💧 Our Weirdest Holiday

[“Groundhog Day”, the movie, isn’t available to stream so I instead wrote this post about “Groundhog Day”, the asinine holiday I apparently wasn’t through disparaging.]
When it comes to Groundhog Day, yesterday’s XKCD nailed it.1 It really is a bizarre holiday, and it’s one I have previously derided:

The problem, as I see it, is that there’s simply nothing there. They pull out poor Punxsutawney Phil, and then…a person announces whether the rodent saw his shadow or not. The groundhog doesn’t actually react in any visible way. The whole thing isn’t even as goofy as “Is the groundhog awake or not?”. No, the weather-predicting woodchuck is utterly unnecessary to the proceedings. They could just flip a coin. Or skip the whole thing entirely.

That post goes on to detail how back in the 19th century, they killed and ate Punxsutawney Phil following his prediction. Even three years after learning that horrid bit of trivia, I’m still taken aback by it. And those Phils were not the only unfortunate prognosticators.

Yesterday, I learned about Nantucket’s decades-old tradition of Quentin the quahog. Quentin is a random clam that gets cracked open to make a weather prediction.2 The forecast is determined by which side of the shell the water spurts out from, which is quite stupid, yet still better than Punxsutawney Phil “seeing” his shadow (or not). Once cracked, however, the clam may as well be eaten, and so it is. I think.

Nantucket’s Quentin the Quahog squirted to the right Monday morning, predicting an early spring is on the way[.]

…

Quentin was opened this morning at the town’s Brant Point Shellfish Hatchery by assistant biologist Griffin Harkins. He then paid the ultimate sacrifice and was consumed.

The writing is decidedly unclear, but I believe that Quentin was the one consumed, rather than assistant biologist Harkins. It would probably be bigger news if they ate a scientist.

Speaking of comics about Groundhog Day, Snoopy gave us a far better idea for a holiday way back in 1981.3 Perhaps next year, we can celebrate that instead.

Footnotes:

The XKCD strip in question is archived here. ↩︎

“We kind of try to choose one that looks like it’s going to be able to predict the future” said Nantucket biologist Joseph Minella. ↩︎

The Peanuts strip in question is archived here. ↩︎