the groundhog day project

Every night, by cold bricks’ glow I watch the shadow rising from this old man in the snow. At 8:02 we let it go. At 8:02 we let it go. Let’s just get on with this, already. Jedson O’Reilly is the only homeless person in Punxsutawney. He dies alone in an alley on the biggest holiday in town. The people of (film-)Punxsutawney are assholes. Evidence, you ask? In 2012, as published in the Punxsutawney Spirit , Community Action, Inc. performed a survey of “unsheltered homeless individuals” in Jefferson County, PA. The county’s total population was listed at 44,764. The survey found there to be only 8 individuals “identified as being unsheltered homeless in accordance with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's (HUD) definition.” (To be fair, “The HUD defines a household as "unsheltered homeless) only when the individual or individuals are residing in a place not meant for human habitation, such as cars, parks, sidewalks, abandoned buildings or the street. It...

I was going to open with the following: The people of Punxsutawney, PA are assholes. And, this is why. They've got one homeless guy in the entire town, and they can afford to have a whole lot of groundhog banners and groundhog trashcans, not to mention that stage on Gobbler's Knob and all those Inner Circle guys' fancy suits, but they can't help out one nice old guy with a meal and a warm place to be? Then, I got sidetracked by math. To demonstrate that Punxsutawney was small enough that we can assume only the one homeless guy exists, I wanted to figure out just how populated Punxsutawney is. Mind you, I don't mean the real-world Punxsutawney but the film version. The film version of Punxsutawney is significantly smaller (in population) than the real one. I started by thinking the movie didn't tell us the population (a mistake I realized pretty quickly). So I looked up Punxsutawney's population, 5,962 as of 2010, closer to 7,000 in 1990 (the film presumab...