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xkcd #3202: Groundhog Day Meaning
Title text:
Originally, the ceremony used a variety of rodents and mustelids, but over time most people agreed it made sense to standardize on a specific individual ground squirrel in Pennsylvania.
Transcript:
Transcript will show once it’s been added to explainxkcd.com
Source: https://xkcd.com/3202/
I mean, it doesn't have anything to do with the movie Groundhog Day in which the main character relives Groundhog Day over and over again? I don't think anybody used "groundhog day" as a synonym for "personal time loop" before the movie.
Why do you think they named the movie and holiday "Groundhog Day"? From the rodents waking up from a months long coma? That'd be silly. It has always been about time loop.
You gotta have some standards. If you use a different rodent every year, you can’t realistically compare the results with one another. Who knows how wildly the measurement error varies from species to species?
I mean, the one thing the comic gets wrong is that we never really settled on a standard, there are like 36 different regional rodents that are used., my favourite being Wiarton Willie:
The story of Wiarton Willie dates back to 1956. A Wiarton resident named Mac McKenzie wanted to showcase his childhood home to his many friends, so he sent out invitations for a "Groundhog Day" gathering. One of these invitations fell into the hands of a Toronto Star reporter. The reporter travelled to Wiarton looking for the Groundhog Day event. None of the townspeople knew about a festival, but one suggested he check at the Arlington Hotel, the local watering hole. There the reporter found McKenzie and his friends partying and was invited to join them. The next day, the reporter lamented to McKenzie that he needed some kind of story to take back to justify his expenses. So McKenzie grabbed his wife's fur hat, which had a large button on the front, went out to the parking lot, dug a burrow in the snow and pronounced a prognostication (which no one remembers). The picture of Mac and the hat ran in the February 3, 1956 edition of the Toronto Star. A year later, about 50 people arrived for the festival.
Oh wow! That's amazing.
Americans will use any unit besides the metric system /s
Groundhog (Gr), a unit of uncertainty in weather predictions. The value of 1 Gr means the prediction is as good as pulling it out of a hat.
It's not every day that we get to see Black Hat lost.
Weirdest? Please, take a look at any religious holiday. Let's take Easter, we celebrate resurrection of man-god who allowed himself to be killed so he could save us, and immediately after ressurection he transformed into god-god and moved to the sky. So anyway we make dyed eggs to celebrate it.
celebrate resurrection of man-god who allowed himself to be killed so he could save us, and immediately after resurrection he transformed into god-god and moved to the sky.
Man-god allowed himself to be killed to save us from the wrath of god-god. A being who was mad that the creatures he created weren't spending all day every day worshiping him exactly as he said to, after giving them the free will to do otherwise.
Simple, easy to understand and relatable.
He died so we dye
The word "celebtate" fits the comment surprisingly well!
EDIT: The celebtation is over. Now were back to merely celebrating. Ah well, guess that'll do.
the eggs thing predates christianity, so these things weren't all invented at once. people just kept on adding more and more outrageous shit
Let us not forget about the Hare Club For Men, and that Saint Peter was, in fact, a rabbit.
Or Christmas, where we cut down trees to set up inside and decorate to celebrate said man-god's birth, except the date is nowhere near his actual birthday
There really is an xkcd for everything.
It's a good holiday because it has the responsibility to not have a facade. What even is Christmas? A solstace celebration? A celebration of the natural forest? The birthday of someone who was probably born early fall? An excuse to give children gifts? Idk anymore man.
If we count years from the birth of Christ, shouldn't his birthday be January first?
Shepherds only really stay out in their fields during calving season, i.e. And in Israel, that's mid-December to mid-January.
But really, anything actually written about Jesus before the age of like 30, is likely completely made up during the Council of Nicaea in 325AD.
Before that, the Trinity wasn't fully mainstream, because Jesus was considered a created being and not god himself. At least by a large percentage of early Christians.
what is Walter White doing in this cartoon?
Pretty sure hat guy predates Walter White.
Learning about Groundhog's Day!