Wiarton Willie
Canada’s Wiarton Willie emerges from his burrow on February 2nd, and, if he doesn’t see his shadow, an early spring is predicted. If the groundhog sees his shadow, winter will last another six weeks.
But our nation’s prognostications are not limited to rodents.
Sure we could use thermometers, barometers, psychrometers, anemometers and various other ometers.
But we Canucks like to do things in the most unorthodox fashion possible.
Meet Gus Wickstrom of Tompkins, Saskatchewan.
Gus predicts the weather using pig spleens.
A pig spleen costs him two or three dollars. Not the thousands of dollars Environment Canada spends on all those ometers.
Word has it that his forecasts are 98.5 per cent correct. That’s more accurate than Environment Canada!
How does he do it?
Allow me to exspleen.
Gus holds a freshly butchered spleen up in air, turns it upside down, and looks at it from all sides.
Then he bites into it.
If the spleen is soft, it means warm weather. If the spleen is firm, that means cold weather. A bumpy spleen means a storm is coming. Gus also factors the thickness of the spleen into his forecast.
Gus, of Scandinavian ancestry, learned the art of pig spleen predicting from his father. It’s been passed down in his family from generation to generation over 200 years.
Doppler be damned!
Bite that, Environment Canada.
And here’s how the Irish (bless them) forecast the weather…
Photo by SID (Stupid Irish Daddy)
First! everyone must be having a lay in.
ReplyDeleteIn England we have a wonderful invention called a "barometer" for forecasting weather.
Also you can predict how hard the winter will be by how high the rooks build their nests in the trees!
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ReplyDeleteI just open the door and look outside.
ReplyDeleteDisgusting, yet believable.
ReplyDeleteI wonder if Piggy's spleen would work?
Frobi: And the rooks would be building their nests high to escape those big snowhills you get over there?
ReplyDeleteSpikey: Seeing as you live on the Tundra, the weather probably never changes. Snow, snow, and more snow.
Maidink: Yay for experimenting with Piggy's spleen!
Did you see that film 'The Weatherman' with Nicholas Cage? They admitted that , in spite of all the science and technology and pig's spleens they hadn't got a clue.
ReplyDeleteKaz: I didn't see it. But I figure Spikey's method of forecasting (open the door and look outside) and SID's Irish stone method are about as accurate as it gets.
ReplyDeleteTis!
ReplyDeleteAnd you don't even have to go outside,provided you have a window.
You have windows in Canada?
Only in Saskatchewan, you say? Good.
ReplyDeleteBy the shape of that diagram, I figured for sure you were going to describe yet another method maybe called Penile Projections.
I quite like SID's method. Very practical.
SID: Remind me to blog about the time I had no office window and no apartment windows. I would go to work in the morning in the winter before the sun rose and come home after dark in the evening. A winter of bad spleen. But generally, Canucks do have windows.
ReplyDeleteWW: Whilst researching penile projections I discovered this.
Pigs are amazing creatures, those Jews and Muslims are offending God by not eating that fine creature. Bacon, gammon and pork chops, not to mention pig's trotters and crackling, they also make excellent lovers........so I've heard.
ReplyDeleteHAHA! To predict the weather by using a weather forecasting stone - what a novel idea!
ReplyDeleteKnudsen: According to our Tazzy, pigs do indeed make excellent lovers.
ReplyDeleteMiao: The stone will put meteorologists everywhere out of work. Mark my words.
That dangling Rock is about one million times more accurate than Environment Canada...
ReplyDeletewhich by the way does NOT have windows!