Today, unlike yesterday, is Groundhog Day. To anyone outside the civilized world, it's virtually meaningless. However, to high-thinking, industrialized, technologically competent Americans, it's a veritable scientific festival. And why wouldn't it be? It's a large rodent predicting the weather. Substantially more accurate than the powerful weather gizmos that TV stations tell us are accurate. Who needs Doppeler radar when we have a whistlepig - a rodent of the family Sciuridae, belonging to the group of large ground squirrels known as marmots. It beats the Hell out of Hurricane Schwartz or that Bolaris guy.
Today, the large ground squirrel in Pennsylvania said we were going to have six more weeks of winter because he didn't see his shadow, which, every scientist knows, is like a barometric reading in the kiester.
I'm not sure what it all means, since it's 50 degrees in Philadelphia today and will be again tomorrow. Tuesday, it's going to 62. We have barely had a flake of snow. We already had the early spring, and six more weeks of winter would mean that we'd finally have winter, so I don't know the point of it all.
Maybe, what it means is that we're never going to be intelligent or sophisticated enough as a race of people that we could ever let go of stupid superstitions or odd belief systems, since they seem to bring in money and feed into our great wish that we can somehow influence events over which we have no control. It's hard to figure sometimes, how the same people writing macros in Excel and programming their cell phone can be sitting in front of a TV watching a football game, wearing their "lucky jersey" because the team never loses when he's wearing it. I'm sorry, but I think things like Groundhog Day make us look childish and stupid.
Shadow, schmadow. I wonder what marmot stew tastes like?
1 comment:
Its all the reporters scaring the crap out of the rodent. Or he is just jealous of the second most famous groundhog in PA and his scratch off tickets
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