Here's an item relevant to our snowy April: a prosecutor in the US
has charged Punxsutawney Phil, the groundhog who "officially" predicts the coming of spring (or not) every 2 February, "Groundhog Day," with getting it wrong this year. Apparently Phil came out, did not see his shadow, and therefore led everyone to think that spring would arrive soon. (Here is
an explanation of this tradition.) The joke is that the prosecutor in question went to the trouble of drawing up a bill of indictment in formal legal language, just like you would in charging a criminal. There's also a bit of friendly interstate rivalry here, since "Phil" is a famous attraction in his town in Pennsylvania -- in fact, that's all this town with the unpronounceable name is known for -- while the prosecutor is across the state line in Ohio. (And apparently in a county where there's little enough real crime that he has time to indict groundhogs!)
A movie that came out 20 years ago,
Groundhog Day, turned this odd tradition into a romantic comedy. The story is set in Punxsutawney, where an arrogant TV weatherman who is sent there to report on the groundhog's appearance finds that he is repeating the day over and over. The movie then tells the story of his various ways of dealing with this and trying to get himself out of his peculiar time warp. It's a clever film, a pretty good comedy and, I would say, a "minor classic" in that it's still well-remembered and well-regarded two decades later. There are sites where it can be watched online,
for instance here.
I love this film. In Czech it is called Na Hromnice o hodinu více. Good idea, good actors and really funny:-)
ReplyDeleteBrilliant film. But the title is Na hromnice o den více, I think :-)
ReplyDeleteOh yes:-) Sorry for the mistake. That's the play on words.
ReplyDeleteWait, the Czech title is a play on words? Can somebody please explain that to me?
ReplyDeleteThe title can be translated as On "Hromnice" one day more. Hromnice is old pagan festival which is celebrated on February 2 and it allegedly marks the beginning of spring, there are many weather lores associated with it, one of them being something like "on Hromnice one hour more" which I believe can be explained by the fact that days are becoming longer since that day. So the title of the movie plays with the words and change "hour" into "day" as a reference to repeating the whole day over and over.
ReplyDeleteAww, I can't help myself but I have a soft spot for this movie and the little cute groundhog. How can you be angry with him? Seriously :D I say lets blame the weather forecasters here in the Czech Republic because there were many times when they said the weather would be better and warmer and then nothing and it started to snow again! How dare they?(and obviously someone has to blamed *sarcasm sign*)
ReplyDeleteThanks for the explanation of the pun. As to the reason for the unusual weather, I read that it was a result of global warming causing the polar ice cap to disappear, which means the arctic sea retains more heat, causing the "jet stream" to expand and push arctic (Scandinavian-type) weather further south than it used to go. So maybe this won't seem so unusual after a few more years! We'll see.
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