It’s 2 a.m. and we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time (CST) in Manitoba

Provincial governments come and go in Manitoba, like elsewhere, but one of things that doesn’t change is my email reminder around this time every year: “Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations reminds all Manitobans that daylight time will end in Manitoba early Sunday morning when clocks will be set back one hour,” the new NDP government’s Manitoba Municipal and Northern Relations department, presided over by Minister Ian Bushie, cheerily told me yesterday.

“Under the Official Time Act, daylight time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.

“The official time change back to central standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 5 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

So at 2 a.m. in the morrow, we’re snoozing into Sunday’s Central Standard Time, (CST) in Manitoba, with our gratitude renewed for Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming, who we thank profusely for the extra hour of sleep.

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us, at least until tomorrow, can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in early November is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.

Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party on New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explained to me years ago that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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A Year of COVID-19: Missing friends, missing the Hub and Strand Theatre in Thompson, Manitoba

Last night, I was wistful for a very long moment for the pre-pandemic, pre-COVID-19 world, as I spotted the Hub restaurant and the Strand Theatre straight ahead of me downtown on Churchill Drive here in Thompson, Manitoba. After almost a year of takeout cuisine, which I am indeed grateful for, the Hub’s dining room, and perhaps a very rare steak sandwich to enjoy in the company of friends, and/or a movie next-door at the Strand Theatre, reminded me of life before Code Red.

For the last year, I have like many, many other people around the world, focused primarily on the present and putting one foot in front of the other and moving forward, one day at a time. It can be exhausting. Last March, the calendar may have said 31 days, but in truth it was the month without end.

One of the most chilling things, and there have been many, that I’ve heard to date during the COVID-19 pandemic, was this audio clip posted on Twitter last March 21. I heard this brief 30-second clip on Twitter March 24, 2020, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. Aside from the subject matter, there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out, with this message:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

On March 30, I wrote on Facebook: “Consider this. Ordered earlier this month to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the U.S.Navy hospital ship USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday and arrived in New York Harbor this morning.

“The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

“Picture this.

“What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20) must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon.”

The following day, on March 31, 2020, I posted again on Facebook, “Waking up every morning in March 2020: ‘Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations'” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg).

I’ve read, thought and written a fair bit about pandemics and the like over the last 30 years. More than a decade ago on Dec. 4, 2010, when I was editing the Thompson Citizen and Nickel Belt News, I penned a story headlined, “Potential influenza pandemic on Garden Hill First Nation, MKO says: Surrounding Island Lake First Nations may also be under the flu gun.”

I wrote: “The novel H1N1 influenza pandemic, which started in Mexico in March 2009, albeit with relatively mild symptoms in most cases, was the first pandemic since the Hong Kong Flu of 1968. It originated in Guangdong Province in southeast China, but the first record of the outbreak was in Hong Kong on July 13, 1968.

“By the end of July, extensive outbreaks were reported in Vietnam and Singapore. By September 1968, Hong Kong Flu reached India, Philippines, northern Australia and Europe. That same month, the virus entered California via returning Vietnam War troops but did not become widespread in the North American until December 1968.

“A vaccine became available in 1969 one month after the Hong Kong flu pandemic peaked in North America. About a million people died worldwide in what are described as “excess” death beyond what be expected in a normal flu season, but still only half the mortality rate of the Asian flu a decade earlier. H1N1 swine flu is the first worldwide influenza pandemic since the Hong Flu of 1968-69.

“A decade earlier, the Asian Flu pandemic of 1957 was an outbreak of avian-origin H2N2 influenza that originated in China in early 1956 and lasted until 1958. It originated from mutation in wild ducks combining with a pre-existing human strain. The virus was first identified in Guizhou and spread to Singapore in February 1957, reaching Hong Kong by April and the United States and Canada by June 1957. Estimates of worldwide deaths caused by the Asian Flu pandemic vary, but the World Health Organization believes it is about two million.

“The Asian Flu strain later mutated through antigenic drift into H3N2, resulting in the milder Hong Kong Flu pandemic of 1968 and 1969.

“Influenza A viruses are classified into subtypes on the basis of two surface proteins: hemagglutinin (H) and neuraminidase (N).

“Three subtypes of hemagglutinin (H1, H2 and H3) and two subtypes of neuraminidase (N1 and N2) are recognized among influenza A viruses that have caused widespread human disease, says the Public Health Agency of Canada. “Since 1977 the human H3N2 and human H1N1 influenza A subtypes have contributed to influenza illness to varying degrees each year. It is not yet known if this pattern will be altered by the emergence of the 2009 pandemic virus [A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)]. Immunity to the H and N antigens reduces the likelihood of infection and lessens the severity of disease if infection occurs.”

“Influenza B viruses have evolved into two antigenically distinct lineages since the mid-1980s, represented by B/Yamagata/16/88-like and B/Victoria/2/87-like viruses. Viruses of the B/Yamagata lineage accounted for the majority of isolates in most countries between 1990 and 2001. Viruses belonging to the B/Victoria lineage were not identified outside of Asia between 1991 and 2001, but in March 2001 they re-emerged for the first time in a decade in North America. Since then, viruses from both the B/Yamagata and B/Victoria lineages have variously contributed to influenza illness each year.

“The antigenic characteristics of current and emerging influenza virus strains include A/California/7/2009 (H1N1)-like, A/Perth/16/2009 (H3N2)-like and B/Brisbane/60/2008 (Victoria lineage)-like antigens.”

On Nov. 1, 2019, just before a likely, but not yet conclusively proven, viral species jump to humans, in or around Wuhan, China, that likely sparked  the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus SARS-CoV-2, more commonly known as COVID-19, I posted on Facebook on time-lapse tracking of the transmission and evolution of Influenza A (H7N9), the most deadly flu on Earth, which has been circulating in China for the last five years or so. It has a mortality rate of 40 per cent, making it about 200 times more deadly than 2018’s Influenza A (H3N2) flu virus that circulated in Canada.

While influenza isn’t a coronavirus, some of the arguments I made on Oct. 16, 2013 in a editorial for the Thompson Citizen, might sound somewhat  familiar today, “Even if the influenza vaccine only prevents infection 60 per cent to 70 per cent of the time, in the best of cases – meaning that of every 10 people who would have gotten the flu without the shot, three or four still will – flu shots have proven to be effective in slowing the virus down and helping to limit the spread of pandemics,” I wrote. “On the balance of probabilities, you hopefully are helping yourself in getting a flu shot, but you’re almost certainly in any event being altruistic in helping the rest of us in the general population by slowing the spread the virus down.”

I’ve also blogged in soundingsjohnbarker on such esoteric topics as blog posts on “Black Death: Not so bad?” in 2014, “What if the 22nd century means staying at home with long-distance travel a thing of the past?” in 2015, “A still bigger picture: Médecins Sans Frontières’ (MSF), Samaritan’s Purse, ZMapp and the 2014 Ebola Crisis” in 2018 and, more recently, “The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’” in 2020

Thirty years ago, I wrote a third-year history essay at Trent way back in 1991 about ergot poisoning, from a fungus that commonly forms in wheat, rye, and other grains, and is now known to cause such symptoms as convulsions, vomiting, and hallucinations, possibly triggering the events leading to the Salem witch trials in Massachusetts between February 1692 and May 1693. In 2006. I read Laurie Garrett’s landmark 1994 book, “The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance.”

In 2011, Megan O’Brien was able to tell me she could bring in on inter-library loan to the Thompson Public Library for me a copy of “The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague Of All Time” by John Kelly, published in 2005.

Four years later, I borrowed an audio book version from University College of the North’s Wellington & Madeleine Spence Memorial Library on the Thompson Campus of “Station Eleven”, New York City writer Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel published in 2014, and centred around the fictional “Georgia Flu” pandemic, which is so lethal, and named after the former Soviet republic, that within weeks, most of the world’s population has been killed and “all countries and borders have vanished.”

In 2017, also from the UCN library here, I borrowed “The Plague”, a novel by Albert Camus, published in 1947, that tells the story from the point of view of an unknown narrator of a plague sweeping the French Algerian city of Oran.

I spent Mondays between 5 p.m. and 6 p.m. in a comfortable orange chair on the third floor of UCN during the fall of 2019 reading John M. Barry’s book “The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History”, chronicling the 1918-19 Spanish Flu pandemic. Barry is an adjunct member of faculty at the Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine in New Orleans.

So, yes, I had some idea of what a pandemic might look like when it arrived a year ago and it did turn out indeed to be the fire this time.

Knowing might be good preparation. But you can only know so much. Nowhere had I read in advance to get ready for a pandemic where perhaps one out of every three carriers might be showing no symptoms and feeling just fine while shedding the virus and transmitting a disease, with multiple variants now, and that varies so much in its effects from person to person. The Chimera, according to Greek mythology, was a monstrous fire-breathing hybrid creature. COVID-19 is its progeny.

And no matter how much you know, it’s not the same as the lived experience of a pandemic where “mask up” is the imperative public health-ordered emergency non-pharmaceutical intervention that taken to brain and heart, along with six-foot physical so-called “social distancing” and restricted travel, might just some day mean dinner at the Hub and a movie at the Strand Theatre again.

That might seem like a distant hope at the moment, and I suppose it is, but I am mindful that individual actions can collectively matter, and instead of the “twindemic” of influenza and COVID-19 public health epidemiologists feared last spring for this winter, the start of the annual flu season in the Northern Hemisphere has been very quiet to date, much like it was in the Southern Hemisphere during their winter season last year during our summer. Since September, the CDC “FluView” – its weekly report on influenza surveillance – has shown all 50 states in shades of green and chartreuse, indicating “minimal” or “low” flu activity. Normally by December, at least some states are painted in oranges and reds for “moderate” and “high.”

In the Southern Hemisphere, where winter stretches from June through August, widespread mask-wearing, rigorous lockdowns and other precautions against Covid-19 transmission drove the flu down to record-low levels. Southern Hemisphere countries help “reseed” influenza viruses in the Northern Hemisphere each year, so a good flu season here year “Down Under” often, not always, means we can reasonably hope for one in the Northern Hemisphere.

