Original art by Mark Valentine
The groundhog is a living, breathing, well-loved symbol of disrespect for science…
I googled Groundhog Day 2014 and got 259,000,000 pages. The top pages included The Weather Channel, National Geographic, The Huffington Post, USA Today, even CBS News.
People seem to have a lot of interest in ridiculing meteorologists.
We all do it. You have probably said, “I wish I could be wrong that often and keep my job.”
Musicians and promoters like me always curse the weatherman for telling people to stay home to avoid a storm that doesn’t come. People died in Atlanta last month when they kinda got it wrong.
I think that’s why we embrace the furry disrespect of the groundhog.
Name another field of science that has billions of dollars worth of orbiting satellites along with millions of Earth-bound monitors. All of that data is then being processed through billions of dollars of computers that run 24 hours a day. Then government scientists analyze the data and we don’t believe anything they say that extends more than 2 or 3 days.
NASA barely gets a raised eyebrow over the enhanced photos from the Hubble Telescope. Their accuracy goes unquestioned without a single rodent to laugh at the arrogance of space science. We did finally get Steven Hawkins to say there is no such thing as Black Holes this week, but his challenge lacked the festive atmosphere that surrounds a groundhog.
Paleontologists have decided that dinosaurs had feathers and hair and were quite colorful.
I don’t know how that was decided without skin samples, but they are scientists. And I trust them enough not to suspect they’d merely be motivated to make more attractive exhibits or get more color into the books they’re trying to sell.
We must not unleash a groundhog on these deep thinkers.
History is littered with scientific theories that were wrong or at least incomplete.
Yet We’re bombarded by new information that is the “final word” on subjects from Climate Change to Weight Loss. It’s hard not to push back without a little skepticism that maybe we don’t know everything. Because that tiny push back may put you in a pigeon hole that is hard to escape from.
After all, you don’t want to be one of “them.”
So I’ll just continue to smile at the funny pictures of the groundhog and join in the chorus of those who have said, “I wish I could be wrong that often and keep my job.”
Ona side note, ground hogs are very tender….they’re vegetarians.
One of the last things I did w my ex wife, prior to the divorce, was go see Groundhog Day. Neither of us were crazy about spending time together at that point, I don’t know why we went, but we did.
Movies over, were walking out in our pre D silence when I decided to break the ice and ask, “So, how’d you like the movie?”
Her; “….probably the most stupid thing I’ve ever seen; it was just the same thing, over and over….”
That’s not “grounds” but thank goodness Kansas is a no fault state.
I considered the groundhog for a minute and then I unconsidered that consideration.