Groundhog Day (the holiday and movie) burrow their ways back

By Ed Goldman

To recap: In the film, a magical curse is visited upon the character played by Bill Murray as an egotistical TV reporter. He’s condescendingly covering the annual Groundhog Day emergence of the eponymous Punxsutawney Phil, whose arrival is supposed to indicate how much longer winter will last— and is forced to relive the day until he finally becomes a decent guy. MacDowell plays his sweet-natured field producer who’s at first the object of Murray’s lust but ultimately, his sincere love.

While it may sound as cornily predictable as a Hallmark Holiday special, it’s in fact a deftly delivered romance that’s funny and human enough to prevent your regretting the emotion it elicits from you. I feel the same way about “Casablanca” though I have no intention of watching “Groundhog Day” every few months, as I do “Casablanca.”

To summarize, today’s Groundhog Day. And I kind of doubt that even a lovable rodent like Punxsutawney Phil can out-guess climate change to let us know just how much longer winter will be with us.

The entire field of weather prognosticating has always been a challenging one—not only for the “licensed” meteorologists every local TV station hires (many of whom get their daily reports from the same source) but also for the seasoned professionals who create computer climate models and still sometimes get caught unprepared in a downpour. I imagine this is as embarrassing for the pros as it is for sponsors of outdoor Psychic Faires, as they’re billed, when they have to be canceled at the last minute, owing to spontaneous cyclones.

Curious about how accurate weather forecasts can be in this new era of peekaboo predicting, I looked online and found this initially encouraging report:

“In the latest and most comprehensive statistical analysis of forecast accuracy ever undertaken, independent forecast tracker ForecastWatch reconfirmed the Superior Accuracy of AccuWeather forecasts by a significant margin over the next five sources of weather forecasts in all categories examined. The study analyzed 120 million forecasts from over 1,000 locations globally over a four-year period … and AccuWeather was found to be the clear winner as the most accurate provider of weather forecasts in temperature, precipitation and wind speed—a clean sweep of all categories—for a 1-5 days-out forecast period.”

Bedazzled by the data, I scrolled up to see who’d written the piece. It was bylined “Staff at AccuWeather.” The capitalizing of “Superior Accuracy” should have been my first clue.

Now, this might not seem as suspicious as Dick Cheney’s offering, some years back, to conduct a search to find a vice-presidential candidate for George W. Bush—and, for Heaven’s sake, finding out it was none other than… Dick Cheney!

Or, much worse, O.J. Simpson’s organizing and heading up an exhaustive search to find the coldblooded murderer of his ex-wife and her friend Ron Goldman—but, go figure, not finding anyone.

As a sidenote, and to provide a perhaps unfair glimpse into local TV news, when those killings occurred, a local TV reporter, noticing that one of the victims and I had the same surname, phoned to ask if I was related to Ron Goldman. I said no. “Oh, too bad,” she said, “I’d have loved to interview you.” 

Let’s look at that for a brief, shining moment: the reporter was sorry one of my relatives hadn’t just been slaughtered. And a little disappointed that, consequently, she wouldn’t be dropping by my home to put me on camera, no doubt answering such penetrating questions as, “How do you feel?”, “Were you and Ron Close?” and “So what’s O.J. really like?”