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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know. A production of I Heart Radio. Hey, and welcome to the podcast, I'm Josh Clark, and there's Charles, we are praying over there and Jerry's right over their Internet speaking lines. And this is stuff you should know, a special holiday edition that comes out on the holiday, Chuck.

Now, is this can we call this a holiday? Yeah, Groundhog Day is definitely a holiday. Are you not a pagan?

Well, no. I just thought holidays meant like work. You don't work in businesses close.

I mean, there's got to be somebody that's closed on Groundhog Day.

Well, I bet certain people in a certain town. Well, actually, they're probably everything's open because it's got to be they're just doing this to make money. Right.

They would be total fools if they're like, yeah, I always close on Groundhog Day. Oh, I didn't think that through.

So, yeah, we'll get to that town in a little bit. But first, let's talk about groundhogs themselves, because if you don't know what Groundhog Day is, don't worry. This isn't one of those ones where we need to define it for you. Just kick back and relax and let us guide you down the river of knowledge, OK?

All right.

Groundhogs, a.k.a. Woodchucks Fekkai podcast Whistle Pigs. Yeah. Other for another name. They are. You know what they are? They're beautiful. They weigh 12 to 15 pounds. They live put a pin in this that they live six to eight years. That'll come back later. They eat vegetables and fruits. They're called whistle pigs sometimes because they whistle that they're scared or if they're looking for a mate.

It's more of a chirping sound to me. Yeah. But Chirping Pigs' is not as fun as whistle big that explains that high bourbon, though I had no idea why it was called Whistle Pig, but it's named after Whistle Pig. Is that high end? Yeah, it's pretty good.

Okay, it's the kind of guy behind the counter, you know.

Well, it's on myself. I don't drink a lot of bourbon, but. Oh well good. Turn it up right now while we're recording. Tell us what you think.

All right. I'm back and I'm hammered. Everyone thinks they can climb trees, they can swim and they hibernate in late fall. And this is kind of one of the important parts of. Yeah. Woodchucks and groundhogs and how they figure into Groundhog Day. They hibernate in the fall and their body temperatures drop. That heartbeat slows down from 80 to about five beats a minute. They lose a lot of body fat. And then the males in February come out and say, who wants to do it?

Right.

Well, it's crazy, though, is when they come out, they don't actually do it. They more like make plans for later.

It's they're nervous. It's really weird. And the reason why they do this, they literally break hibernation, which can kill them. If they do it wrong, the timing's wrong or they don't have enough body fat stored up. They do it because groundhogs are so ornery toward one another. They're really territorial about their food supply and their burrow that they've probably made a lot of enemies and heard a lot of feelings over the past year or so. They come out in February to basically be like, hey, how about you?

And I just bury the hatchet and I'm going to go back to sleep for a few more weeks.

But when I come out, we'll totally do it and I'm going to bury something up and.

Oh, God. And they do. There's some sort of agreement and they see each other. A few weeks later, the the groundhog goes back to his burrow and then he comes out for good. He finishes hibernating in March and then the the groundhog fornication can begin forthwith, post-haste. That's right, in that nuts, that's how orderly they are, they have to come out and make plans for later. Yeah, they need a. Would just that chill time in between to to really gather themselves and make sure they're up for it?

I guess so, yeah. So that's supercute, that's a nice little primer on who these little beasts are, but this is about Groundhog Day, the holiday where America shuts down, right? Government doesn't do business. The banks are closed, can't buy a piece of gum to save your life.

And if only so, get that gum on February 1st, everyone. That's right. But sometime between that point, between when America became a place and 1887, someone looked at the groundhog and this little hibernation thing that they did and they said, you know what? We also have this weird tradition that we're going to explain a second where we like to try and predict when to plant crops and what the weather's going to do here toward the end of winter in the spring.

And let's mash that up into a weird, weird day to honor this little thing.

Yeah, and that's Groundhog Day. That's where it came from. It's a couple of weird traditions, like you said, mashed together. And the other weird tradition in addition to the groundhog coming out in February is this. This tradition of February 2nd being observed is kind of this indicator of how much winter is going to be left. And it's based on an astronomical event called the Cross Quarter Day, which was observed by the ancient Celts. The pagans I mentioned earlier and cross quarter days are pretty interesting and that it's a it's a day of the year and there's four of them that fall between a solstice and an equinox.

And do you have a solstice is where the sun is either at the most northerly or southern part of the sky, depending on what hemisphere you're in. So it's either summer or winter solstice. And then the equinox is where the equator of the earth in the equator of the sun are on an equal plane. Just for a minute. Just for a moment, I should say. And you have your vernal, your spring and autumnal fall equinox. So those are four quarter dates.

