{"id":111,"date":"2006-02-02T04:52:22","date_gmt":"2006-02-02T12:52:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/songoose.com\/?p=111"},"modified":"2025-07-22T18:37:59","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T18:37:59","slug":"happy-groundhog-day","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/?p=111","title":{"rendered":"Happy Groundhog Day!"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite obscure holidays, if only for the sheer absurdity of it. <a href=\"http:\/\/groundhog.org\/faq\/history.shtml\">Check out some history<\/a>. With the Stillers in the Big Game (starts with &#8220;S&#8221;, ends with &#8220;uper Bowl&#8221;, can&#8217;t say specifically for licensing reasons), Punxy, PA must be  one hell of a place to be this morning. (Not that it wasn&#8217;t already.) Imagine if the Iggles didn&#8217;t self destruct and got there too! <\/p>\n<p>I was also thinking about what a great but underappreciated movie Groundhog Day is. It really is one of the finest comedies of our generation&#8230; containing a nice balance of optimism and cynicism. It ends in a happy, romantic comedy way, but without being overly sentimental. Throughout the movie, however, Phil reaches depths of despair rarely seen in a Meg Ryan &#8211; Tom Hanks flick. I also like the way it leaves so much to the imagination &#8212; why did Phil end up in this situation? How? How long was he there? Most Hollywood movies must explain all this, but Ramis&#8217; genius left it all ambiguous. Lastly, its one of few movies that gets better the more you watch it. Each viewing adds another layer to the puzzle. I&#8217;ll be screening it tonight!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>One of my favorite obscure holidays, if only for the sheer absurdity of it. Check out some history. With the Stillers in the Big Game (starts with &#8220;S&#8221;, ends with &#8220;uper Bowl&#8221;, can&#8217;t say specifically for licensing reasons), Punxy, PA must be one hell of a place to be this morning. (Not that it wasn&#8217;t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-holidays"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=111"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":508,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111\/revisions\/508"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/archive.mikemadaio.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}