the groundhog day project

In my recent paper "From Charioteer Myth to Shoulder Angel: A Look at our Divided Soul" (2013) I detailed the connection between Plato's charioteer myth from Phaedrus and the modern phenomenon of the shoulder angel and shoulder devil--you know the thing: While I mentioned the early 90s television series Herman's Head , the ensemble cast of which included Ken Hudson Campbell, a.k.a. Man in Hallway, a.k.a. Chubby Man, in the paper, it was the one of my three papers I wrote in the fall that didn't include Groundhog Day . Today, while reading the rest of Benesh's (2011) dissertation, one of the notions I scribbled down--this one not related to anything in Benesh's piece--was about Phil's shoulder devil and shoulder angel... or rather his lack of the same. This is what I wrote down--along the right edge of my copy of the tournament schedule if you must know: Phil has no shoulder devil, only a shoulder angel. Why? Because the film is about dealing with...

I interrupted the "impromptu" tradition--previously here , here and here (that last one spilled into a part two )--last week to answer the obvious question people ask me about this blog: why? (To be fair, that's not usually the first question; the first question is something along the lines of "you're doing what?" with a sort of shocked, confused tone.) Today, I will not be interrupting... I don't think. I will be attempting to once again link impromptu speaking prompts to Groundhog Day . "Patriotism is the willingness to kill and be killed for trivial reasons." - Bertrand Russell I think it's necessary to broaden this one right off the bat to link it to Groundhog Day since, obviously, this film has next to nothing to do with patriotism. But, if we broaden this out to something bigger, it connects. See, I think this quotation is dealing not exclusively in "patriotism" but all -isms. When we subscribe to -isms, we set asi...