2:47, #351: Ground Hog Dazed

I looked at my handy dandy pocket calendar today...yes, this troglodyte prefers paper to electronic...and noticed that it's Ground Hog Day. Hey...it don't matter if Punxsutawney Phil sees his shadow or if Elfson Phil can walk on wet paint and not leave footprints...we're due for "vi" more weeks of winter weather until the Ides of March...maybe later, since I can remember snow on the lacrosse field of Muhlenberg College on the first week of April in the 1970s. Hey, I just had a thought...perhaps those Romans with bloodlust made a Julius Caesar Salad due to an extended case of the Winter Blues that culminated on The Ides?!! ;p

Well, nobody on the Internet wants to give me a definite derivation of why the Furry Fat Fellows are called Ground Hogs or Whistle Pigs, so I'll just have to extemporize my own thoughts...they live in the Ground and they're as fat as Hogs...thatzzit!! They're also called Whistle Pigs in the Adirondacks for some reason. Well, back in the day when I lived in Gettysburg (no, not during the Battle of!) and owned a 12-gauge shotgun, one Furry Fat Fellow (I guess the girls would be Furry Fat Femme Fatales?) ate a sapling I had planted, so when he later waddled past my basement window, I loaded Ole Betsy (thank you, Davey Crockett), stood by the corner of the smokehouse, whistled for him...causing him to halt and stand up, and then blasted him into Kingdom come!! Not to worry, I also gave him a decent burial down by the creek on my property so he could later fertilize some of the vegetation he had formerly eaten. (There's a scene from Mel Gibson's "Hamlet" going through my brain where he talks about Polonius' death and that of mankind in general with worms, guts, and passing through.)

Speaking of in general...Audiovisualman and I watched the FABULOUS "God's and Generals" last night for the twelfth time. I remember reading about the Battle of Chancellorsville that the animals ran out of the forest as the Confederates mounted their attack against the Union flank that crumbled under their onslaught. I wonder if any of the groundhogs bothered to look for their shadows?