And then in between those are four cross quarter dates that carve up the, I guess, the year even further into the ancient Celts. It seems like to them the cross quarter dates weren't the midway point of anything. They were the beginning point. Whereas to us the quarter dates the solstice and the equinox are the beginning of the seasons. The Celts didn't see it that way. And so they really celebrated the cross quarter dates.

Yeah, it's kind of like, I guess an American might see them as sort of a seasonal hump day where you're kind of smack dab in the middle of things and we don't observe them like they do. But I feel like just instinctively, in sort of early to mid-February, every year, late January, my psyche sort of starts to think about, all right, we're we're ezan towards spring. I feel like we're about halfway there. Right. And this is an Atlanta event.

That's the ancient pagan blood coursing through your veins. It might be I think we were pagans, but.

Yeah, but to the pagans, it was it wasn't like the halfway point is the beginning. So in on February 2nd, it's cross quarter day. It was actually a day cold. Well, it was called a number of things, but to the Celts, it was it was the beginning of spring. At first they called the embargo, which means in the belly like that, the world, the earth is pregnant and about to give birth from into spring like that.

Yeah, it was when the lambing season began, which I don't think I like that.

You know, you do if you if you look up lambing pictures, it's like that's when all the baby lambs are born in. Hopfinger I thought it might be their harvest.

That's what I thought, too. And I know that probably comes a little bit later, but this is when everything's still cute and sweet. OK, they also called it Briganti after the the after Bridgid, the female deity of light. And the whole point was that, you know, the sun had really kind of been hiding for most of the winter, ever since the winter solstice. And now it was starting to kind of creep out. And to those of us who are like, this is the halfway point, it's kind of like, come on, son, keep going.

And when the Christians get their hands on the Celts, the pagans, they said, well, how about this? Let's call this like the Festival of Lights and we'll commemorate this. This is like a part of winter. We're starting to get sunnier and sunnier by having you guys bring your candles around the church and we're going to bless them and then they'll just keep burning for the rest of the winter. How about that?

That's right. They turn them into magic candles. It became known not only as Festival of Lights, but Candle Moss. And you'll hear that word a few times later on and. It's sort of still grounded in seasons, though, and the whole thing here is like as far as the ancient Celts go and then, you know, people since then, farmers, namely, is when can we when is the weather going to turn here? When is that ground going to thaw?

When can we expect good weather and not be fooled into planting, only to have it frost again and kill those early buds? That's something that you now that you've taken up gardening and stuff at your house, you will be frustrated by this. Now, to my friend when that happens. Oh, yeah.

The frost, the early fall, early frost, I should say, late frost is the worst of it. I can't sleep now.

Well, Emily always like when things start blooming too early. She's like, no, stop, stop. Yeah, I know. I think it's going to frost again. It always does.

I had to I had to stop myself now. I failed to stop myself. I fertilize too late in the season and and I had a big problem with that man.

Might have just really gone downhill in the last 12 years.

I predicted your your gardening way back in the day. I don't know if you remember that. And what episode how gardening. I don't know. Someone's going to have to find it. But you kind of you kind of tease me and I said, you're going to get into it one day, trust me. And you're like, man, I see.

That doesn't sound like me. Yeah. Oh, this is sort of a gardening thing, huh?

Yeah, I'm actually surprised at that, but I'll take your word for it. I do want to know, is there anybody out there, if you know what you're talking about, let us know what episode it is in a time.

So it would be great to have someone else so he can raise it, right? That's right. So like I said, they were trying to figure out when to plant and it was not a good omen if it was bright and sunny because that was a sign of snow and a late frost to continue on. And that would not be a good time to plant. And this is all a little confusing. Yeah. If I'm being honest. Yeah.

So like the whole thing was if Candlemas February 2nd, if, if it was if that day was nice out, if the sun was shining, if there were no clouds in the sky, that actually meant that there was going to be a much longer period of winter left. And the reason why that kind of makes sense from a farmer's standpoint is one, maybe you're saying, well, this portends a growing season where it's just going to be nice out and there's not going to be any rain.

You don't want that. But also, number two, it's like you said, and like that kind of weather might fool the plants into starting to grow again and then, bam, they get hit with a late frost. So even though it seems counterintuitive, if it's nice out on February 2nd, Candlemas to the ancient Celts, that meant that there was more winter coming. If it was the opposite, if it was overcast, maybe even storming, if it was just gross out, it meant that winter was almost over, that the it was more than halfway over and you were probably going to see spring pretty pretty soon.

So that is the initial the initial way that February 2nd kind of plays into this whole thing.

