Punxsutawney Phil Sees His Shadow, Ruins Everything (Happy Groundhog Day!)

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  • Source: www.washingtonpost.com / Via: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/capital-weather-gang/wp/2015/02/02/groundhog-day-2015-punxsutawney-phil-sees-shadow-predicts-six-more-weeks-of-winter/

    It’s Groundhog Day and the world’s cutest weather forecaster (next to KCBS’s Jackie Johnson) has some bad news: it looks like we’re going to have six more weeks of winter.

    The rules work like this, in case you also had never bothered to look it up: they put the groundhog in a tree stump, and then on this day every year either he sees his shadow and goes back in to sleep for another six weeks…

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    … which means that there’s going to be more winter since Groundhogs hibernate during the winter. Or he sees that the weather is moderate and sticks around, which means we’ll have an early Spring!

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    You can check out the festive, still very endearing and weirdly cult-like ritual taking place in the video above.

    Reports say, though, that Punxsutawney Phil’s predictions have been getting alarmingly less and less accurate, bringing his accuracy score increasingly closer to that of his human meteorologist counterparts. But that hopefully won’t stop this from remaining a long-standing and fun tradition for everyone to spend two minutes looking at every year.

    The groundhog has been predicting the weather since 1887, and people of Punxsutawney maintain that there is only one Phil, even though groundhogs live for about six years. So Punxsutawney Phil, whose full name is Punxsutawney Phil Sowerby, can not only see into the future, but is actually immortal.

    According to Accuweather, the groundhog has an 80% accuracy rate, though, so make sure to bundle up for the rest of this long winter. Brrrrrrrr!

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