First of all, Happy Groundhog Day! A “groundhog” is a large rodent native to North America. It’s primarily known for two things: a long list of alternative names, from woodchuck to whistlepig to thickwood badger to red monk. And quite a few more. They live in burrows, which leads to the other thing they’re known for. On February 2, some specific ones (the most famous being Punxsatawney Phil, from Punxsatawney, Pennsylvania) are said to emerge from their burrows to check the weather. If they see their own shadows, they hurry back inside because winter will continue for another six weeks. No shadow means spring will come early — which has also been interpreted as “yeah right; in the case spring arrives in just a month and a half.”
The Bill Murray film Groundhog Day has created a link between Groundhog Day and being trapped in a one-day repeating loop of time — but the original Groundhog Day myth doesn’t include any such looping. The myth originated with the Dutch settlers in and around Pennsylvania, and supposedly developed from a similar tale about predicting the length of winter based on the weather at the festival of Candlemas.
Another thing about February 2 is that quite a few well-known authors were born this day. In chronological order, Damião de Góis was born in 1502 in Portugal. You many not have heard of him, but his books on humanist philosophy were pretty influential at the time. in 1882, somebody you have heard of came along: James Joyce. His most famous work is probably Ulysses, which is one of those books that more people claim to have read than have actually managed to read it (it’s difficult). My advice is to read it by taking a college class where the professor helps explain the really dense parts.
The very next year, 1883, Johnston McCulley was born in Illinois in the US. You may not have heard his name, but one of his characters is still very well known: Zorro. Zorro is a “masked avenger,” and credited as the precursor to characters like Batman and the Lone Ranger. McCulley knew a good thing when he saw it, and wrote more than 60 Zorro stories.
Ayn Rand is next, born in 1905. She started as a novelist whose best known works are The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged. Later she turned to philosophy and came up with something she called Objectivism. Ironically, her ideas are associated with the Libertarian movement in the US, but she viewed Libertarians as anarchists and was against the whole thing.
James Dickey was born in 1923, and served as the US Poet Laureate in the 1960s. He was also a novelist, and wrote Deliverance, which was made into a popular movie in 1972. That was the same year that Judith Viorst, who was born in 1931, published her most famous book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day. It’s a children’s book about a little boy whose day goes from bad to worse. Like Rand, Viorst changed careers after selling millions of books — in this case she went back to school and became a researcher in Freudian psychology. Viorst is still alive and turns 93 today.
You don’t have to write novels to be a writer. Ina Garten, who was born in 1948, has written best-selling cookbooks. She’s also the host of a TV cooking show, Barefoot Contessa. She didn’t come up with the name — it came from a 1954 movie, which she says she’s never seen. It was the name of a specialty food store that she originally got a job in, and eventually purchased. Some of her recipes are pretty famous, including perfect roast chicken and weeknight bolongese, but as far as anyone knows she’s never cooked for groundhogs. It could be a full-time job, an adult groundhog eats more than a pound of grass, berries, leaves, and whatever else they can find.