So you know what my problem with this is? What is and you put this one together and you kind of came up with some other signs found in nature, in different cultures, where they sort of look to the natural world to kind of tell the future, like the width of the bands of a wooly caterpillar, the size and number of webs a spider might spin in the fall, how the squirrels are gathering, gathering their nuts.

I your frantic or call or when the geese depart from the north, how thick corn husks are at harvest. Like, I love all that stuff because to me that is like pre science science. Yeah. Yeah. I think all of that stuff is kind of rooted in some. Maybe it might be a reach for some but some sort of scientific basis. And it was just from people observing, which was sort of the first science was observation. But to me this one is the least scientific of them all.

The because it's just one day. Yeah.

It like it is it's just one day, like if it's February 2nd, if it's Candlemas and this is the condition and that's your indicator. So yeah, I guess it is the least unscientific pre science measure of what's the most on second. Yeah, it really is. It really is. It's on par with drowning a person as a witch because your your prediction for the the winter didn't come true. The Woolly Caterpillars bands didn't portend the future after all, because there's probably something I don't know about the caterpillar, but I bet you there's some little nugget of science in there.

Yeah. As to how their bands grow, depending on whether.

Yeah, I like the stuff. Oh man. That reminds me. So I read this article in The New Yorker. Not too long ago, and it's about we got to do an episode on it, there's this lake, a little lake way up in the Himalayas in the middle of nowhere, and this really dangerous pass. And there's always been a bunch of skeletons jumbled together at the bottom of this lake, and you can clearly see them. So Anthropologist's went in and grabbed these these skeletons or some of them to take samples.

And it turns out some of them seem to be from southern Italy, maybe even from Greece, from the Mediterranean. They have no business whatsoever. And where is it? Up in the Himalayas, like in Nepal. Wow. Right on. Just so long a I think a Hindu or a Buddhist pilgrimage path. And like, it's just really bizarre that they're there. But the author took some time to just kind of go off on the side and talk about how there was this spread of this group from the steps of Russia many, many thousands of years ago.

They basically brought the Indo-European language our way, but also we're super patriarch, archetypal super rapee super murderers. And they really had an impact. You can tell a lasting impact today and how just humans operate. But apparently in Western Europe and including the British Isles, the Celts seem to be much more peaceful, much more egalitarian. Women held much more powerful roles then than they did under this other group. And it really kind of drove home like, wow, like history could have gone a totally different direction.

And like, where would we be right now if that other group hadn't come out of the steps and dominated the rest of Europe and just basically changed this like fertility worshipping nature cult into, you know, this hierarchical, patriarchal, murderous civilization that's basically Western civilization today.

I think the people in the movie Midsummer would agree with you. That was a good movie that I kept thinking about that as well during this.

Of course, I watch that again and had a better feeling about it. Yeah. I mean, it's the first time some crazy folklore man like it is really something else. I totally only seen it once. I need to see it again. Well, maybe you won't like it the second time. I hope that's not true, but it's possible.

All right. Here's what we're going to do. We're going to take a break and we're going to regather ourselves and we're going to bring it back to February 2nd right after this.

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Cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha. All right, so we set up what was going on back in the day and Groundhog Day is just something that survived from that ancient practice back then, especially in Germany. They had a tradition of waking up a badger, not probably not a good idea, and seeing if it would crawl back into its burrow to see if it was a sign of bad weather ahead. And then that eventually makes it over to the United States.

Some people in Pennsylvania that settle Pennsylvania took that idea, adapted it to groundhogs, I guess, because there were more groundhogs and badgers and started looking at these groundhogs coming out and whether or not they would see their shadow.

Well, whether or not the people would see the shadow.

It was the Germans who came over who said, well, wait, there's no badgers. So how are we going to tell about the weather? There's winter left or not. And they said, well, groundhogs will do, I guess. And and the fact that, like, they were present and then brought the superstition with them, that was based in this combination of badgers coming out of their burrow and going back and then Candlebox and the fact that there weren't any badgers and groundhogs will have to do.

That's where Groundhog Day came from in that bizarre. It is, but if you really want to talk about Groundhog Day and what we know as Groundhog Day, that sort of goofy, fun, money making scheme that they came up with is it can be traced back to one dude. February 2nd, 1887, the very first Groundhog Day celebration was created by Climber Free's FRSS, the editor of the Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper. And Punxsutawney is about 80 miles from Pittsburgh there in western Pennsylvania.

It's a coal mining town and it's a very small town. I think its indigenous name from the Native American peoples was a town of the sandflies. Yeah, the land AP did they have sandflies? Did that, I guess. I don't know why else the winamp would have called it that. And I was like, sandflies don't sound crazy. People out of their sandflies are terrible. Not only does their bite hurt, but they spread all sorts of diseases to and Punxsutawney Punxsutawney basically means sandfly town.

