Groundhog Rerun

  Other than it being Peggy's birth month, February is no favorite month for me.

For one thing, for 28 days (sometimes 29) we have to hear people mispronounce the name of the month, which is FEBrooary, not FEBuary. Sorry to be punctilious about it, but Mrs Rennie insisted on us saying it properly in 4th grade, and I shall not let her down now. 

What's more, no one seems to stumble over "May" or "October," so let's give Feb a little love. It's Valentine's month, after all (known in Baltimore as "Valentime's Day," but anyway.

No, here's the thing with February. I have friends from other places around the world, and every year around this time I get texts and emails asking if we really truly believe that what some groundhog sees on February 2 is an accurate prognostication of the weather for the next month and a half.

I mean, if you read that some remote villagers thousands of miles removed from what we laughingly call "civilization" took a rodent out of his habitat, gave him a human male name, and held him up before lights and camera and the rising sun, and then decided that he did or did not see his shadow, and stated that the weather for the next six weeks had some relevance to the beast's shadow, you would shake your head.

Folklore it is, and I wouldn't even fuss about it, except that it comes in a time in our nation's history that people who can vote, drive, own property and hold office are awash in other folklore - "JFK Jr is really alive!" "You can drop nuclear weapons on hurricanes to blunt their damaging effects!" "School shootings didn't happen!" "Wildfires in California were started by Jewish space lasers" "No one should make money by shorting stocks except for established capitalist entities" and "Benjamin Franklin was the only president of the United States who was never president of the United States."

All right, I stole the last one from Firesign Theater. But when my international friends, who still can't believe that Sonny Bono used to be a US Congressman, ask me about the others, I'm just going to be Greene with envy.