Ground Hog’s Day: Should Little Critters be in Charge of the Weather?

While it is comforting for us to place our faith in cute & adorable little critters, probably because of movies like Snow White & Cinderella where the critters are extremely sentient & are very active in those storylines, if you are cavalier enough to be a betting individual, one would be a fool not to look at some concrete stats. Lucky for you, we have dug up some records for you to intelligently place your bets. Note that various news sources including USA Today predicted that there would be an early spring in 2020, but 2020 was a fever crazy dream & I don’t personally remember that winter, so we’re going to skip over that & look at the last decade along with other sources to help us inform our decisions in 2021.

According to the National Centers for Environmental Information, in the last decade, Phil the groundhog, (who is “the” groundhog to pay attention to apparently), only was correct 40% of the time. One would be better off flipping a coin than paying attention to Phil. On this metric alone, if you’ve been betting money on Phil being correct, I suggest you stop interacting with whatever gambling group you are involved with immediately. The following graphic shows Phil’s predictions for the last decade, along with predictions going all the way back to 1887, which shows that Phil predicts long winters over 75% of the time. Not only has Phil the groundhog been more wrong than right as of late, if Phil actually does have any influence over the weather, it also appears that he also wishes ill upon us & is indeed not our ally.

Even more condemning, according to Wikipedia (& to all the teachers that told me that Wikipedia is not a reliable source, yes it is, they site things better than most books, plus teachers told me we would not have calculators with us at all times & they were wrong about that too) one has to raise a serious eyebrow regarding how the prediction is translated from groundhog to human understanding: “At daybreak on February 2, Punxsutawney Phil awakens from his burrow on Gobbler’s Knob, is helped to the top of the stump by his handlers, and purportedly explains to the President of the Inner Circle, in a language known as ‘Groundhogese’, whether he has seen his shadow.” This sounds like a way to manipulate bets placed around this event, & this “Inner Circle” should be investigated for fraud & tried accordingly, along with Phil, who we’ve established is not our friend.

However, maybe we’re not paying attention to the “right” critter. According to Newsweek, “A hedgehog seeing his shadow on Candlemas Day, celebrated on February 2, meant six more weeks of bad weather, according to German lore. Unfortunately, when German settlers came to the United States, the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club noted that hedgehogs were in short supply, so they tapped groundhogs to take on the role.” Of course, the United States has its way of mutating traditions of old into “American Light” versions, so for over a century we may have been pushed towards the wrong psychic animal, & after watching the movie “Sonic the Hedgehog” perhaps hedgehogs are the way.

So there you have it, do not pay attention to the propped up liar that is Phil & follow the way of the hedgehog, perhaps the little critter that should rightfully be in charge of the weather according to tradition. Either do that or don’t put faith into little critters & let go of all your Disney inspired dreams of little critters having the psychic like capabilities & accept them for the adorable, cute, & hungry creatures they are.

By the way, there is totally no salt on the writer’s end that Groundhog’s Day steals the thunder of the the writer’s birthday which is a day prior.