So I guess there was a real sandfly problem there at some point.

But there's no scene in western Pennsylvania that they have a saying there. I think a lot of the United States was marshy before we started developing it. So there's probably a lot of marsh around western Pennsylvania at the time.

I thought they just might have really liked the settlement. And it'll be like naming something like home of the bedbug here or something.

Isn't that why Iceland is called Iceland and not the old story that they basically wanted to really people either that or else the settlers of Greenland wanted to make Iceland look bad in Greenland look good. So they called Iceland, Iceland, something like that.

I mean, that's one of the first little things you hear in elementary school from that guy, right? Did you know that Iceland is green and Greenland is ice? Yeah, I remember.

I remember giving that kid a wedgie. Oh, wait, I was the kid. We got the words. Oh, OK. Makes a lot more sense.

So here we are in 1887 and Climber Freeze has stumbled upon a great little maker to bring thousands of people to his town to spend money.

Actually, he he started a year before that just ever so briefly. He just as the publisher of The Punxsutawney Spirit, he published a line that said, Today is Groundhog Day. And up to the time of going to press the beast is not seen at Shadow. And the fact that he doesn't spend any time explaining what he's talking about. Yeah. Suggests that it was already pretty well established, at least in the town of Punxsutawney at the time, probably in western Pennsylvania with their large German and large groundhog population.

And that was it. That was the first mention in a newspaper in America of Groundhog Day. And because Groundhog Day is a specifically American invention based on ancient Celtic and in German traditions, this would be the first time in the world anyone ever mentioned in the paper.

So he plants that seed. He wants to get a buzz going. He's like, I'm going to tease this out over a year. No one's going to know what's coming. No one's going to know what hit him in 1887 and in that year that he was sort of that idea was brewing. He founded he got some folks together, groundhog hunters, and called it the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club. And that would become that in 1899. And they were groundhog hunters.

Groundhogs were passed and they would go around, kill groundhogs. Apparently, they were to eat them. It was a delicacy that they served to out of towners at first, I guess here you guinea pigs just to see if they died. And then the locals started eating groundhogs, which I can't imagine tastes very good.

No, but that's hilarious that the tradition of Groundhog Day grew out of these people eating groundhogs like groundhog hunters.

Terrible, terrible, but also hilarious. And the fact that they served on the out of towners first also just really gets me. But this this Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, they held the first Groundhog Day in 1887, as you were saying before. And I don't I could not find to save my life why they chose Gobbler's Knob. But there may be a clue in why Gobbler's Knob is named that there's two possible reasons given. One is that I guess it was a hangout for turkeys.

OK, great. Or it was the place that traditionally groundhog hunters or hunters of any woodland animal would kind of come out of the woods to this hilly area and eat what they had just caught or cook and eat what they just caught, possibly having picnics in the area. So it would make sense that the Groundhog Club would go to Gobbler's Knob where they would normally eat groundhog if this was already associated with groundhogs in that way. But either way, that's where the hell picturesque.

Yeah, picturesque and bloody. Yeah.

But I mean, you know, it makes sense to have a thing. There's. What I'm saying, right, right, so right, yeah, it is quite beautiful, but that's where the first Groundhog Day in 1887 was held and has been basically ever since. I mean, there was a stretch here, there where they didn't do it, but as they were first starting to get their footing. But I think from the turn of the last century onward, it's been at Gobbler's Knob every year.

And I think of that first one, the groundhog saw his shadow. Yeah. And for parts of the area and this is kind of how it goes, of course, with something that's unscientifically parts of the area. Had it worked out parts of the area, it did not work out as far as winter ending sooner than later.

Well, I think that's kind of par for the course for sure. For Phil is. We'll see. And so although we can think like climber freeze for giving us Groundhog Day, like I said, like, it's clear this is already an established tradition. I think the earliest mention they've been able to find of somebody referencing Groundhog Day goes back to 1841 where a guy named James Morris wrote in his diary about he mentioned Groundhog Day. And I don't think he said whether the groundhog saw his shadow or not.

He just mentions it and kind of describes it. So it had been around for many decades before climate freeze came along with it. But climate freeze is definitely the one to to popularize it.

Yeah, I mean, he started writing about it and writing about the, you know, this amazing groundhog that could foretell the future weather. And, you know, it's all tongue in cheek and good fun. We have to talk about Punxsutawney Phil, of course, the famous groundhog that is still the groundhog of record in Punxsutawney Phil name Punxsutawney Phil, seer of seers, sage of sages, prognosticator of prognosticators and weather prophet. Extraordinary is Phil's full name.

That's right. And it's very cute.