And some of it is just seasonal variability. Some flu seasons are worse than others. Flu viruses mutate far more than coronaviruses through antigenic drift, hence the need for a different combination flu vaccine every year.

Since last February, COVID-19 has killed more than 430,000 people in the United States, more  than influenza has in the last five years, notes the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.in Baltimore. COVID-19 has a higher severe disease and mortality rate than influenza in all age groups, except perhaps children under the age of 12. “Influenza is a significant burden on the population, but COVID-19 has had a vastly larger effect,” Johns Hopkins says.

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COVID-19: The fire that darkened the world in 2020

Eight months ago today, I wrote my first post on the current coronavirus pandemic, and in a headline asked, ‘The fire this time? Pandemic prose, and waiting and watching for the ‘big one’ (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2020/01/23/the-fire-this-time-pandemic-prose-and-waiting-and-watching-for-the-big-one/).

I penned those words on a cold winter January night. At that time, COVID-19 hadn’t been invented by the World Health Organization (WHO), as the official moniker for what was then simply known provisionally as Novel Coronavirus 2019-n, or CoV2019-nCoV, designating it as a novel coronavirus discovered last year. The Coronavirus Study Group (CSG) of the International Committee on Taxonomy of Viruses, which is the entity within the International Union of Microbiological Societies, founded in 1927 as the International Society for Microbiology, and responsible for developing the official classification of viruses and taxa naming (taxonomy) of the Coronaviridae family, proposed the naming convention SARS-CoV-2. On Jan. 23, when I first wrote about it, the WHO was still a week away from designating the newly-discovered coronavirus a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). The WHO then waited another six weeks almost until March 11 to decide a global pandemic was under way.

As summer has given way to September’s still unseasonably warm autumn here in Northern Manitoba, the question mark, of course, can be dropped. It is indeed the fire this time. Except when it is not. That is the paradox of COVID-19. The vast majority of people infected with COVID-19 will recover. The elderly and those of any age group with comorbidities are at greatest risk. Except there will be apparently otherwise healthy young people who die of COVID-19, too. Many, in fact, although nothing like their elders.

People infected with the flu almost always get sick. They are rarely asymptomatic. Many people with COVID-19 are asymptomatic, presymptomatic, or only mildly symptomatic, but contagious in any of those three states, making them walking viral bombs. The estimate of a virus’s contagiousness is captured in a variable called R-naught (R0), or basic reproduction number, and is a key number used in infectious disease modelling for estimating pandemic growth rate. Seasonal flu has an R0 of 1.3, while measles is highly contagious with an R0 between 12 and 18. By way of historical comparison, the the R0 of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic is estimated to have been between 1.4 and 2.8, which is within the range COVID-19 falls currently in many parts of the world.

COVID-19 has officially killed more than 200,000 people in the United States alone over the last eight months.

It is indeed the fire this time.

The 1918 influenza pandemic, widely known as the “Spanish Flu,” killed about 675,000 people in the United States, and perhaps 50 million worldwide, in a much less populated smaller world, As of mid-afternoon Sept. 22, the WHO reported there have been 31,174,627 confirmed cases worldwide of COVID-19, including 962,613 deaths.

COVID-19 in just eight months has killed almost 30 per cent of the number of Americans who died over three years between 1918 and 1920 of Spanish Flu, the worst global pandemic of modern times.

How does COVID-19 stack up against a more “normal” modern American five-to-six month flu season? The Atlanta-based Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reports preliminary estimates from the 2018-19 flu season, the most recent data available, shows 34,157 deaths. Estimates from the 2018-2019 season are still considered preliminary and may change as data is finalized, the CDC notes. Looking back over the last decade to 2010, estimated influenza deaths in the United States ranged from a low of 12,000 to a high of 61,000.

The case fatality rate for COVID-19 in the United States is currently 2.9 per cent. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center (CRC) in Baltimore says Canada has reported 9,279 COVID-19 deaths with a case fatality rate of 6.3 per cent.

For seasonal influenza, mortality is usually well below 0.1 per cent, the WHO says. Countries throughout the world have reported very different case fatality ratios – the number of deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases. Differences in mortality numbers can be caused by:

• differences in the number of people tested: With more testing, more people with milder cases are identified. This lowers the case-fatality ratio;.
• demographics: For example, mortality tends to be higher in older populations;.
• characteristics of the healthcare system: For example, mortality may rise as hospitals become overwhelmed and have fewer resources.

As for either a vaccine or herd immunity being the magic bullet to defeat COVID-19, consider the so-called common cold. The U.S. National Library of Medicine, an institute with the National Institutes of Health, notes there are now seven human coronaviruses (HCoVs) associated with upper respiratory tract infections that sometime spread to the lungs and other organs. Epidemiological studies suggest that HCoVs account for 15 to 30 per cent of common colds.

Are you aware of a vaccine for the common cold? Are you immune to catching colds?

Coronaviruses are enveloped positive-strand RNA viruses from the Coronaviridae family. Making a safe and effective vaccine is far more complex than making batches of an annual flu vaccine. And while herd immunity has been a factor in mitigating some disease pandemics, including influenza, the evidence that could happen with a coronavirus such as COVID-19 is preliminary and inconclusive at best.

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The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

The World is now Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood.

The daily educational program for children debuted on PBS in 1968, after two smaller runs – in 1961 with Misterogers on the CBC, and in 1966 with Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood on the Boston-based Eastern Educational Network, a forerunner to the Public Broadcasting Service. Every day, Fred Rogers would get home from work, put on a cardigan and sneakers, and talk to his neighbours, delivering lessons on friendship, love, kindness, acceptance, and more. Viewers were an important part of the neighborhood, too. Now, the world is a great social laboratory for putting the ideas and values of Fred Rogers into everyday practice in a time of life and death – a time of the continuous present, without past or future.

As the world hits bottom – which may paradoxically be when it hits the peak for COVID-19 cases, which in the United States, now the world epicentre of the coronavirus pandemic, may come in about two weeks time in mid-April – there will be, and already are around the world, early signs of recovery of a better us, and of a better world.

It is still both late days and early days simultaneously, but the 85-year-old argot of personal recovery can be applied now to public recovery, as well, I think: “One day at a time” and “just for today” should no longer be thought of as just private lifesaving advice for recovering alcoholics and addicts, but a public signpost for all for the rebuilding task that will be ahead, one person and one community at a time. The 12-step movement, dates back to June 1935, when Bill Wilson, a failed New York City stockbroker, and Dr. Bob Smith, an Akron, Ohio physician, both recently or newly sober (particularly Dr. Bob, although Bill W. wasn’t that many months ahead of him on the sobriety curve) became friends and Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) was born in Ohio. Both sayings, “one day at a time” and “just for today” are used interchangeably as both verbal slogans and written mottoes, the former coming from AA, and the latter, also a prayer to some, and a poem to others, from Narcotics Anonymous (NA), formed in 1953. They have proved useful as something pithy and easily grasped by the still-suffering in the early days of recovery, grasping for something tangible to hang onto for just one more second, minute, hour or day, grasping for those words every bit as much as a drowning person grasps for the rung on the ladder or life preserver.

Which is probably as good a description as any of the COVID-19 world we live in today, with a March that has birthed a dread spring in a month that seemingly never ends, where waking up every morning in March 2020 has been like having the voice of Capt. Jean-Luc Picard as a personal alarm clock inside my head, uttering such classic Star Trek lines as “damage report’ and “Red alert. All hands stand to battle stations” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV30YwXaKJg&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1c8IoTcgboKQu3u12DNJ_rRNzvH6k0ZNDK3p3b3KLEGBIZLJ4ktx6XBMI).

Fortunately, Gene Roddenberry has been a reminder to me since 1966 that character, courage and goodness are not proprietary virtues of the religious, non-religious, believers or non-believers. We all can and do share in them. And we’re going to need those virtues, and all of us, believers and non-believers, in the days ahead. In this month of unbelievable sounds and images, where the next day’s sounds and images routinely exceeds the horror and scale of the previous day, two stand out for me, one very well known, the other not so much. The first is the image of the floating hospital United States Navy Ship (USNS) Comfort as it entered New York Harbor March 30 during the Biological Armageddon coronavirus pandemic response in New York City. Mike Segar’s photograph for Reuters illustrates why it is often said “a picture is worth a thousand words.”

Ordered to “lean forward,” a military term familiar to those who serve in the United States Navy, meaning the willingness to be aggressive, to take risks, the USNS Comfort (T-AH-20), homeported at Naval Station Norfolk, Virginia, sailed from port up the Atlantic seaboard Saturday. What those sailors, military doctors and nurses, officers, enlisted personnel and civilians aboard the Comfort must have been thinking as they answered the call of duty and sailed north into a Biological Armageddon. The Comfort will provide relief for New York hospitals by taking on non-COVID-19 cases and allowing the hospitals to focus on the most critical patients suffering from the virus.

The second that stands out for me is a brief audio clip I heard on Twitter March 24, the day after the “surge” hit New York City. Tim Mak is National Public Radio (NPR’s) Washington investigative correspondent – and an emergency medical technician (EMT), which is how he got the message. It is the most chilling on the pandemic I have heard to date. I think that’s because of both the subject matter, but also because there is something eerie about that electronically-generated voice on the automated message that went out:

“This an emergency message. This is a priority request for D.C. MRC volunteers (District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC)…” (https://twitter.com/i/status/1241471610395267084)

The automated message went out March 21 to health care professionals in Washington, D.C.

The District of Columbia (DC) Medical Reserve Corps (DC MRC) supports the DC Department of Health (DC Health) in its role as lead for public health and medical emergency preparedness, response and recovery by recruiting, training, and deploying medical and non-medical volunteers to assist with planned events and emergencies.

