the groundhog day project

Let us get on with the end of Christmas. Today, let us be serious, maybe a little cynical. The key to any Christmas movie, to Christmas itself, is a year-end assessment of the year leading to it. Particularly, the whole naughty/nice thing. (Meanwhile, by the way, I’ve got the commentary track playing. Director Bob Clark and star Peter Billingsly. Nothing too exciting so far. Currently, after the Black Bart fantasy, Peter is talking about the cut Flash Gordon bit.) As the year comes to an end, we are told (quite explicitly as children) that someone has been watching us all year. There’s no point in being told this after the fact, of course. What matters is that we have the idea in our heads that someone is watching in the future. Like religion, it keeps us in line because of the idea that someone is keeping track of our actions. In my (2014) piece on Plato’s charioteer, I argued that even the simple dichotomy of angels and demons, in the form of that cartoon image of the two tiny o...

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...