the groundhog day project

Linking Groundhog Day to impromptu quotations--as I did here , here and here & here and here & here -- yesterday and the day before and it is not going as... I guess you could say smoothly. It's not going as smoothly as other days. I'm getting bogged down in details and the picking of nits--which obviously is not like me at all. As a regular reader of this blog, you would understand that I never obsess about anything to the point of picking it apart until it dies. Seriously though, how does something get labeled as a Danish Proverb when it is neither Danish nor a Proverb? But, then there's a bigger problem; spend too much time on "random" quotations and I miss the boat on larger things I could be doing. Like spending four days revisiting eternal recurrence or deja vu, or a whole week on some other topic... perhaps deja vu. I mean, just because Carl Sagan supposedly once said, "Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known," does...

Was too tired to do much linking of Groundhog Day to impromptu quotations--as I did here , here and here & here and here & here -- yesterday . So, now for some more: "What we obtain too cheap[ly] we esteem too little. It is dearness only that gives everything its value." - Thomas Paine An obvious one. What Phil Connors gets out of his life pre-loop or the early days of the loop are gains too easily gotten. He has shallow relationships. He steals money and (presumably) spends it absurdly. He Phil Connors Nancy rather than actually try to ask her out properly (which she might have said "yes" to). It is the stuff he gets later in the loop, the stuff he has to put real effort into, that holds "dearness." His ice sculpting, his piano playing, his saving of lives-- (Note: I do not include learning French, though one could argue it belongs on the list... one would be a presumptuous idealist, and maybe a moron, but one could argue it) --this i...

Today I will be once again linking Groundhog Day to various quotations used in an impromptu round at today's speech tournament (this one down in Long Beach)... as I did here , here and here & here and here & here . "Life is a challenge - meet it. Life is a song - sing it. Life is a dream - realize it. Life is a game - play it. Life is love - enjoy it." - Bhagawan Sri Sathya Sai Baba This quotation (like a few others I saw today) is almost too easy because it is so broad. But, I could make it (relatively) difficult by breaking it down. There are five parts to it. Groundhog Day links to each of those. Phil's life (both pre-loop and in-loop... and post-loop if I was right here ) is definitely a challenge. His good days, his bad days--they all take work. Even his worst days--the breaking-of-the-alarm-clock days and the suicide days--take work. He doesn't just hit a snooze button; he destroys that clock. And, he doesn't do the obvious (and possib...

It continues: "You know, my faith is one that admits some doubt." - Barack Obama Faith cannot be faith, here, obviously, if I want to link this to Groundhog Day . So, the question then becomes, what is faith? Faith is when we believe stuff without evidence. Pre-loop Phil believes he's better than he is, that he deserves more than other people... Well, I'd actually probably argue that he doesn't really believe that, but I think he would think he believes it. Contrary to the quotation, I don't think Phil's "faith" then allows for doubt. But, the loop changes that. It breaks down his barriers, his defenses, and gives him a whole lot to doubt about who he believed he was. But, that is cheating, because that isn't what the quotation is about. The quotation, I think, when taken on its own, suggests that faith should always admit doubts. I think this is actually a bad impromptu quotation, though, because it provides no conclusion with which t...

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...

Continuing from yesterday , like I have done twice before , it's impromptu quotation tie-in night. I meant to do all 21 quotations from round 2 of impromptu from yesterday's tournament, but I was apparently quite tired. I actually don't usually get so exhausted from a tournament as a coach as I used to get as a competitor, but it was a long three days. I've got a few weekends off now before another 3-day tournament. In the meantime, The Groundhog Day Project continues. "What I like in a good author is not what he says but what he whispers." - Logan Pearsall Smith. To tie this to Groundhog Day the first step is to broaden it a bit so it isn't all about authors--our quiet actions are more genuine than our louder actions, I might say. Our best actions are not the ones about which we take the time to boast. Pre-loop Phil Connors is the kind of guy who would boast about most anything he could. Rita calls him incredible--and just did this as the movie play...

Like I did a couple weeks ago and a couple weeks before that , it's impromptu quotation tie-in night. Took the team out to Northridge for the past three days, judged debate rounds Friday and Saturday, judged speeches today, including impromptu. So, once again, I've got my list--21 quotations this time--and I will now proceed to link Groundhog Day to everything on it. "I think Superman and Santa Claus are actually the same guy, and I'll tell you why. Both fly, both wear red, and both have a beard. - Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts While there's the obvious factual inaccuracy--done on purpose, of course, to be funny--I think I could interpret this quotation to suggest that really on some level we are all the same person. We are all fundamentally the same and this is, in fact, one of the lessons Phil Connors learns in Groundhog Day . When he first gets to Punxsutawney, he looks down on the locals, calls them "hicks" and wants nothing more than to get back to...

Speech tournament the past two days, and today I judged, among other things, impromptu again. So, just like I did two weeks ago , it's time to connect Groundhog Day to all the... well, round one of impromptu didn't use quotations today but rather "haikus." And, I put that in quotation marks because some of them are not haikus by the usual shallow standard of syllable count and none of them are haikus by the less shallow standard of being about nature. But, anyway, I've got 14 of them--two each for up to seven competitors--and so my task is now to link them all to Groundhog Day . We hunt perfection true love and our destiny but it hunts us too Starting off with an easy one, these lines epitomize Phil's journey quite well, depending on what we take perfection to mean. We could apply it to Rita, or Phil's idealized version of Rita. We could apply it to the idealized version of Phil as well. The tricky part is that last line. Arguably, Groundhog Day tells...

I must do this quickly. Not just because it is late at night and I have a deadline, but because to do it thoroughly and properly would just take too long and probably get far too boring. What am I going to be doing, you might ask. Well, I've mentioned that when I was competing in speech and debate I used Groundhog Day as an example in all but one of my impromptu rounds. Well, today was my first tournament as an official coach and one of the rounds I judged was impromptu, so I've got a nice sheet of quotations just itching to be linked to Groundhog Day . First, a brief explanation, in case you don't know how the event works: each speaker is given a bit of paper with three quotations on it. You pick one and take about 2 minutes to prepare a 5 minute speech built around the quotation. You have some attention getter, then you share the quotation you've picked, explain what you interpret it to mean, agree or disagree with it, and then you're off. The usual methods fo...