I guess he wasn't named Phil until, I don't know, the the first half or the mid middle of the last century, because the the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club on their website says that he is named after King Philip and King Philip is not I don't think who they're talking about. I think they're referencing Prince Philip, who is Queen Elizabeth's husband, and he wouldn't have really become a public figure until, you know, the 30s, maybe the 40s or 50s.

So before that, the groundhog, you know, that's a stretch. Yeah, but the groundhog was known as Brer Groundhog, brother groundhog or brother groundhog. That's what they all called them before. But the thing about Punxsutawney Phil, which is what his name now, he may have had different names, but the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club maintains that he's still the same groundhog that the the the group came upon back in 1887. That is this magically living long living groundhog who's been alive for, I guess, now hundred and thirty three years since that first Groundhog Day in 1887.

Right. So, you know, we said earlier to put a pin in the fact that groundhogs live was like six to eight years or something like that, 10 in captivity. Sure. Well, he's in captivity, but one hundred and thirty three, it seems like it's way beyond that.

Yeah. So they they cooked up a fun little story there. They said that Phil was able to live so long because he drinks a punch made of dandelions every summer. And I think they saw the writing on the wall and said, hey, we can make another moneymaking day out of this thing if we have a little summer festival picnic thing where filled drinks this dandelion juice, as it were. And so now they have a big celebration for Phil's annual drinking of the daisy juice and dandelion juice.

And we mentioned that, you know, back years back, the groundhog was treated as a person, eaten, hunted and eaten, and that they may have had like a picnic around Gobbler's Knob to eat the groundhogs. This annual tradition now where they all celebrate Phil, gaining seven more years to his life, seems to have been based on their annual groundhog hunt and roast. So they went from eating groundhog to pretending that this one is has been alive for one hundred and thirty three years, thanks to this this magical potion that he drinks.

I wonder if they make great efforts to get a groundhog that really looks like the original film.

I think groundhogs look a lot alike to humans. Yeah, you know, sure, but it's like Ohga for the Georgia Bulldogs, like they have different ages and white bulldogs, you know, they are all the guys look a little bit different and we all like that's part of the personality of of each other. But I think the groundhogs. You're saying they just like he didn't have a big white stripe down the middle of his head or anything.

I see. I see what you mean. Yeah. Yeah. No, all they've got because it's you know, the thing about the other guys is, you know, it's August six or they talk a million or something like that, like they're meant to be. They're different other but they're all related in some way, at least through school spirit. This is supposed to be all of the success of groundhogs whenever they come upon, you know, him in his burrow and he's not moving any longer like that.

Yeah. They would, I guess, kind of have to find a groundhog that looks kind of like him so that they can be like, well, this is the this is the same one. He's been around for one hundred and thirty three years. All I'm saying is it's probably not very hard to pull the wool over human being's eyes when they're like, no, it's the same groundhog.

You know, I think I think the nuggets are all the same family line, if I'm not mistaken. Is that right? I don't know if all of them in history, but I think there's a very prominent Savanah family that where all the other guests come from, if I'm not mistaken, didn't I should know that the main guy, the guy who is on trial and midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, wasn't he the ILGA breeder for a while?

I don't know. But it had something to do with that. I feel like he he had something. Yeah, he had something to do with the if if not like the actual the owner of the the guy's mom or something. Yeah.

Pretty good movie. I never read the book. I did both and they were both pretty good. It was one of those ones where like the movies just about as good as the book. Back when you could watch a Kevin Spacey movie.

That's right, yeah. Creeped out. Yep. And John Cusack does a good job, too. That's right.

And you could watch a John Cusack movie. So let's take it let's take a break here and we'll talk about you know, we mentioned that when Phil dies in the dead of night, they have to get him out of there quietly. We'll talk about how they might do that right after this.

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Cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha cha. OK, so we're back and we have a dead groundhog on our hands. Yeah, well, if Punxsutawney Phil passes away, which has clearly happened probably over every eight to 10 years, they can do so quietly because Phil leads a very pampered life, an indoor life, you might say. Oh, yeah. Kushi Because he has handlers. He has a full sort of staff of volunteers that look after Phil and they have funny titles like Shindell Shakr or Chief Chief Helfman, and they make sure Phil leads a pretty cushy life there in captivity.

I've read that he eats a lot of ice cream and actually had to have a tooth removed once because he had a cavity from eating so much. Oh yeah.

He's he's basically kept very happy and strung out on junk food, I guess. But that inner circle that you mentioned, that's 15 local volunteers who basically they're not the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club.

They're like the the upper echelon, the leaders of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, it sounds like in only a couple of them are allowed to handle Phil. And the president is the only one who actually can communicate with Phil, as we'll see.