Roddenberry, a Southern Baptist-turned humanist, held and spoke a truth held and spoken by another Southern Baptist, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and others before him: the universe unfolds as it indeed should, and the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. A perfect illustration of this is “Lower Decks,” the 167th episode of the series and the 15th episode of the seventh and final season, which originally aired on Feb. 7, 1994. With remarkable simplicity and brevity, these five sentences from Picard are offered in a ship-wide address from the captain’s ready room off the bridge when Ensign Sito Jaxa, a Bajoran Starfleet officer serving aboard the USS Enterprise, is killed on a covert mission in the line of duty (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2018/09/24/church-of-star-trek-the-next-generation-and-the-moral-arc-of-the-universe/):

“‘To all Starfleet personnel, this is the Captain. It is my sad duty to inform you that a member of the crew, Ensign Sito Jaxa, has been lost in the line of duty. She was the finest example of a Starfleet officer, and a young woman of remarkable courage and strength of character. Her loss will be deeply felt by all who knew her. Picard out’.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40XUt1HU5H8&feature=share)

Writing a decade after Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in his 1978  book, Robert Kennedy and His Times, the American historian, Arthur M. Schlesinger, commenting in the foreword, said Kennedy “possessed to an exceptional degree what T. S. Eliot called an ‘experiencing nature.’ History changed him, and, had time permitted, he might have changed history. His relationship to his age makes him, I believe, a ‘representative man’ in Emerson’s phrase – one who embodies the consciousness of an epoch, who perceives things in fresh lights and new connections, who exhibits unsuspected possibilities of purpose and action to his contemporaries.”

Such men and women arise from unexpected and unlikely places.

Abraham Lincoln, who in a speech delivered on June 17, 1858, at the close of the Republican state convention at the Illinois State Capitol in Springfield, reaching back to the first century and the words of the Apostle Saint Mark the Evangelist (“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand”) gave what would become one of the most famous speeches in American history.

Said Lincoln on that late spring day: “A house divided against itself cannot stand. I believe this government cannot endure permanently half slave and half free … It will become all one thing, or all the other.”

Five years later, he gave the most famous speech in American history. Republican President Abraham Lincoln’s 273-word “Gettysburg Address,” lasted less than two minutes, and was delivered at Gettysburg, Pennsylvania on Nov. 19, 1863. Edward Everett, the former senator and secretary of state – and brilliant Massachusetts orator – who, without notes for two hours, preceded President Lincoln in speaking at Gettysburg, gave a brilliant speech that day, as expected, but Lincoln happened to follow with what we now remember as the “Gettysburg Address.” Lincoln’s speech immediately struck a chord and remains the best-known speech in American history more than 150 years after it was given. Everett wrote a letter to Lincoln the day after their speeches, saying, “I should be glad, if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

Said Lincoln that long-ago November day: “Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

“Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

“But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate – we can not consecrate – we can not hallow — this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us – that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion – that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain – that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.” (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U2a-S3rjDBw&feature=share&fbclid=IwAR1LKNwMramCkVoodunLwy1SGqQFCBsejS5cLU9Q0TgVYPPPGs7pFUBxdJw)

I wrote about AIDS in the 1980s. And I remember the climate of fear in 1986 that reporters were not untouched by when we were assigned stories that meant going inside provincial reformatories and federal penitentiaries to interview HIV-positive prisoners in Ontario. The high callings of journalism are to speak truth to power, as well as comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. But exactly how AIDS was transmitted in terms of morbidity and mortality was not completely understood 35 years ago. So I watched with surprise and unexpected admiration as C. Everett Koop, an evangelical Christian, who served as surgeon general under U.S. Republican president Ronald Reagan from 1982 to 1989, and was well known for wearing his uniform as a vice admiral of the United States Public Health Service Commissioned Corps, had the singular political courage to speak the truth about the science of AIDS as our knowledge increased. According to the Washington Post, “Koop was the only surgeon general to become a household name” (https://soundingsjohnbarker.wordpress.com/2015/01/15/empathy-and-compassion-are-the-gifts-of-our-shared-human-experience/).

Former U.S. president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, also got it right in his first inaugural address Jan. 20, 1993 when he said, ”by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring … we recognize a simple but powerful truth – we need each other. And we must care for one another.” He went on to say, we are “tempered by the knowledge that, but for fate, we – the fortunate and the unfortunate – might have been each other.”

Guardian columnist George Monbiot argued yesterday that power has “migrated not just from private money to the state, but from both market and state to another place altogether: the commons. All over the world, communities have mobilized where governments have failed.”

Joanne Rogers is 92 and the widow of Fred Rogers. She has been getting a lot of telephone calls at her apartment in Pittsburgh, says Los Angeles Times staff writer Amy Kaufman in a March 29 story wondering what Mister Rogers, who died in 2005 at the age of 74, would say and do to cope with the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic?

“When Fred was a boy and scary things would happen to him, his mother used to tell him: ‘Freddy, look for the helpers.’ So he would have talked about the helpers,” Joanne said.

“Helpers,” she explained, are those individuals who – even at the height of global chaos – try to find a way to ease the burden for others; folks such as doctors, nurses, grocery store cashiers, and mail carriers.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Vanquishing the Vortex: Punxsutawney Phil and Wiarton Willie rise to the rescue

Truth be told, if Thompson, Manitoba had a groundhog prognosticator when the sun rose several hours ago at 8:24 a.m. Central Standard Time (CST), he or she would very likely have predicted a short winter of only four more weeks because they probably wouldn’t have seen their shadow under mainly cloudy skies. Mind you, the groundhog would by lying. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2?

Still, it could be worse. While Environment Canada again has us flagged under a red “Extreme Cold Warning” banner in its online weather forecast for Thompson today, the actual text of the bulletin helpfully notes, “The extreme wind chill has already abated for Thompson region but will likely redevelop tonight.” If you want to check out places with weather comparable to Thompson, you’d do well, says WeatherSpark, to check out of the Russian communities of Bayanday, (53°04′N latitude), and Mago  (53° 15′ 05″ N latitude) in southeastern Siberia and central Asia, somewhere north of Ulaanbaatar, (Ulan Bator), the capital of Mongolia, another well-known world hotspot. Thompson is located at 55.7433° N latitude. WeatherSpark, was started by James Diebel, an American, and Jacob Norda, a Swede. Thompson’s fun weather facts are available online through their WeatherSpark website at: http://weatherspark.com/averages/28377/Thompson-Manitoba-Canada

Diebel, born and raised in Wisconsin, has a bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics and astronautics, and mathematics from University of Wisconsin, and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, and Norda, born and raised in Sweden, holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Linköping Institute of Technology. They teamed up and started Vector Magic, now known as Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc., in December 2007. Their weather facts are based on historical records dating back to 1988. Cedar Lake Ventures is located in the Minneapolis area in Excelsior, Minnesota. Diebel lives in the Minneapolis area, while Norda has lived in the San Francisco Bay Area since 2001.

While Thompson may well be in for another eight weeks or so of winter, whether it be under sunny or cloudy skies, Punxsutawney Phil, from Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, and Wiarton Willie from South Bruce County, Ontario, did their parts this morning to putting paid to polar and vanquishing the vortex elsewhere, first described as the polar vortex as early as 1853, by predicting an early spring.  Punxsutawney Phil emerged from his burrow around 7:30 a.m. EST and did not see his shadow, predicting an early spring. “Faithful followers, there is no shadow of me and a beautiful spring it shall be,” a member of Phil’s Inner Circle read from the groundhog’s prediction scroll to the cheers and applause from the crowd. As the legend goes, if Phil sees his shadow, he considers it an “omen” of six more weeks of bad weather and heads back into his hole. If it’s cloudy and he doesn’t, you can put away that winter coat sooner than expected. Robert Buckle, mayor of the Town of South Bruce, which includes Wiarton, said Wiarton Willie had tweeted at 7:08 a.m. “So, my #prediction is #official. I didn’t see my shadow so an early spring it is.” (#officialprediction #earlyspring #WiartonWillie #Wiarton #PredictionMorning #GroundhogDay).

Rumour has it there were some groundhog dissenters to the early spring forecast, including Shubenacadie Sam. My one and only time covering a furry prognosticator came on Feb.2, 2000, when I was working for the Chronicle Herald’ s Truro bureau in Nova Scotia, and found myself that February morning assigned to go down to Shubenacadie, about 37 kilometres southwest of Truro in Hants County in central Nova Scotia, to cover the predictive prowess of Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia’s most famous groundhog prognosticator. As well as Shubenacadie Sam, Punxsutawney Phil, and Wiarton Willie, other famous woodchuck prognosticators include (or have included), Manitoba’s own Winnipeg Willow, Manitoba Merv, and Winnipeg Wyn, who called for another six weeks of winter today after seeing her shadow.

In his 2002 book, The Day Niagara Falls Ran Dry, one of my favourites climatologists, David Phillips, cited a survey of 40 years of weather data from 13 Canadian cities, which concluded there was an equal number of cloudy and sunny days on Feb. 2 – and during that time, the groundhogs’ predictions were right only 37 per cent of the time. Sounds a bit like professional jealousy to me.  While NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration based in Washington, D.C. claims seven-day forecasts can now accurately predict the weather about 80 percent of the time and a five-day forecast can accurately predict the weather approximately 90 percent of the time, common sense tells us that can’t be true. Talk about fake news. We all know that the last day of a five or seven-day forecast is wildly hyped at the beginning of the period to be much nicer than it will turn out in reality when that day finally arrives five or seven days later. They hope, short-term memory being what it and all, that’s you’ll simply forget by day five or seven. If you don’t believe me, find out the truth for yourself by taking a look at the clip “Seven Day Forecast” from the Rick Mercer Report (https://www.cbc.ca/mercerreport/videos/clips/seven-day-forecast). In the past decade, Phil has predicted a longer winter seven times and an early spring three times. He was only right about 40 per cent of the time, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which says the groundhog shows “no predictive skill” (https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/customer-support/education-resources/groundhog-day).

Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal – the hedgehog – as a means of predicting weather. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its burrow Feb. 2 – where the main entrance is often by a tree stump or rock and is usually conspicuous because of a pile of freshly excavated earth, with side entrances also and tunnels leading to an enlarged chamber three to six feet underground containing the nest – and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring.

Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition,” although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State,” A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes.  Clymer H. Freas, city editor of The Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper is credited with printing the news of the first observance in 1886 (one year before the first trek to Gobbler’s Knob) on Feb. 2, 1887, where Groundhog Day, featuring the rodent meteorologist, was first celebrated for the first time in Punxsutawney.) “Today is groundhog day and up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow,” he  wrote. Freas, who belonged to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney, who would later be called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, declared that “Punxsutawney Phil,” as the groundhog was named, was the “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary” and Punxsutawney, named by the Lenape or Delawares, and located halfway between the Allegheny and the Susquehanna rivers,  90 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, was henceforth to be known as the “Weather Capital of the World.”

The earliest American reference to Groundhog Day dates back to Feb. 4, 1841 and is found in the diary of Morgantown, Berks County,  Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris, and can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. Morris wrote: “Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”

According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, “insects do not bother groundhogs and germs pretty much leave them alone. They are resistant to the plagues that periodically wipe out large numbers of wild animals. One reason for this is their cleanliness.

“Groundhogs are one of the few animals that really hibernate,” the club says. “Hibernation is not just a deep sleep. It is actually a deep coma, where the body temperature drops to a few degrees above freezing, the heart barely beats, the blood scarcely flows, and breathing nearly stops.” Their heartbeats slow from 80 to five beats per minute and they can lose 30 percent of their body fat.

With all this in mind, plan to settle in tonight for what should be at minimum an annual viewing of Harold Ramis’ February 1993 movie Groundhog Day, staring Bill Murray as Channel 9 Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors, who apparently stuck in an infinite time loop after being stranded by an unexpected change in direction of a blizzard, wakes up every morning to a radio alarm clock at 6 a.m. in a bed-and-breakfast in Punxsutawney, reliving Groundhog Day over and over, again and again.

Andie MacDowell is perfect as Murray’s field producer, Rita Hanson, while Chris Elliott nicely rounds out the trio as the long-suffering cameraman (think “Paul from Shaw,” Thompsonites)

Film critic Ryan Gilbey of the New Statesman called Groundhog Day “the perfect comedy, for ever,” while Malcolm Jones at the Daily Beast went even further, saying it was “about as perfect as a movie gets.” Bill Murray called it “probably the best work I’ve done.”

Michael Keaton and Tom Hanks were both considered for Murray’s role, but weren’t chosen because  Ramis thought they were “too nice.” Brian-Doyle Murray, Bill Murray’s older brother, plays Mayor Buster Green, who acts as the Groundhog Day master of ceremonies on Gobbler’s Knob, as he pulls “Scooter,” perhaps the world’s most televised groundhog, as he plays Punxsutawney Phil, from his burrow to see if he sees his shadow.

Bill Hoffmann, owner of Animal Rentals in Chicago, trained Scooter for the movie. Hoffmann told Lisa Kucharski |of the Woodstock Independent in Woodstock, Illinois in a January 2014 interview that it was challenging work to keep Scooter happy. He said groundhogs have an attention span of about 15 minutes and in film work, it takes about 15 minutes just to set the lighting for a scene. Scooter had five understudies and all six groundhogs were rotated in for different scenes.

Groundhogs have short, powerful legs and a medium-long, bushy, and somewhat flattened tail. They are also called whistle pigs for their loud shrill alarm whistles when they become alarmed or are suddenly disturbed. Groundhogs also whistle in the spring when they begin courting. The name woodchuck is possibly derived from an Algonquian name for the animal. Groundhogs, whistle pigs or woodchucks – take your pick – normally weigh from 12 to 15 pounds and have a life expectancy of four to eight years.

Groundhogs are known as “true hibernators,” going into a dormant state – in which their body temperature and heart rate fall dramatically – from late fall until late winter or early spring. True hibernators, including groundhogs can reduce their body temperature below 20°C. Bears for example, when they hibernate, only drop their body temperature to 30°C from 37°C. True hibernators can also reduce their heart rate down to about five beats a minute, and their body temperature can go as low as 5°C.  Groundhogs go through bouts of torpor when their body temperature drops to about 5°C.  They’ll do this for about a week, then wake up for three or four days, then go back into torpor.

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

Groundhog Day: ‘OK, rise and shine, campers, and don’t forget your booties ‘cause it’s coooold out there today’

Few movies, truth be told, stand the test of time. Fewer still bear watching over and over again every year. Several that do – Frank Capra’s 1946 It’s a Wonderful Life, starring Jimmy Stewart as George Bailey, or Alastair Sim as Scrooge in the 1951 version of A Christmas Carol and 1988’s Die Hard, directed by John McTiernan and written by Steven E. de Souza and Jeb Stuart, following the Christmas Eve exploits of John McClane (Bruce Willis), playing an off-duty New York City cop visiting in Los Angeles for the holidays, share a common Christmas genre.

But there are a few other movies outside the classics from the Christmas genre that also merit watching again and again.

Harold Ramis’ February 1993 movie Groundhog Day, stars Bill Murray as Channel 9 Pittsburgh weatherman Phil Connors, who apparently stuck in an infinite time loop after being stranded by an unexpected change in direction of a blizzard, wakes up every morning to a radio alarm clock at 6 a.m. in a bed-and-breakfast in Punxsutawney, reliving Groundhog Day over and over, again and again.

Andie MacDowell is perfect as Murray’s field producer, Rita Hanson, while Chris Elliott nicely rounds out the trio as the long-suffering cameraman (think “Paul from Shaw,” Thompsonites)

Film critic Ryan Gilbey of the New Statesman called Groundhog Day “the perfect comedy, for ever,” while Malcolm Jones at the Daily Beast went even further, saying it was “about as perfect as a movie gets.” Bill Murray called it “probably the best work I’ve done.”

Michael Keaton and Tom Hanks were both considered for Murray’s role, but weren’t chosen because  Ramis thought they were “too nice.” Brian-Doyle Murray, Bill Murray’s older brother, plays Mayor Buster Green, who acts as the Groundhog Day master of ceremonies on Gobbler’s Knob, as he pulls “Scooter,” perhaps the world’s most televised groundhog, as he plays Punxsutawney Phil, from his burrow to see if he sees his shadow.

Bill Hoffmann, owner of Animal Rentals in Chicago, trained Scooter for the movie. Hoffmann told Lisa Kucharski |of the Woodstock Independent in Woodstock, Illinois in a January 2014 interview that it was challenging work to keep Scooter happy. He said groundhogs have an attention span of about 15 minutes and in film work, it takes about 15 minutes just to set the lighting for a scene. Scooter had five understudies and all six groundhogs were rotated in for different scenes.

Groundhogs have short, powerful legs and a medium-long, bushy, and somewhat flattened tail. They are also called whistle pigs for their loud shrill alarm whistles when they become alarmed or are suddenly disturbed. Groundhogs also whistle in the spring when they begin courting. The name woodchuck is possibly derived from an Algonquian name for the animal. Groundhogs, whistle pigs or woodchucks – take your pick – normally weigh from 12 to 15 pounds and have a life expectancy of four to eight years.

Groundhogs are known as “true hibernators,” going into a dormant state – in which their body temperature and heart rate fall dramatically – from late fall until late winter or early spring. True hibernators, including groundhogs can reduce their body temperature below 20°C. Bears for example, when they hibernate, only drop their body temperature to 30°C from 37°C. True hibernators can also reduce their heart rate down to about five beats a minute, and their body temperature can go as low as 5°C.  Groundhogs go through bouts of torpor when their body temperature drops to about 5°C.  They’ll do this for about a week, then wake up for three or four days, then go back into torpor.

Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal – the hedgehog – as a means of predicting weather. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its burrow Feb. 2 – where the main entrance is often by a tree stump or rock and is usually conspicuous because of a pile of freshly excavated earth, with side entrances also and tunnels leading to an enlarged chamber three to six feet underground containing the nest – and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring.

Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition,” although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State,” A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes.  Clymer H. Freas, city editor of The Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper is credited with printing the news of the first observance in 1886 (one year before the first trek to Gobbler’s Knob) on Feb. 2, 1887, where Groundhog Day, featuring the rodent meteorologist, was first celebrated for the first time in Punxsutawney.) “Today is groundhog day and up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow,” he  wrote. Freas, who belonged to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney, who would later be called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, declared that “Punxsutawney Phil,” as the groundhog was named, was the “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary” and Punxsutawney, named by the Lenape or Delawares, and located halfway between the Allegheny and the Susquehanna rivers,  90 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, was henceforth to be known as the “Weather Capital of the World.”

The earliest American reference to Groundhog Day dates back to Feb. 4, 1841 and is found in the diary of Morgantown, Berks County, Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris, and can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. Morris wrote: “Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”

New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 (Groundhog Day), the day when those furry prognosticating woodchucks – Punxsutawney Phil in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia, Winnipeg Willow, Balzac Billy in Alberta and Wiarton Willie in Ontario – predict either four or six more weeks of winter, depending on whether they see their shadows when they emerge from their burrows, really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking here. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2? Yes, bring it on.

But the movie is a different matter: 25 years after its 1993 release, I still learn something new when I watch Groundhog Day around this time every year. While I can probably reflexively by now deliver on cue on many of the classic lines, such as, “OK, rise and shine, campers, and don’t forget your booties ‘cause it’s coooold out there today,” there’s plenty of smaller things to discover each time I watch with eyes anew.

Writing in the Daily Beast in February 2014, Malcolm Jones argued that “Ramis made a lot of funny movies, including Animal House, Ghostbusters, Caddyshack, and Analyze This. But Groundhog Day is in a class by itself. For my money, you have to go back to Preston Sturges’ ’40s comedies to find its equal. Irony of ironies, no matter how often you hit repeat, this story of a man living the same day over and over just keeps getting better.”

