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I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo \u2026 but c\u2019mon, this Groundhog\u2019s Day business, let\u2019s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously.\u00a0 Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No Way is a groundhog going to see his shadow on Feb. 2nd<\/sup>.\u00a0 Even if we had<\/em> groundhogs!\u00a0 This thing just gives Science a bad name.\u00a0 And lately, the last thing it needs in these superstitious, fake news, impeachment trial, end-of-the-world times is a black eye over some mammalian hairball on the East Coast seeing its hairball shadow (or not) and then extrapolating that<\/em> to El Nino or asteroid strikes on Wall Street or global warming.<\/p>\n Which is precisely why some of the more empirically minded boyz down at the Mabana Body Shop have been searching, in a deductive sort of methodology, an alternative Predictor of winter longevity.\u00a0 Hellfire, if this Covid lockdown makes every day the same as the last one and the one coming tomorrow, we figure there\u2019s no point in fighting endless monotonous inevitability.\u00a0 We\u2019ll just pull the covers up, collect unemployment and wait patiently for our vaccinations.\u00a0 This is how civilizations thrive: \u00a0they figure out tides and seasons for planting schedules and harvest times and earlier happy hours.<\/p>\n The model the boyz constructed over the past decade or so is a local paradigm that utilizes a 5 gallon polyethylene bucket of fresh caught Dungeness crabs\u00a0 —- I KNOW you\u2019re going to point out they\u2019re illegal this time of season, but listen, we\u2019re putting em back when the data is collected.\u00a0 Spirit of the Law, if not the Letter and that, in a clamshell is the very essence of the South End Way. —- So you got a pail of clacking claws and now you bring out a dog, any<\/em> dog, any<\/em> breed, random sampling, see?\u00a0 And you let the pooch check out the crustaceans.\u00a0 No shadows, no hibernating drowsy marmots.\u00a0 And if the crab gets a lock on Snoopy\u2019s snout, voila, studies have shown that is a true omen of an early spring.\u00a0 The dog schnozz slips the noose, 6 more weeks of sleeping in.\u00a0 Or six more months of a spiking pandemic.\u00a0 Probably both.<\/p>\n Simple. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0Like Einstein says, the more elegant the theory, the higher the probability it\u2019s correct.\u00a0 And the boyz down at the body shop will tell you, the accuracy here is in the 90 percentile range, statistically astounding.\u00a0 We\u2019re not claiming, like those unabashed self -promoters in Pennsylvania, that this will predict spring or the end of Covid for the entire<\/em> country, but for all us Left Coasters, rest assured, Feb 2nd<\/sup> now has science as its bedrock foundation.\u00a0 We\u2019ll leave it to the South End Chamber of Commerce how they want to capitalize on it.\u00a0 Crab Dog Day.\u00a0 Nice profitable ring to it, don\u2019t you think, kind of like a cash register.\u00a0 If we can keep PETA at bay\u2026.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I love a good holiday as much as the next yahoo \u2026 but c\u2019mon, this Groundhog\u2019s Day business, let\u2019s be honest, the Chamber of Commerce out there in Pullmyleg, Pennsylvania has pulled a fast one on those of us who take meteorologic prediction seriously.\u00a0 Down here on the convergence zoned South End, No […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6],"tags":[5351,5350,5349],"class_list":["post-16321","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rantings-and-ravings","tag-6-more-weeks-of-winter","tag-crab-dog-day-prediction","tag-groundhog-day-substitute"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16321","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=16321"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16321\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16322,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16321\/revisions\/16322"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=16321"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=16321"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.skeeterdaddle.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=16321"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}