Yeah, they and we'll talk about the movie in a bit. But if you've seen the movie, you've seen those tuxedos and top hats or if you you know, you've got the day off of work anyway, if you tune in to watch the coverage, you're going to see those tuxedos and top hats because they say, hey, Phil's a VIP. When VIPs came to town back in the day, this is what we'd wear when we met him at the train.

And he is our most famous resident. So we are going to pay him that respect.

Well, the other thing that I saw, the other explanation is that explanation actually came from one of the former inner circle members. But another explanation is that some of those early, like 19th century depictions of Brayer Groundhog was in a top hat like he was supposed to be this very intelligent forecaster of of weather. So there depict him in like a top hat. And I think that's probably likely or where it came from. And they just forgot somewhere along the way, you know.

Well, Phil, there's a lot of sleeping. He does not hibernate, though, because he like I said, he's in his his climate controlled burrow. He doesn't have these cues from nature to let him know when anything is at all. He as far as he knows, it's always perfect weather, except every February when he gets yanked out of there, taken out in the cold in the middle of the night to his other thankfully climate controlled burrow that is built into a stump.

If you've never seen it, you can just Google an image of this kind of nice scene. It's got a stage there and a stump and it's, you know, looks like something. You'd see it like a show at Six Flags or something. That's exactly right. The Country Bears Jamboree or something. Totally. Yeah, that's great. I couldn't quite put my finger on what it looked like, but that is exactly what I was thinking that we can find.

So it's a bit of a rude awakening. Like you said, it's the middle of the night for Phil, but they give him some time to kind of relax and like get settled into his stump. His showtimes stump, I guess, is what you call it. Sure.

But I can't imagine that he's like getting a lot of relaxation. And because just outside of that stump is anywhere from I've seen 8000 up to 20000 people all hanging out on Gobbler's Knob. And this is in a town of about 5000 people. So the population might be quadrupled depending on whether Groundhog Day falls on a weekend. And they are so loud that it's a rowdy, boisterous crowd. They shoot off fireworks. They have live music all throughout the night.

This is all leading up to dawn, basically from about three a.m. to about 6:00 a.m. They just are partying right outside of Phil's stump.

And then finally, there's a drink like a signature drink. I that yeah, I saw there's a groundhog punch that has to do like vodka and a bunch of other stuff. But sure, I also have a distinct impression that this might be, if not dry, at least way more family friendly than. Yeah. Everybody wasted on punch kind of thing. No, that's true.

I mean, you don't want to you don't want it to be like well, like the Kentucky Derby, dude, man, things get dark.

They're real quick. You've been to one of those, right? Yeah. And it got dark there real quick, man. That was like like the second the race is over.

Yeah. Even know before, during or after is just utter chaos. You mean like we didn't leave. We fled.

It was crazy too. Yeah.

But now I get the impression that this is a lot more clean cut than, than the Kentucky Derby.

I feel when I saw fireworks, I just felt bad for Phil that can't yeah, he must have been scared for sure. And I'm sure all the dogs in the area are like, I hate Groundhog Day. Yeah. You know, and good neighbors that aren't really big on Groundhog Day are probably not very happy.

I mean, but I got to tell you, Airbnb, your place is what you do. I would guess so, because, again, 5000 people live in town, 20000 additional people show up. And hopefully, if you own a business, you've listened to Chuck in your businesses open that day.

So you mentioned the president is the only one who can speak to Phil or understand Phil. When Phil emerges from that burrow, he does speak groundhog ese, is what they call it. And the president is the only person even in that inner circle that can understand and translate for the people. And Phil is as kind of a rapper in that right.

I think that's being rather generous. But yes, he's he speaks in rhyme, kind of sing song rhyme. Wow, I mean, it looks like rap to me on this Groundhog Day, I'm happy to say I love Fruity Pebbles in a major way. Was that a commercial?

Yes, it was, ironically. Well, I guess the opposite of, ironically, expectedly, a Fruity Pebbles commercial now.

So, yeah. So he speaks in sing. The president translates for everyone. They all have a good time. And keep in mind, this is at dawn. So I imagine the whole affair is over pretty quickly.

Yeah, they got to be so tired too. Yeah. But everybody gets powered up by some vodka based groundhog punch. Sure. They're like, why are we drunk at eight fifty three?

I think that's kind of the case, at least for some people, but that's the whole shebang. They kind of stretched it out for a week. I've seen that the whole festivities kind of take place over the week, but it seems like February 2nd is kind of the big day, February 1st, 2nd.

So is he accurate, though? That's the question. The answer to that question is no, not at all. Because it's unscientific. Well, yeah, it's definitely unscientific, but somehow Phil is even worse than chance at predicting the weather. Now, the Groundhog Club says he's he's correct 100 percent of the time. That's the whole tongue in cheek thing. And then some people like to try to prove them right and say, well, yes, in some parts of the country, he's right.