In 2006, Groundhog Day was added to the National Film Preservation Board’s National Film Registry in Culpeper, Virginia for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

 

 

 

Time dilation, Daylight Saving Time and Other Mysteries of Time

 

In 1983, Ohio State University historian Stephen Kern wrote The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, a book which talked about the sweeping changes in technology and culture that reshaped life, including the theory of relativity and introduction of Sir Sandford Fleming’s worldwide Standard Time – and an onrush of technics, including telephone, electric lighting, steamships, skyscrapers, bicycles, cinema, airplanes, X-rays, machine guns, as well as cultural innovations that shattered older forms of art and thought, such as the stream-of-consciousness novel, psychoanalysis, Cubism, simultaneous poetry. All of these things created new ways of understanding and experiencing time and space during that almost 40-year period ending with the end of the First World War. Kern’s argument is that in the modern preoccupation with speed, especially with the fast and impersonal telegraph, international diplomacy broke down in July 1914, leading to the outbreak of the First World War the following month.

In physics, according to Albert Einstein’s 1905 theory of special relativity (SR), motion in space alters the flow of time, creating a time dilation, speeding up or slowing down time, because as you move through space, time itself is measured differently for the moving object than the unmoving object. This, in theory, would allow time travel within the known laws of physics into the future, not into the past.

I had a very odd experience, more akin to what Kern wrote about 33 years ago than Einsteinian physics, I suppose, where time was a product of perception – in this instance slowing down, rather than speeding up – back on Feb. 9, 2015, when I began working as a library clerk on the new Thompson campus of University College of the North (UCN) at the intersection of Thompson Drive North and UCN Drive.

I decided, probably not wisely in retrospect, to bicycle to work my first night, taking the then newly paved but snow-covered two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that then ran pretty much from behind my house all the way down to UCN (it now runs even further to Cree Road). While I had been riding all winter, very little of it until that point had been on the multi-use boulevard pathway toward UCN. I was also using an unfamiliar bicycle with some chain-dropping problems that first night.

The result was too little time and heavy exertion, not wanting to be late for work my first night. I thought I had given myself plenty of time for my 6:30 p.m. start, but conditions were more adverse than I anticipated. The ride is two kilometres, the last half kilometre or so from about the Giant Tiger department store to campus.

I distinctly remember checking the wristwatch on my left wrist four of five times under street lights as I pushed as hard as I could that last half-kilometre stretch. The oddest thing was the first three or four times, the hands on the analog display showed 6:28 p.m. – as if time was standing still, although my bicycle was in motion with me aboard. It wasn’t until I got to the door at UCN, the watch seemed to move that last two minutes to show exactly 6:30 p.m. on the dot. I have no rational explanation for what happened. Did the minute hand on my watch get stuck briefly and then free itself and jump ahead the two minutes? Maybe, but it didn’t feel like that.

Speaking of rational, under Manitoba’s Official Time Act, Daylight Saving Time (DST) begins on the second Sunday in March and continues until the first Sunday in November. That means it begins tomorrow. How rational Daylight Saving Time is; well that continues to be a matter of some debate.

The official time change to Daylight Saving Time occurs at 2 a.m., Sunday, March 13, at which time clocks should be set ahead to 3 a.m.

While it has been gradually remaining lighter later in the evening since late December here in the Northern Hemisphere, we’re about to get an even bigger early evening light boost Sunday. Tonight the sun sets here in Thompson, Manitoba at Latitude 56° 19.8′ North at 6:31 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST), according to National Research Council (NRC) of Canada calculations. Tomorrow sunset here is at 7:33 p.m. Central Daylight Saving Time (CDT).  Presto! In the course of a single day, we’ve picked up another hour and two minutes of daylight in the evening. And by the time the spring equinox arrives March 20 here in Thompson, we’ll be seeing about the same amount of hours of daylight as night, with sunrise at 7:33 a.m., and sunset at 7:48 p.m. Come the summer solstice June 20, don’t be surprised if we’re out on the dock at the Paint Lake Marina, a bit south of here, fishing until almost 11 p.m., as sunset won’t be until 10:26 p.m., while the end of civil twilight, defined as the centre of the sun’s disk at six degrees below the horizon, and the limit at which illumination is sufficient, under good weather conditions, for terrestrial objects to be clearly distinguished; the horizon is clearly defined and the brightest stars are visible under good atmospheric conditions, won’t be for more than an hour later at 11:30 p.m. CDT.

While fishing until midnight on the dock sounds pretty appealing right about now, as Lucas Powers pointed out earlier today in an interesting online CBC News story headlined “Daylight saving time 2016: How big business benefits from more sunshine. Longer daylight time has nothing to do with saving energy or benefiting farmers, critics say, which you can read at http://www.cbc.ca/news/business/daylight-saving-business-energy-1.3485281, as it outlines how the biggest long-time (pardon the pun) advocates for Daylight Saving Time over the years has been no other than the big business lobby. Tufts University professor Michael Downing wrote a book, Spring Forward: The Annual Madness of Daylight Saving Time, on the phenomena 10 years ago.

The Alexandria, Virginia-based Association for Convenience & Petroleum Retailing, formerly known as the National Association of Convenience Stores, founded in August 1961, loves Daylight Saving Time. Likewise big-box stores, sporting and recreational goods manufacturers, barbecue and charcoal retailers, lawn and garden retailers, shopping malls and golf courses. Surprise.

For this, we can thank (or blame) George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST). Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island, and, in all fairness, Hudson could hardly be accused of being a shill for big business. They just picked up on Hudson’s idea in time, so to speak, and ran with it.

Standard Time, of course, with its standardized times zones, is a Canadian invention, courtesy of Sir Sanford Fleming, conveniently divided into hourly segments, and dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead.

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, a principal research officer in the Frequency and Time group, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Fleming’s genius was to create 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time.

But on the other side of the world in New Zealand, Hudson had a somewhat different interest a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time.  Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

While interest grew in  Hudson’s Daylight Saving Time ideas between 1895 and 1898, they were hardly greeted by a rousing show of unanimous support when he presented his first paper in Wellington on Oct. 15, 1895, according to  the abstract in Volume 28, 1895 of the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, which noted, “The author proposed to alter the time of the clock at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilizing the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails.

“Mr. Travers said the clocks could be managed by having different hands. He did not think we were far enough advanced to adopt the plan advocated by the author of the paper.

“Mr. Harding said that the only practical part of Mr. Hudson’s paper had long since been anticipated by Benjamin Franklin, one of whose essays denounced the extravagance of making up for lost daylight by artificial light. Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable. If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.

“Mr. Maskell said that the mere calling the hours different would not make any difference in the time. It was out of the question to think of altering a system that had been in use for thousands of years, and found by experience to be the best. The paper was not practical.

“Mr. Hawthorne did not see any difficulty in carrying out the views advocated so ably by Mr. Hudson.

“Mr. Hustwick was of opinion that the reform spoken of would have to wait a little longer.

“Mr. Richardson said that it would be a good thing if the plan could be applied to the young people.

“Mr. Hudson, in reply, said that he was sorry to see the paper treated rather with ridicule. He intended it to be practical. It was approved of by those much in the open air. There would be no difficulty in altering the clocks.”

While Hudson may he have been somewhat discouraged by that initial reception, he was far from defeated, so he was back before the Wellington Philosophical Society with his second paper on the subject three years later in October 1898:

“In order to more fully utilize the long days of summer, it is proposed on the 1st October of each year to put the standard time on two hours by making 12 (midnight) into 2 a.m., whilst on the 1st March the time would be put back two hours by making 2 a.m. into 12 (midnight), thus reverting to the present time arrangements for the winter months,” wrote Hudson in 1898.

“The effect of this alteration would be to advance all the day’s operations in summer two hours compared with the present system. In this way the early-morning daylight would be utilised, and a long period of daylight leisure would be made available in the evening for cricket, gardening, cycling, or any other outdoor pursuit desired. It will no doubt be urged that people are at present quite at liberty to make use of the early-morning daylight in summer without any such drastic alteration in the established order of things as is here suggested. To this objection it may be pointed out that, living as we do in a social community, we are unable to separate ourselves from the habits of those around us. We cannot individually alter our times of going to bed or getting up, but must fall in with the habits of the majority – at all events, to a great extent, Again, under the present arrangement, those who desire to utilise the early-morning daylight are compelled to take some of their recreation before their daily work and some afterwards, which in many cases results in their having to forgo pursuits that they would be enabled to follow successfully if their daylight leisure were continuous  … The foregoing remarks are framed to apply to us in the Southern Hemisphere, but with the seasons reversed they’ would, of course, apply with equal force to the Northern; Hemisphere.”

While Vernon’s self interest in Daylight Saving Time stemmed at least in part from his interest in collecting insects during a  longer evening, along with such other genteel pursuits by his countrymen as  cricket, gardening and cycling, it wouldn’t be until 18 years later that his DST proposals would be implemented in a modified form in a very different military context in the midst of the First World War by  Germany and Austria at 11 p.m. on April 30, 1916, when they advanced the hands of the clock one hour until the following October.  The rationale was simple: conserve fuel needed to produce electric power. Belgium, Denmark, France, Italy, Luxembourg, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Sweden, Turkey and Tasmania immediately followed suit, as did Manitoba and Nova Scotia here in Canada. Britain also followed three weeks later on May 21, 1916. In 1917, Australia and Newfoundland began DST.

The United States followed on March 31, 1918 and Daylight Saving Time was observed for seven months in 1918 and 1919, but was largely unpopular and Americans used in variably and inconsistently for decades afterwards. The most recent change in the United States, pursuant to the Energy Policy Act of 2005, adding parts of March and November to DST, came into effect in 2007, and has been adopted by most Canadian jurisdictions to keep in synchronization with American business and government interests. The operative word is “most,” however, as there are a slew of Canadian exceptions to the general norm.

Most of British Columbia is on Pacific Time and observes DST, but there are two main exceptions: Part of the Peace River Regional District, including the communities of Chetwynd, Dawson Creek, Hudson’s Hope, Fort St. John, Taylor and Tumbler Ridge, are on Mountain Time and do not observe DST. This means that the region’s clocks are the same as those in Calgary and Edmonton in the winter, and they are the same as those in Vancouver in the summer.

The East Kootenay region of southeastern British Columbia, including the communities of Cranbrook, Fernie, Golden and Invermere, are on Mountain Time and observe DST, meaning the region is always on the same time as Calgary. An exception is Creston, which observes MST year-round. Clocks in Creston match those in Calgary in the winter, and Vancouver in the summer.

