CSotD: The Amazing Day With No Celebrations
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In today’s Frazz (AMS), Caulfield asks an important question: Why do we celebrate Groundhog Day?
More to the point, do we celebrate Groundhog Day?
Obviously, the folks in Punxsutawney do, because they’ve managed to turn it into a thing, even though the Bill Murray movie pretty well had it nailed as a pointless story for hapless news crews.
These are known as “brites,” which is to say, fluffy little meaningless stories that lighten the burden of real news. For reporters, brites can be fun to stumble over, because it’s nice, for a change, to not have to probe into someone’s misery or try to deal with someone who is concealing facts.
But mandatory brites are less fun.
In the movie, Murray’s character goes from being a cynical wiseguy who feels insulted by having to cover Groundhog Day into a nice guy, but here’s the real story: Even nice guys feel insulted by being assigned to cover the same brite year after year after year.
Assign it to the newsroom rookie, or an intern. Or just pull up one from five years ago and run it again. Who’s gonna notice?
You might actually get a decent story out of World Wetlands Day, though February is a damn silly time of year to be marking that, and, besides, you ought to be covering wetlands throughout the year anyway.
As for Heavenly Hash Day or Tater Tot Day, those are generally brought to the attention of the newsroom via press releases that go straight into the round file, as they should, though occasionally an editor gets an angry call the next day demanding to know why we ignored it, at which point the challenge becomes finding a polite way of saying, “Because you are the only person in the entire world who cares about it.”
But Groundhog Day is a holy day of obligation and I have no idea why. It was over at 7:06 this morning and the only “news” is whether the little beastie saw his shadow or not. We don’t even get to get drunk.
And speaking of the little beastie, Adam@Home (AMS) notes the pun, to which I would add that, at least in the places I’ve lived, it’s a woodchuck 364 days of the year and only a groundhog today.
Though here’s an off-the-grid woman in Vermont who uses the word groundhog, and if you think Adam ruined his kid’s childhood, don’t click on that link because it details, with photographs, how to prepare the little beastie for dinner.
Your dinner, not his.
RJ Matson is one of a kabillion political cartoonists who marked the day with a cartoon, but one of a very few whose piece stands out, in large part for not showing Bill Murray in bed, but also because he employs a style that shows he knows there is a silliness factor at work and a punchline that puts an equally amusing, and astute, spin on the concept.
Which is to say, it’s an opportunity seized, rather than an obligation checked off or a quickie that allows the cartoonist a holiday even if nobody else is getting one.
The idea that someone could come up with a fresh Groundhog Day cartoon and a fresh George Santos cartoon in one swell foop is worth celebrating.
As noted before, I’m sick to death of George Santos cartoons, but recognize that, if cartoonists and other commentators stop commenting on him, he’ll simply fade into Congress along with the other empty suits who are there to represent party votes rather than their constituents.
At least chucks are edible.
And 50,000 years ago, I am quite sure nobody got the collywobbles over the thought of eating a woodchuck, because everybody was country back then and pragmatic about such things.
Which brings us to Joe Heller’s commentary on the Green Comet, because this country boy doesn’t agree with either side of this one. If modern people aren’t interested, it’s less because we’ve become jaded than it’s because we can’t see the sky anymore.
I wrote a curriculum on astronomy and folklore some years ago, with the technical assistance of Friends of the Blog Brian Fies and Sherwood Harrington, and when I mentioned the Milky Way, they cautioned me that most of my young readers had likely never seen it, and probably couldn’t.
I was gobsmacked. Growing up in the Adirondacks, the Milky Way was simply there. The idea that someone had never seen it was like saying they’re never seen a tree.
But a little poking around proved them right: City folks can’t see it, and the people who had seen it were out camping in deep wilderness.
Britain’s Natural History Museum has a discouraging report on the topic of light pollution and stars, in which a lead researcher predicts “If the brightening of the night sky continues at the current rate, a child born in a place where 250 stars are visible will only be able to see 100 stars there on their 18th birthday.”
The report goes on to list ways in which light pollution also messes with animal’s instincts and other critical environmental functions, but the loss of stars is enough to break my heart.
As far as the Green Comet goes, why bother to look up when there’s nothing to see?
Those primitive people on the left side of Heller’s cartoon would have been looking up, and they’d know the stars on the right side of Dylan Meconis‘s illustration. While the Greeks would see the picture she drew of Boötes the Herdsman, others in the Northern Hemisphere would see a large variety of images. But they’d all see something.
They were curious and thoughtful people, and however their imaginations filled in the spaces between stars, Boötes was critical, because, while a comet would certainly be interesting, Boötes had practical applications in their lives.
I’ll confess that I never studied the stars as deeply as those ancients did, nor understood them half so well, but the Milky Way lit my path home on winter nights and it’s a shame that so few people can even see it, or the Green Comet, or the world around them, anymore.
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