In other parts he's not. But for the Punxsutawney area of western Pennsylvania, he's he's he hits between 30 and 40 percent on any given 10 year stretch, 40 percent between 2010 and 2019, 30 percent between 2001 and 2010. So that's not very good. I mean, like if you just toss a coin, you could expect to come up heads or tails better than that. And that's basically what they're doing. And we should say in Phil's defense, he's not predicting anything.

This is all the very, very insane inner circle who are making these predictions. So they're technically short, who are worse than chance at predicting whether there's going to be six more weeks of winter or an early spring.

Yeah, Phil didn't want to be there in the first place. That's right.

There's I saw footage of one in 1997 where he bit the the guy, the handler's finger and only got some of the glove. But it looked like it would have been pretty vicious had he gotten any of his actual finger. It was the layers. The crowd went wild. They loved it. He literally bit the hand that feeds. Yeah, I guess so. He said, give me some more ice cream.

So should we talk about the movie? We can't not talk about the movie.

Oh, I didn't think we were talking about the movie Groundhog Day, a movie which I have covered on Movie Crush. This was the favorite movie of Griffin McIlroy of the famous McIlroy Brothers podcasting.

I saw that I thought was just a macro was a Griffin. Now, Justin, he was on two, though he did Withnail and I another great movie. And Griffin picked picked Groundhog Day. And he says Griffin's quote was, not only do I think it's my favorite movie, he said, I think it's the best movie, like literally the best movie ever had some groundhog punch himself.

He loves it and and I love it. It's a little you know, it doesn't age super well, kind of. It's a little problematic.

Is it like is it kind of. Chauvinism is a little. He's a little. He's just a little aggressive. He doesn't take no for an answer over and over again. And that's the point of the movie. But watching it through today's lens is sort of like he back off to just not interested.

So, yeah, I get to. So the the for those of you who haven't seen it, first of all, go see it. But then secondly, it's about this reporter who gets stuck in this time loop where he's living February 2nd, Groundhog Day in Punxsutawney over and over and over again. His name is Phil and it had such a huge impact. Yeah. And they never explain why this happens. It just happens to him, which I think is something that makes the movie that much more enjoyable.

But the the the this movie had such an impact on the culture that today people associate Groundhog Day not just with, you know, predicting whether there's going to be an early spring or more winter, they predicted with weird things like losing track of time or time, doing odd things or having deja vu. And that's strictly from the movie. Like that was never a part of Groundhog Day until this 1993 movie came along.

Yeah, I mean, people will say that if something happened again to you or whatever you say, oh, man. It's like Groundhog Day. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's pretty rare for a movie to enter the sort of public consciousness to that degree.

And also it's interesting and displace something that's already taking that spot even, you know, and add to it at least.

Yeah, for sure. When I was doing research for the movie Crash episode, I did see that thing that you included here, that the original screenwriter and eventual co-writer to Harold Ramis, Danny Rubin, the original script. It was ten thousand years that he was living because of the Buddhist principle, that it takes 10000 years for a human soul to be perfect. And they change that up in the movie. And there is a lot of robust debate about how many days occur in the movie.

Supposedly, and I looked this up in a bunch of different places, if you just look at the movie, the number of times it repeats, it's thirty eight, OK, I saw twenty three. But if there are people who have taken time to calculate how long it really is because, you know, he learns foreign languages, he becomes a master piano player, and people have taken great lengths to actually calculate how long it would take to do all this.

And everyone I mean, there are some exact days that people have calculated, but everyone is sort of landed in the neighborhood of about 10 years, including Harold Ramis saying, yeah, we feel like it's about 10 years that he's relived in order to learn all the stuff.

I think 10000 more I'm going Rubin's estimate, you know.

Well, if it was ten thousand years, he would just be like it'd be like in the Matrix at the end or something.

Well, at some point he says, I'm a God. So that's true. You know, maybe it still is in there, but, yeah, the one of the things about that movie to choke is it's part of the festivities now. They show it the night before, like the local theater. And it's been a boon for the town as well. Not just Groundhog Day, but the movie itself has drawn people to the town to kind of see, you know, Punxsutawney.

And they're usually very disappointed to find out that they didn't actually shoot the town in Punxsutawney. They shot it in Woodstock, Illinois. So while they named like the businesses and took like cop cars from Punxsutawney and like moved a lot of Punxsutawney to Woodstock, you can't visually see, like, oh, this is where this this you know, this is where Ned Ryerson crosses the street to say hi, you know, downtown, like, that's in Woodstock, Illinois.