While the rest of Nunavut observes DST, Southampton Island, including Coral Harbour, remains on Eastern Standard Time throughout the year. The Kitikmeot Region including Cambridge Bay observes DST but is on Mountain Time.

Most of Ontario uses DST, but Pickle Lake, New Osnaburgh, and Atikokan, located within the Central Time Zone in Northwestern Ontario, all observe Eastern Standard Time all year long.

Most of Quebec also uses DST. However, the eastern part of Quebec’s North Shore, east of 63° west longitude, are in the Atlantic Time Zone, but do not observe DST for the most part, meaning in summer their clocks match those of the rest of the province, while in November, their clocks are match Atlantic Standard Time (AST) in the Maritimes. Although places east of 63° west are officially on Atlantic Time, local custom is to use Eastern Time as far east as the Natashquan River. Those communities observe DST, including all of Anticosti Island, which is bisected by the 63rd meridian. Les Îles de la Madeleine observe DST and are on Atlantic Time.

Although Saskatchewan is geographically within the Mountain Time zone, the province is officially part of the Central Time zone. As a result, while most of Saskatchewan does not change clocks spring and fall, it technically observes DST year round. This means that clocks in most of the province match clocks in Winnipeg during the winter and Calgary and Edmonton during the summer. This time zone designation was implemented in 1966, when the Saskatchewan Time Act was passed in order to standardize time province-wide. Lloydminster, which is bisected by the Saskatchewan-Alberta provincial boundary, observes Mountain Time year-round, with DST, which in the summer synchronizes it with the rest of Saskatchewan. Along the Manitoba inter-provincial boundary, the small, remote Saskatchewan municipalities of Denare Beach and Creighton unofficially observe Central Daylight Time during the summer, keeping the same time as the larger neighbouring Town of Flin Flon here in Manitoba.

Just remember, you are about to pass briefly through The Twilight Zone. Nothing can happen tomorrow between 2:01 a.m. and 2:59 a.m. because those 59 minutes do not exist on March 13 this year or any when March day when Standard Time meets Daylight Saving Time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVSRm80WzZk

You can also follow me on Twitter at: https://twitter.com/jwbarker22

 

Clymer H. Freas and the creation of Punxsutawney Phil, America’s most famous groundhog weather prognosticator

There will be no early spring in Winnipeg this year. Or at least not one that can be predicted Tuesday because winsome Winnipeg Willow, the provincial capital’s weather prognosticating woodchuck, a rodent in the squirrel family (or in Latin, Sciuridae in the order Rodentia, which also includes tree squirrels, ground squirrels, flying squirrels, chipmunks and larger bodied marmots), died Jan. 29, a bit shy of what would have been her sixth birthday this spring – and just four days before Groundhog Day Feb. 2.

For a woodchuck, also known as a groundhog or whistle pig, six years of age is a good long life, says the Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre in Winnipeg, where Willow lived most of her life. Groundhogs have short, powerful legs and a medium-long, bushy, and somewhat flattened tail. They are called whistle pigs for their loud shrill alarm whistles when they become alarmed or are suddenly disturbed. Groundhogs also whistle in the spring when they begin courting. The name woodchuck is possibly derived from an Algonquian name for the animal. Groundhogs, whistle pigs or woodchucks – take your pick – normally weigh from 12 to 15 pounds and have a life expectancy of four to eight years.

Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre has cancelled their scheduled Groundhog Day event that was to have taken place Feb. 2 at Cabela’s on Sterling Lyon Parkway in Winnipeg. Cabela’s, now one of the leading fishing and hunting outfitters in the world, was started by Dick Cabela in 1961 as a kitchen-table business, selling hand-tied fishing flies by mail-order from Chappell, Nebraska.

The Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre was founded in 2007 by a group of animal-loving volunteers. It is a non-profit organization whose main goal is to treat injured and orphaned wildlife and to successfully release them back into their natural habitat. Willow was born in the spring of 2010 and was brought to the centre after her mother was killed by a dog. She was being raised for release until she broke her leg in an outdoor enclosure. “With the extra handling and time spent in care, she became too friendly towards people to be released back into the wild,” Lisa Tretiak, a founding member and president of the Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre said Friday. In the spring of 2008, Tretiak became the first Manitoban, and only the fourth person in Canada, to be certified as a wildlife rehabilitator through the Eugene, Oregon-based International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council, founded in California in 1972.

Willow was adopted into Prairie Wildlife Rehabilitation Centre’s educational program and visited many Winnipeg schools and students. The woodchuck or groundhog’s scientific name is Marmota monax.

The first part of the scientific name, Marmota, is the Latin word for “marmot.” It was probably derived from corruption through two Latin words meaning “mouse of the mountain” and is the name given to the European marmot and the North American marmot, which are close relatives of the woodchuck. The last part, monax, is an aboriginal name that means “the digger,” as woodchucks are noted burrows excavators. Groundhogs are almost complete vegetarians, preferring to eat leaves, flowers, soft stems of various grasses, field crops, such as clover and alfalfa, and of many kinds of wild herbs. They occasionally climb trees to obtain apples. Willow reputedly loved kale, green leafy lettuce, broccoli, carrots, sweet potatoes, snap peas and peanuts.

“We loved trying to predict the upcoming forecast,” Tretiak said, although Willow was a bit … err … spotty, to put if charitably, as a prognosticator. “I think we only got one season right,” added Tretiak. “From her current behavior this past winter, we were going to predict an early spring as she was eager to head outdoors.” So perhaps best be keeping your parka handy, Winterpeggers, for the next six weeks.

My one and only time covering a furry prognosticator came on Feb.2, 2000, when I was working for the now strike-bound Chronicle Herald’ s Truro bureau in Nova Scotia.  As well as journeying to such locales as Middle Musquodoboit Harbour on the Eastern Shore’s Musquodoboit Harbour River, or the Folly Lake-Folly Gap-Folly Mountain area, and through the Cobequid Mountains and Wentworth Valley to Londonderry, formerly known as Acadia Mines, in Colchester County, where time appeared to have stood still, I also found myself that February morning assigned to go down to Shubenacadie, about 37 kilometres southwest of Truro in Hants County in central Nova Scotia, to cover the predictive prowess of Shubenacadie Sam, Nova Scotia’s most famous groundhog prognosticator.

A baby groundhog is called a kit or a cub. Because they are one of the few large mammals abroad in daylight, many people enjoy seeing them. As well as Winnipeg Willow and Shubenacadie Sam, other famous woodchuck prognosticators include (or have included) Punxsutawney Phil, from Gobbler’s Knob in Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, Wiarton Willie from Bruce County, Ontario and Balzac Billy, from Balzac, Alberta, just north of Calgary.

Groundhog Day has its roots in the ancient Christian tradition of Candlemas Day, when clergy would bless and distribute candles needed for winter. The candles represented how long and cold the winter would be. Germans expanded on this concept by selecting an animal – the hedgehog – as a means of predicting weather. According to tradition, if a groundhog comes out of its burrow Feb. 2 – where the main entrance is often by a tree stump or rock and is usually conspicuous because of a pile of freshly excavated earth, with side entrances also and tunnels leading to an enlarged chamber three to six feet underground containing the nest – and sees its shadow, there will be six more weeks of winter weather; no shadow means an early spring.

Once they came to America, German settlers in Pennsylvania continued the tradition,” although they switched from hedgehogs to groundhogs, which were plentiful in the Keystone State,” A&E Television Networks’ This Day in History notes.  Clymer H. Freas, city editor of The Punxsutawney Spirit newspaper is credited with printing the news of the first observance in 1886 (one year before the first trek to Gobbler’s Knob) on Feb. 2, 1887, where Groundhog Day, featuring the rodent meteorologist, was first celebrated for the first time in Punxsutawney.) “Today is groundhog day and up to the time of going to press the beast has not seen its shadow,” he  wrote. Freas, who belonged to a group of groundhog hunters from Punxsutawney, who would later be called the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, declared that “Punxsutawney Phil,” as the groundhog was named, was the “Seer of Seers, Sage of Sages, Prognosticator of Prognosticators, and Weather Prophet Extraordinary” and Punxsutawney, named by the Lenape or Delawares, and located halfway between the Allegheny and the Susquehanna rivers,  90 miles northeast of Pittsburgh, was henceforth to be known as the “Weather Capital of the World.”

But forget about weather predictions for just a minute and consider this: Groundhog fur was once used for fur coats, and the flesh of young, lean animals was considered a tasty treat by some late 19th and early 20th century Pennsylvania pioneers. While the line of Punxsutawney groundhogs that have been known since the late 1880s as “Punxsutawney Phil” make up America’s most famous groundhog lineage, and are now better known for their tourism potential, as opposed to their coat-making and vittles possibilities, Freas was involved even some 13 years after Phil’s debut in organizing Punxsutawney’s first “Groundhog Feast” in 1899, where groundhog meat was enjoyed as a local Pennsylvania  delicacy, washed down by a concoction known as “Groundhog Punch.”

But back to the weather. If you want to know just how good a weather prediction track record “Punxsutawney Phil” has, or perhaps how he stacks up against your local weather forecaster,  you can checkout the Groundhog Day webpage of the  U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/customer-support/education-resources/groundhog-day

The earliest American reference to Groundhog Day dates back to Feb. 4, 1841 and is found in the diary of Morgantown, Berks County,  Pennsylvania storekeeper James Morris, and can be found at the Pennsylvania Dutch Folklore Center at Franklin and Marshall College in Lancaster. Morris wrote: “Last Tuesday, the 2nd, was Candlemas day, the day on which, according to the Germans, the Groundhog peeps out of his winter quarters and if he sees his shadow he pops back for another six weeks nap, but if the day be cloudy he remains out, as the weather is to be moderate.”

According to the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club, “insects do not bother groundhogs and germs pretty much leave them alone. They are resistant to the plagues that periodically wipe out large numbers of wild animals. One reason for this is their cleanliness.

“Groundhogs are one of the few animals that really hibernate,” the club says. “Hibernation is not just a deep sleep. It is actually a deep coma, where the body temperature drops to a few degrees above freezing, the heart barely beats, the blood scarcely flows, and breathing nearly stops.” Their heartbeats slow from 80 to five beats per minute and they can lose 30 percent of their body fat.

