Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow this week

"Hear Ye Hear Ye
On Gobbler's Knob this glorious Groundhog Day, February 2nd, 2009
Punxsutawney Phil, Seer of Seers, Prognosticator of all Prognosticators..." saw his shadow, thus predicting six more weeks of winter.

If you don't know the story, you can Google it, of course. The essence is this: in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, the official home of Phil the groundhog, there is a celebration every year regarding this purportedly Celtic tradition of determining the arrival of spring based on a groundhog's shadow. Punxsutawneyians have been conducting the ritual since 1887. You might say it's a great excuse for a party. And I am guessing one of the major events there for filling hotel rooms. (Here in Duluth we have Grandma's marathon, for example.)

A few stats you've probably always wanted to know about these furry critters:

All groundhogs have 22 teeth.
Groundhogs hibernate one to a burrow, with at least two doorways.
Males emerge earlier than females each spring.
Groundhogs can lose 50 per cent of their body weight in hibernation. Their maximum size is 10 kilograms.
They can both swim and climb trees, and have a top speed of 15 kilometres an hour.
Groundhog Day is halfway between the winter solstice and spring equinox.

My favorite part about the occasion is that one of my favorite movies of all time is based on this ritual celebration. You can read all the reviews at imdb.com, but these excerpts from one reviewer capture the essence of why Groundhog Day, the film, is on my top ten list.

Author: kylopod from Baltimore, MD
Even the funniest movies eventually stop making me laugh after I've watched them enough times that the humor no longer surprises me. A joke never has the same effect when you know the punch line in advance. But every once in a blue moon, a comedy comes along that is so thoughtful and meaningful in addition to being funny that after seeing it a dozen times and laughing less often, I start noticing its depth and insight. For me, no movie has so perfectly united hilarity with profundity as "Groundhog Day," which happens to be my favorite movie of all time.

Superficially, this film belongs roughly in the same genre as "All of Me" and "Liar Liar," comedies in which a character becomes the victim of some weird supernatural fate and must adapt to the insane logic of the situation. But Steve Martin and Jim Carrey are geniuses of physical comedy, whereas Bill Murray specializes in understatement. I can't imagine any other approach having worked for this film, where the world is going crazy around Phil the weatherman, Murray's hard-edged character who keeps his emotions bottled up. What makes the initial scenes in which he first discovers his fate so hilarious is the mounting panic in his demeanor even as he tries to act like everything's normal. All he can think of to say is, "I may be having a problem." Uh, no kidding. Throughout the rest of the film, he'll deliver similarly muted lines to describe his situation, like "My years are not advancing as fast as you might think." It's striking that a man who has all the time in the world would choose his words so carefully, but it reflects a well-conceived screenplay.

In this comedy, the laughs are reinforced by repetition. The absurdity of Phil discovering that he's repeating the same day is funny enough, but every time that alarm clock goes off, and the radio starts playing, "I Got You Babe," and Phil goes through the same motions and meets the same people and then goes out into the street to be accosted by the same annoying high school buddy ("Phiiiil?"), I laugh again because I'm reminded how funny it was the first time around. People who didn't like this film (I've met one or two) emphasize how annoying it is that everything gets repeated. I sort of understand that complaint, since jokes repeated over and over usually fail miserably. "Groundhog Day," however, works uniquely well because the situation gets increasingly absurd and Phil gets increasingly desperate with each day that fails to pass....

Though this film has a serious message, it is still quintessentially a comedy. But it's a comedy that uses psychological exploration of a fascinating character to make its point. After the laughter has worn down, "Groundhog Day" turns out to be one of the richest and deepest films I've ever seen.

That being said, this week's forecast from Punxsutawney is for six more weeks of winter. What the Wall Street Journal wants Phil to tell us, however, is how many more weeks of recession we're going to see. The answer to that will probably come from some monkey on CNN.