8. 8.

    Fergus Wooster

    Blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. There is no way this winter is ever going to end, as long as that groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don’t see any other way out.

    He’s got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.

  11. 11.

    flukebucket

    I’ll never forget the time my daughter came home from kindergarten and excitedly explained to me and her mother that “tomorrow hogs are going to come up out of the ground and tell us if winter is over or not”

    Damn. Kids grow up too fast.

  14. 14.

    Annie

    Not surprising, although someone should have run that rat over years ago. The forecast here in DC, is snow today, tomorrow, the next day, and so on….

  15. 15.

    geg6

    @dmsilev:

    They’ve obviously never visited Phil in his natural habitat at Gobbler’s Knob in beautiful Punxsutawny, PA. Phil lives in the lap of luxury and not just luxury as a rodent would define it. If there is a more pampered and spoiled animal on this earth than Punxsutawny Phil, I cannot imagine it. Believe me, I’ve seen it. Unfrackingbelievable.

  17. 17.

    beltane

    Six more weeks for someone. Where I live, March comes in like a lion and goes out like a tiger. We did see a gray squirrel in the woods the other day, which is something I’ve never seen before (we only have the red squirrels). My cat will likely make a nice meal of him.

  21. 21.

    twiffer

    i prefer woodchuck myself. i have to say, it amused me greatly to see the weather channel covering this and cutting to commerical just as they were about to reveal phil’s forecast.

  22. 22.

    BenA

    I love this kind of superstition…. the kind I can get behind… unlike Christianity, paganism, scientology, and eating fried chicken on game day.

  23. 23.

    Chinn Romney

    So does PETA have a paypal account? I’d like to donate. Really, the slurs that Phil has to endure. I followed that link and one guy said that Phil has no predictive skills whatsover. I can only imagine the pain and suffering that put Phil through. Phil’s muscle tone isn’t all that it could be either. We all need to join forces and act quickly.

  24. 24.

    Randy P

    I said this in another thread but it’s more apropos here:

    I never understood that whole Groundhog Day thing when I was a kid in Syracuse, NY. Who ever heard of winter ending in February? Or March for that matter? Of COURSE there was more snow coming.

    For that matter, I never figured out why “spring” had such a reputation among songwriters, poets, etc, either. Why celebrate the season of slush and mud? And chances are, in May you’re going to get one last snowfall anyway.

  27. 27.

    beltane

    @Randy P: Mud season isn’t pretty. And spring doesn’t truly arrive until Memorial Day. Before that, snow is always a possibility.

  28. 28.

    Comrade Mary

    I’ve been playing chicken with the long range forecast by not putting studded tires on my bike. It’s a waste to use them on dry roads because you go more slowly and you wear out the studs, so I’ve put off buying a pair as long as possible. There will be a couple of centimetres of snow by this weekend, but nothing more than I can see.

    In Canada, Wiarton Willie was our rodent forecaster of choice. After decades of service, he died during hibernation, and then, well, things got a bit scandalous. And disgusting.

    The original Wiarton Willie, an albino groundhog said to be 22 years old, died during hibernation in the winter of 1998-99. The good burghers of Wiarton discovered this to their horror just before Groundhog Day 1999.
    __
    Willie’s death made headlines around the world.
    __
    On Groundhog Day, they put Wiarton Willie face-up in a small pine casket, bright pennies over his eyes, paws clutching a raw carrot. But it was a fake! Turns out the real Wiarton Willie was so disgustingly decomposed he couldn’t be put on display, so they found a stuffed facsimile and laid it in the casket.
    __
    “We didn’t try to hide the fact that he was stuffed,” said Tom Ashman of Wiarton Willie’s publicity team. “If the media had been doing their job they would have seen the stitches on the belly.”
    __
    But, why fake it?
    __
    “People needed closure,” Ashman explained.

    Draw whatever parallels you like.

  29. 29.

    The Golux

    One thing that’s always puzzled me is the “six more weeks of winter” if the groundhog sees his shadow. You never hear what the prediction is if he doesn’t see his shadow; is it seven? Four? They never say.

    Wikipedia to the rescue: No shadow means less winter.

    Also curious is the fact that six weeks only gets you to March 16th, so you still get a shorter winter than the calendar dictates.

  30. 30.

    WereBear

    The idea being that in the pause right between the solstice and the equinox, there is predictive power in the weather we’re getting at that moment.

    Since I don’t recall Phil ever seeing his shadow, I don’t know if he’s ever been wrong…

  31. 31.

    David in NY

    As I recall, the groundhog’s calendar is set to that of Europe, where the story originated (it first involved some other hibernating animal). So in the beginning, the prospect of mid-March spring being late might not have been fanciful. (We laughed at it as we grew up in Michigan, too.)

  34. 34.

    Patrick

    Generally, where it gets real cold (which thanks to global warming is no longer Pennsylvania most years), you stop getting precipitation because the air is too dry. The predictive power might come from the idea that precipitation heralds more humid weather which leads to warmer weather.

    However, that all assumes it started with the groundhog. But the groundhog is a poor substitute for german hedgehogs. Who I guess leave their warrens at the end of winter to search for mates. Germans moved to Pennsylvania, and looked for a substitute. But groundhogs don’t leave their warrens for that purpose at this time here. So, the whole thing got merged with Candlemas/Imbolc weather prediction and that is what we have. It did lead to a great movie, and is harmless fun.

    You don’t need a groundhog. Look at your own shadow, it is the same sun shining down.

  41. 41.

    jl

    Why the hate speech against groundhogs?

    I admit that you did not call punksawhatsy Bill, or Will, or Jamison, or whatever, a US Senator but still, calling it a rat was mean.

    I hope Cole’s shoulder gets better soon, either the pain or them pain drugs are messing with his normally very polite and delicately mild good and perfect manners.

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