Spring, of course, is something of a relative concept here Northern Manitoba, just above 55 degrees north latitude. Relative to much of the rest of Canada and the United States that is. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking here. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2?

Yes, bring that on, any year! But hold the Groundhog Punch.

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Life in the Circumpolar North: Winter living with a sense of joie de vivre and koselig

Monday, Monday. Winter is set to arrive here in Northern Manitoba on winter solstice, Monday, Dec. 21 at 10:49 p.m. Central Standard Time (CST) – which is just eight minutes shy of seven hours after sunset at 3:57 p.m. that day.

The term solstice comes from the Latin word solstitium, meaning “the sun stands still.” This is because on this day, the sun reaches its southern-most position as seen from the Earth. The sun seems to stand still at the Tropic of Capricorn and then reverses its direction. It’s also known as the day the Sun turns around, and in the Northern Hemisphere, astronomers and scientists use the winter solstice Dec. 21 to mark the start of winter season, which ends with the spring equinox Saturday, March 19 at 11:31 p.m. Central Daylight Time (CDT).

Here in Thompson at 55.7433° N latitude, no matter what the official dates for the winter solstice and spring equinox may be, we know quite literally in our bones that we have really long, cold winters and on average there are about 140 frost-free days each year. New arrivals to Thompson and environs are sometimes surprised their first year here to learn Feb. 2 (Groundhog Day), the day when those furry prognosticators – Punxsutawney Phil in Gobbler’s Knob, Pennsylvania, Shubenacadie Sam in Nova Scotia and Wiarton Willie in Ontario – predict either four or six more weeks of winter, depending on whether they see their shadows when they emerge from their burrows, really doesn’t have any resonance beyond wishful thinking here. Winter ending in early or late March in Thompson? Six more weeks of winter only from Feb. 2? Yes, bring it on.

As Thompson oldtimers sometimes tell newcomers: “You might want to consider making friends with winter since it lasts about eight months of the year here.” A slight – but not great – exaggeration. Having spent most of the 21st century living to date in Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories and Thompson in Manitoba, which Macleans magazine, using  Environment Canada, dated, ranked respectively as being number one and number two on their list of “The 10 coldest cities in Canada,” I have some notion of what it means to live in the North.

The North can be defined several ways. Quite often it is quite simply referred to as just that – the North. There is also the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, consisting of 94 major islands and 36,469 minor islands, which aside from Greenland that is almost entirely ice covered, forms the world’s largest High Arctic land area. There is also the Circumpolar North.

The idea of a Circumpolar North was something that caught my imagination in 2001 after I moved from Halifax in Nova Scotia to Yellowknife in Canada’s Northwest Territories. While the Arctic Circle, which I’ve crossed en route to places in the Mackenzie Delta, including the historically-Gwich’in founded community of Tetlit’Zheh (Fort McPherson) at 67.4353° N, Inuvik at 68.3617° and Tuktoyaktuk at 69.4428° N, is rather clearly defined as a circle of latitude that runs 66°33′45.9 N north of the equator, marking the southernmost latitude where the sun can stay continuously below or above the horizon for 24 hours – phenomena known as the Midnight Sun in summer and Polar Night in the depths of a deep and dark December, the Circumpolar North is partly a land of the imagination and a state of being, not quite so precisely defined by geographic lines of latitude, although it generally includes in Canada all that is North of 60, including the islands of the High Arctic, and the remainder of the Yukon, Northwest and Nunavut territories, plus those parts of northeastern Quebec and central Labrador settled by the Innu.

In the United States, the Circumpolar North is defined to include Alaska, except for the Southeast Alaska Panhandle. The Circumpolar North also is made up of Denmark, including Greenland, and the Faroe Islands; Iceland; Norway, including the archipelago of Svalbard; Sweden; Finland; the European Arctic south to the Arctic Circle; and the Russian Federation south to 63°N in European Russia and to 57° N in Asia, including all of the Kamchatka peninsula and Sakhalin Island.

Copenhagen at 55.6761° N is incredibly close latitudinally to Thompson, Manitoba at 55.7433° N, but neither are quite part of the Circumpolar North geographically. But imaginatively, one might make the argument. In winter, Northern Manitoba is vast land of isolation, ice roads, early sunsets and late sunrises. Copenhagen is not so different with short days during the winter with sunrise coming around 9:30 a.m. and sunset about 4:30 p.m.

One December day in 2001, living within sight of the western shore of Great Slave Lake in Yellowknife, I got a sense of how imaginatively the lives of the peoples of the Circumpolar North are weaved together, between glances out my balcony window before 3 p.m. darkness fell and watching Smilla’s Sense of Snow, the delightful 1997 Danish thriller starring Julia Ormond, Gabriel Byrne, and Richard Harris, based on the 1992 novel Frøken Smillas fornemmelse by Danish author Peter Høeg, with both the book and the film telling the story of a transplanted Greenlander, Smilla Jasperson, who investigates the mysterious death of a small Inuit boy who lived in her housing complex in Copenhagen. Clues send her not just around Copenhagen, including the Hotel d’Angleterre, but also to Kiruna, the northernmost town in Sweden in Lapland, and Ilulissat in western Greenland.

And while American poet T.S. Eliot told us that “April is the cruelest month” when he wrote The Waste Land, he seems to have been silent on the issue of November, which the Meteorological Service of Canada at Environment Canada in Winnipeg assures is still usually the snowiest month of the year with one average 35.4 centimetres of snow. At least on average. Usually.

When it comes to permafrost, there was no evidence of the existence of it here in Thompson until work started on the townsite in 1957. Then there was plenty of evidence, as permafrost was encountered at many locations in “scattered islands underlying somewhat less than 50 per cent of the townsite,” as noted by Robert M. Hardy, originally from Winnipeg, and co-founder of R.M. Hardy and Associates Ltd. in Edmonton, the only engineering firm in Alberta to offer geotechnical services at the time, and K.S. Goodman, manager of K.S. Goodman, Materials Testing Laboratories Ltd. in Calgary, in their paper “Permafrost Occurrence and Associated Problems at Thompson, Manitoba.”

Hardy and Goodman’s paper was presented at the National Research Council of Canada’s Associate Committee on Soil and Snow Mechanics Proceedings of the First Canadian Conference on Permafrost in Ottawa on April 17-18, 1962.

We are roughly 240 kilometres south of the line, which approximates the southern limit of continuous permafrost, as shown in the Climatological Atlas of Canada, and about 80 kilometres north of the southern limit of permafrost. But global warming may be causing the southern limit of permafrost to shift further north, meaning less permafrost here in Thompson, making some additional homebuilding on Wekusko Street, Arctic Drive and Char Bay, considered inadvisable 20 years ago, finally feasible within the last six or seven years.

How about the “average weather” for Thompson? Over the course of a year, the temperature typically varies from -29°C to 23°C and is rarely below -39°C or above 28°C. Remember, we’re talking averages now, not temperatures for a specific winter.

The “warm season” (again, a relative term) lasts from May 24 to Sept. 11 with an average daily high temperature above 15°C. The hottest day of the year is on average July 20, with an average high of 23°C and low of 10°C. The coldest day of the year on average is Jan. 15, with an average low of -29°C and high of -19°C

James Diebel, an American, and Jacob Norda, a Swede, who both live in the San Francisco Bay area, can be thanked for these fascinating Thompson weather facts available through their WeatherSpark website at: http://weatherspark.com/averages/28377/Thompson-Manitoba-Canada. Diebel, born and raised in Wisconsin, who has a bachelor’s degree in engineering mechanics and astronautics, and mathematics from University of Wisconsin, and a PhD in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University, and Norda, born and raised in Sweden, who holds a master’s degree in electrical engineering and applied physics from Linköping Institute of Technology, teamed up and started Vector Magic, now known as Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc., in December 2007. The weather facts are based on historical records from 1988 to 2012.

How best to live in the Circumpolar North or the North, however, one wishes to define it? With a sense of joie de vivre – joy of living, I think.

Oulu in Finland, which at 65.0167° N is about 1,600 kilometres farther north than Thompson and located just 200 kilometres below the Arctic Circle, is the sixth largest city in Finland with 141,000 residents, and played host to the first-ever two-day international Winter Cycling Congress in 2013. The second congress was in Winnipeg in February 2014.

I remember back in February 2011 reading about Bruce Krentz’s bet with Harold Smith, a former City of Thompson councillor and executive director for Manitoba Housing and Community Development’s northern housing operations, who challenged him to use active transportation commensurate with getting to his new job as health promotion co-ordinator with the Burntwood Regional Health Authority (now the Northern Regional Health Authority). “He said, ‘Really, you should walk the walk,’” Krentz said at the time. “I sort of made the commitment that I would bike all year.” Smith said he didn’t expect Krentz to use a bike as his method of transportation. “To be honest, when I threw down that challenge I was really thinking about him walking, not cycling,” said Smith, who noted in 2011 he wasn’t surprised that Krentz had stuck with the plan. “Bruce has a history of sticking with things, especially the crazier ones.”

That’s interesting, I thought. Sounds like Bruce. And Harold. Frankly, it didn’t hold any appeal to me personally, although I had been doing a good deal of fair weather riding from mid-April through early November since my arrival in Thompson in 2007.

Circumstances, however, can change and so last year when my circumstances changed, I changed my mind about winter biking in Thompson. Which is why you might spot me wearing my trademark-like red helmet, white front and rear red MEC lights flashing, courtesy of Jeanette, as I at first carefully nudge my way over the short city-owned public footpath connecting the 200-block of Juniper Drive to the back of Southwood Shopping Plaza on Thompson Drive South, before reaching the paved two-lane multi-use boulevard pathway for pedestrians and cyclists that delivers me to work at the Thompson campus library of the University College of the North (UCN).

The Norwegians, Circumpolar North residents that they are, have something to teach us, too.

