Or maybe the better word is 'snubbed'? We got up this morning in time to join the Prediction live over the international Wiarton Willie media coverage ...

• pulled up the willie website, and it was slow going to get it, but all it said was a few stock paragraphs about birds and flowers of spring and a link to someone's old video. the sidebar-link said "Willie Festival" but that lead us to the Town homepage where the one and only Willie icon link lead us right back to that canned blurb on spring!
• headed over to the CFOS website -- dang, their live feed requires RealPlayer, and like, who uses RealPlayer anymore?? No time for a software download and installation (probably wouldn't have the ancient proprietary codecs anyway) so, time ticking closer to the magic moment, we take an alternative plan: Dear, where is our radio?
• checked 560: A syndicated gardening show? Checked 106FM, two tunes back to back right at prediction moment?? CBC was some sort of talk show about aging boomer music biz moguls (ie their usual show) and down the dial all we got was noise.
• Even his own webcam appears to have been switched off. Total media blackout.
• Some time later, CFOS-news did post a one-liner on their news page, followed by some paragraphs of canned text for the benefit of those who live under rocks and have never heard of 'groundhog day' or the rules of its engagement.

That's it?? What's with that? Are the media ignoring Willie? Even the local media? Even the town media?? Or could it be they'd taken to heart my suggestion of imposing a media black-out, for the same reason the Leafs do it, so that if you want to know the score, you gotta be here! :)

I wonder how our bidder felt, having spent $1700 hoping to buy a media splash only to find that, here in Ontario, the media close up and switch on the answering machines every Friday at 5pm, thank you for calling, office hours are ...

and over some heads too

So we settled into some waffles and watching the snow fall. Out of nowhere, the Grade Four'er says, "My teacher says Willie is almost never right."

what???

The fiasco of modern education never ceases to amaze me, and I suppose I should have expected such, given the other nonesense they hand out to the kids (such as the regular Temperance lectures) but this, this one was just going too far.

"Your 'Teacher' has never read a book on astronomy," I began, "Nor any on cognitive science and complementary perception."

Nor, I daresay, has she the least inkling of Joseph Campbell, but I left that out, this having already bubbled to the fore over their nixing of the presentation based on heroic epic material from Star Wars

"The simple fact, as is plain even from Wikipedia, is that our 'Spring' starts at the precise moment when Right Ascension equals exactly zero hours, zero minutes and zero seconds. It is reliable, precise and repeated every year, without fail, without error, without question."

"What Willie tells us," I went on, being on a roll pontificated by the freshly brewed coffee, "is precisely correct, infallible and completely accurate:

'Six more weeks
or a month and a half'

"Which is to say, 42 days and a bit, which, being a dividing line boundary condition, in human perceptual terms can be restated, 'Is the cup half empty, or is it half full?'"

Old Willie was quite explicit about this, In the famous autobiography dictated to Mother Nature circa 1998: Spring is a celestial event -- if we wish to take this natural fact as reason to party, if we wished to do the human thing and divide ourselves into half-empty/half-full delineated teams for some friendly scrum, hey, that's what the ancient Imbolg Festival of Brede is all about!

"Almost never right" my a---

Willie is more right than our educators dare to imagine. And so is Phil, and Gen. Beauregard too. In ancient times they used the Stonehenge to mark this day. Today, we use a wild animal, but it is no less correct in principle, or in effect.

Happy early-spring, everyone.