So I think they don't tell people that until after they've made their way to Punxsutawney and spend at least 50 dollars, then they tell them, OK, it's Woodstock, Illinois, that you're really after. Yeah.

I mean, what do you think? Do you want to go to Punxsutawney and kind of be the real place or do you want to go to Illinois to kind of see these real movie locations? I would like to go to neither of those places.

Oh, I'm good with you. Seeing clips, old clips on YouTube. That's fine with me. Like it's never struck me is like a great holiday, I think not because of Groundhog Day or the fact that some western Pennsylvania or anything like that, but because February 2nd is just such a sucky time of the year. I hate that time of the year that nothing really good can happen around then. So, you know, the beginning of February always stinks, which is ironic because my wedding anniversary is in mid-February.

That to me is when things pick up. Yeah, I pulled that out at the end.

Then you did. I forgot. You guys, you got married in warm climes.

Yeah, we escaped to Hawaii. Yeah. Because February is kind of gross in the United States. Yeah.

My anniversary sometime in late April. I can never remember the date 20 something. Well I just start saying after this, we'll just say all the different numbers will find out the right one and then Jerry can edit it in.

All right. You you got anything else?

I got nothing else. Well, if you want to know more about Groundhog Day, just go on. I think this year it's one hundred percent streaming because it covid they're not having people out, but they are streaming it. So you can go check out the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club's website for all the links and everything. And since I direct everyone to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club's website, as per usual, it's time for Listener Mail.

I am going to call this hot off the presses. This came in thirty seconds ago. Oh, boy. And I didn't have one prepared. And this is a good one. Hey, guys, I hope you're doing well.

Josh, Chuck and Jerry over there. My name is Mike Martin. He him his. Thank you for that, Mike. I'm a classical musician, a bassist in the New World Symphony in Miami Beach, Florida, but an avid listener for six years. My sister Jessica got me hooked on your show after we were traveling to see our family got stuck behind an oil tanker. The truck pulled to a stop on a quiet stretch of highway rural in the middle of the night when the driver put on the hazards, jumped out of the vehicle, confused.

We attempted to go around when the hood of the truck burst into flames. After backing away to a safe distance, my sister left side, pulled out her phone and said, Looks like we're not going anywhere. Have you heard of stuff you should know? Since then, I've listened to your entire catalog five times.

Wow, Mike, about that. Amazing.

So this is a long email, but I'm going to get to the crux of it here. It was about the Klan episode.

In his experience as a black man, he said, I really appreciate your recent episode of the KKK, especially with Chuck mentioned about feeling a need to do a comprehensive dive on the Klan because of the terror and harm they visited on black Americans like myself. Twenty six years old, and even when I was a young child in the 90s, there were cross burnings near my home in semi rural Pennsylvania. We moved a few towns over not long afterwards. But all my life as a black child living in the Northeast, I live with explicitly racist iconography and walks with friends in the woods.

We'd find swastikas and racist screeds spray painted on abandoned railroad buildings. It was not uncommon to see Confederate flags on people's homes and cars. Even in school, I'd find nooses tied on the pull cords of blinds. I even remember the first time I was called the N-word in a school bathroom in the first grade and the principal's response to my parents in his office. We can't help what people teach their kids at home.

Man, the way I was treated improved as I got older. But it prompted me to start thinking about how the more insidious and subtle elements of racism impact my life and those of others from a very young age. And then Mike went on to give a lot of great recommendations for episodes he thinks we should do, and he says stay safe and be well. And that is from Mike Martin, the bass player. Nice.

Mike, thanks a lot for writing. And I'm sorry all that could happen to you. Yeah. Um, and yeah, thanks for the ideas.

Give me an idea that he gave us for an episode. He said jazz because he said it. It's a lot of different things that we've talked about kind of coming together in a musical movement. So that's one that we've talked about is just cheese like Ken Burns did. However, many hours on jazz, how do we do 45 minutes on jazz, whatever.

We did a two parter on Evel Knievel, we can do anything. Bebop screwed up the way you just do that the whole time.

All right. Maybe we shouldn't do an on jazz now. I think of that. Sorry, Mike. Well, if you want to get in touch with this, like Mike did and share the horrors of your childhood, we want to hear that in a weird way and also to share it with the rest of you so we can all feel like a stuff. You should know family even more than we did before. And you can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom gently and send it off to Stuff podcast and I heart radio dotcom.

Stuff you should know is a production of I Heart Radio for more podcasts, my heart radio, because it's the radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. You know, his Big Ben checking in and, you know, is the voice of the one and only D.J. Scream and the number one podcast industry's big fax is now on the black effect and heart radio. Now, bank, if somebody ain't never listen to Big Fast before, let them know what time it is.

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