Laura Vanderkam, in a Nov. 6 Fast Company online magazine piece headlined “The Norwegian Secret To Enjoying A Long Winter: Residents of Norway view their long dark winters as something to celebrate. How it’s possible to be cheerful for the next four months,” outlined the Norwegian notion of koselig, “that means a sense of coziness. It’s like the best parts of Christmas, without all the stress. People light candles, light fires, drink warm beverages, and sit under fuzzy blankets. There’s a community aspect to it too; it’s not just an excuse to sit on the couch watching Netflix.”  You can link to the article here at: http://www.fastcompany.com/3052970/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/the-norwegian-secret-to-enjoying-a-long-winter

Lorelou Desjardins, who pens the Norwegian Frog in the Fjord blog, says, in fact, koselig is more even then being cosy. “Most English speakers translate it by ‘cosy’ but that term doesn’t even begin to cover everything that ‘koselig’ can express,” Desjardins writes at: http://afroginthefjord.com/2014/02/02/how-to-make-things-koselig/

“This concept is difficult to translate to those who do not live here, but basically anything can (and should) be koselig: a house, a conversation, a dinner, a person. It defines something/someone /an atmosphere that makes you feel a sense of warmth very deep inside in a way that all things should be: simple and comforting.”

Kari Leibowitz, a PhD student at Stanford University, spent August 2014 to last June on a Fulbright scholarship in Tromsø in northern Norway – a place “so far north that from late November to late January, the sun never climbs above the horizon,” Vanderkam notes in her Fast Company article.

Leibowitz studied the residents’ overall mental health, because rates of seasonal depression were lower than one might expect.

“At first, she was asking ‘Why aren’t people here more depressed?’ and if there were lessons that could be taken elsewhere. But once she was there, ‘I sort of realized that that was the wrong question to be asking,’ she says. When she asked people ‘Why don’t you have seasonal depression?’ the answer was “Why would we?'”

Vanderkam says that Leibowitz found that it “turns out that in northern Norway, ‘people view winter as something to be enjoyed, not something to be endured,’ and that makes all the difference.

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Standardizing time: Canada’s Sir Sandford Fleming

Thank Scottish-born Canadian surveyor, engineer and inventor Sir Sandford Fleming if you’re getting an extra hour of snooze time Sunday morning.

“Under the Official Time Act,” the Province of Manitoba helpfully reminded me in an e-mail Thursday, Oct. 29, 2015 at 2:06 p.m. (CDT), “daylight saving time ends on the first Sunday in November and resumes the second Sunday in March.The official time change back to standard time will occur this year at 2 a.m., Sunday, Nov. 1 at which time clocks should be set back to 1 a.m.”

While it has been gradually getting darker earlier in the evening since late June here in the Northern Hemisphere, the fact many of us can still travel home in waning daylight from work or school in the late afternoon in late October is in itself a credit to George Vernon Hudson, an English-born New Zealand amateur entomologist and astronomer who gave the world Daylight Saving Time (DST), a decade or so after Fleming’s development of Standard Time. Hudson’s day (and sometimes night) job was as a clerk (eventually chief clerk) in the post office in the capital of Wellington on North Island. Hudson’s shift-work job gave him enough leisure time to collect insects, and led him to value after-work hours of daylight for that pursuit when he was working days. On Oct.15, 1895, spring in New Zealand, he presented a paper called “On Seasonal Time-adjustment in Countries South of Lat. 30°”  to the Wellington Philosophical Society, proposing a two-hour daylight-saving shift, and after considerable interest was expressed in Christchurch on South Island, where 1,000 copies of his paper were printed in 1896, he followed up on Oct. 8, 1898 with a second paper, “On Seasonal Time,” also presented to the  Wellington Philosophical Society in springtime, and which can be found in the Transactions and Proceedings of the Royal Society of New Zealand, housed at the National Library of New Zealand in Wellington.

It is Fleming, however, who deserves most of the credit for both the international dateline, and standard time zones, conveniently divided into hourly segments, dating back to October 1884 and the International Prime Meridian Conference attended by 25 nations in Washington, D.C. Before Fleming invented standard time, noon in Kingston, Ontario was 12 minutes later than noon in Montréal and 13 minutes before noon in Toronto. Noon local time was the time when the sun stood exactly overhead. As for the international date line, it is an imaginary line at the 180º line of longitude that runs from the South Pole to the North Pole separating two consecutive calendar days.

It was Hipparchus of Nicea, a Greek mathematician and astronomer, who around 150 BCE, proposed a global grid of longitude and latitude lines to measure position. It was a coordinate system for locating points on the surface of a sphere. The vertical axis measured “latitude,” and the horizontal axis “longitude.”

Immediately to the left of the international date line the date in the Eastern Hemisphere is always one day ahead of the date (or day) immediately to the right of the international date line in the Western Hemisphere. There is no regulatory body or agency that can say “yes” or “no” if a country wants to switch sides. The country simply lets the international community and mapmakers know. It is not a perfectly straight line, however, and has been moved slightly over the years to accommodate needs of varied countries in the Pacific Ocean. The Midway Islands are in Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) -11, and the Marshall Islands are in UTC+12. The two group of islands, on different sides of the international date line, share the same day and date for the last hour of the day. Samoa, which happens to sit in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, just 32 kilometres, or 20 miles, east of the international date line, went directly from Thursday – on Dec. 29, 2011 – to Saturday, Dec. 31 – without a Friday, Dec. 30. Talk about being anxious to party New Year’s Eve!

Kiribati, north of Samoa and near the equator, south of Hawaii, previously straddled the dateline. The eastern part of Kiribati was a whole day and two hours behind the western part of the country where its capital is located and a time difference of 23 hours between neighbouring islands. There were nine islands on the eastern side of the international date line, and 20 per cent of the population. On Jan. 1, 1995 it added an eastward extension to its section of the dateline so all 33 of its islands would have the same date and all of Kiribati would be in the Eastern Hemisphere.

Since 1892, when Samoa had two Monday, July 4ths, it had been east of the international date line until Dec. 29, 2011, after switching sides to coincide its days better with trading partners in the United States and Europe. Now, Samoa does a lot more business with New Zealand, Australia, China and Pacific Rim countries such as Singapore, so it switched back to the western side of the international date line.

After missing a train in 1876 in Ireland because its printed schedule listed p.m. instead of a.m., Fleming proposed a single 24-hour clock for the entire world with 24 time zones and within each zone the clocks would indicate the same time, with a one-hour difference between adjoining zones. Usually, when one travels in an easterly direction, a different time zone is crossed every 15 degrees of longitude, which is equal to one hour in time. Usually. China, however, has just one time zone, which makes the time zone uncommonly wide. In the extreme western part of China the sun is at its highest point at 3 p.m. and in the extreme eastern part at 11 a.m. In 1912, the year after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty, the Republic of China had created five time zones in the country, ranging from five and a half to eight and a half hours past Greenwich Mean Time. But in 1949, as the Communist Party consolidated control of the country, Chairman Mao Zedong ordered that all of China use Beijing time.

Fleming was born on Jan. 7, 1827 in the town of Kirkcaldy in the lieutenancy area of Fife on the east coast of Scotland. He emigrated to Canada in 1845, settling in Peterborough in southeastern Ontario.

This year, as we shift back to Standard Time from Daylight Saving Time at 2 a.m. tomorrow, which means an extra hour of slumber for many, but also causes me to ponder the potential complications of moving the clock back an hour and repeating the hour from 1 a.m. to 2 a.m. What happens when the clock jumps backward at 2 a.m. again to 1 a.m. for the second time that night and then repeats the hour? Would you have official log chronologies showing 1:13 a.m., 1:37 a.m., 1:56 a.m., 1:03 a.m. and 1:12 a.m. with the later two actually coming after the first three because they came after the clock fell back an hour? How would you distinguish which came first if need be, if someone needed to inspect the log months later (add the annotation 1:13 a.m. CDT or 1:03 a.m. CST?)

Most of Canada’s time experts work in a place called Building M-36 (which involuntarily conjures up for me visions of the X-Files and Area 51.) They work in the Frequency and Time program in the Measurement Science and Standards portfolio with the National Research Council of Canada (NRC) on Montreal Road in Ottawa. Physicist Rob Douglas, the principal research officer, however, can be found on Saskatchewan Drive in Edmonton.

Douglas explains that “in a handwritten log the hour of ambiguity to which you refer can be simply resolved by appending the time zone (e.g. CST or CDT) to potentially ambiguous entries … e.g. “01:32 CDT” for the first pass through the hour of ambiguity and “1:32 CST” during the second pass.

“By explicitly writing the time zone as part of the time entry,” Douglas he added, “you also bypass the time acts’ defaults for official time – as you might wish to do if you are making agreements across a time zone boundary where there is the possibility of geographic ambiguity of time zone.

“The above procedure is very clear in Canada, but unfortunately less so in the USA,” said Douglas. “We in Canada can refer to ‘official’ or ‘legal’ time, which can alternate between being a ‘Standard Time’ or being a ‘Daylight Time.’ In the USA, to allow regulation by the federal government, both ‘Standard Time’ and ‘Daylight Time’ must be considered a ‘standard’ to avoid having time changes be a state responsibility under the residual powers clause of their constitution. If you think you may have to deal with the American ambiguity, it may be worthwhile to include an explanatory note in the log, such as ‘CST is defined as UTC-6h, and CDT is defined as UTC-5h.’

“If the times are being logged in a permanent logbook, with entries in chronological order for a fixed reckoning of time (i.e. in the absence of clock adjustments), then a simple way of removing the ambiguity is to include in the appropriate place in the log an entry such as “02:00 CDT – log’s clock changed from CDT to CST – 01:00 CST.

“If the log is a computer log, by using the operating system’s timestamps (for example as the time recorded for a file’s modification) the problem disappears since these timestamps are recorded as Coordinated Universal Time (UTC – the modern version of Greenwich Mean Time) which is never subjected to Standard/Daylight changes. The operating system re-interprets these timestamps into its version of the correct local time in effect for the particular UTC timestamp, and this re-interpretation may unfortunately still be expressed ambiguously, but the underlying UTC timestamp can be used to resolve any ambiguity about time zones and Daylight/Standard time.”

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