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Well It's unanimous — all three North American weather-savvy groundhogs indicated Monday that six more weeks of snowy roads, icy sidewalks and freezing temperatures are in the cards.
Nova Scotia's Shubenacadie Sam, Ontario's Wiarton Willie and Punxsutawney Phil of Gobbler's Knob, Pa., were awakened from their winter slumber where they all, according to their handlers, saw their shadows.
Tradition suggests that means there will be six more weeks of wintry weather.
Sam, whose Atlantic time zone gives it a jump on other weather-predicting groundhogs, was roused by a town crier and the wailing cry of bagpipes at the Shubenacadie Wildlife Park, about an hour's drive north of Halifax.
Sam saw his shadow as he slowly crawled out to greet a crowd of school children under partly sunny skies.
In Wiarton, Ont., crowds booed and groaned as Willie — an albino groundhog — saw his shadow. It's a change for Willie, who had failed to see his shadow from 2004 through 2008.
Punxsutawney Phil, whose ancestors have been making weather predictions in the state since 1887, also called for six more weeks of winter through his groundhogese translator, Bill Cooper.
Phil also used his time in the spotlight to offer congratulations to the 2009 Super Bowl champion Pittsburgh Steelers, said Cooper.
It's always been a pack of lies, of course, but it's fun, and we need fun if we are to survive another Canadian February.
Groundhog Day was inspired by an old Scottish couplet:
"If Candlemas Day is bright and clear/ There'll be two winters in the year."
How groundhogs got a reputation for predicting weather patterns is a mystery, because they are not the least bit interested in their shadows or the number of winter weeks remaining. The only reasons they come out of hibernation are for food and sex.
German settlers in Punxsutawney, Pa., are said to have started the tradition of watching if a groundhog sees its shadow in 1887, thus the fame of Punxsutawney Phil, the first underground rodent given credit for predicting winter's future course.
In Canada, it was 1956 before Wiarton Willie became a household name for his early February prognostications. Wiarton is a pretty town of 2,300 on the Bruce Peninsula between Lake Huron and Georgian Bay. This being an expansive nation, there are other groundhogs in other jurisdictions. Nova Scotia has Schubenacadie Sam, who's the first in the country to rear his head on Groundhog Day.
Then the tradition makes its way across our time zones, moving on to Wiarton Willie and Gary the Groundhog in Ontario, Brandon Bob in Manitoba and Balzac Billy in Alberta.
The original Wiarton Willie, an albino groundhog said to be 22 years old, died during hibernation in the winter of 1998-99. The good burghers of Wiarton discovered this to their horror just before Groundhog Day 1999.
Willie's death made headlines around the world
On Groundhog Day, they put Wiarton Willie face-up in a small pine casket, bright pennies over his eyes, paws clutching a raw carrot.
But it was a fake!! Turns out the real Wiarton Willie was so disgustingly decomposed he couldn't be put on display, so they found a stuffed facsimile and laid it in the casket.
"We didn't try to hide the fact that he was stuffed," said Tom Ashman of Wiarton Willie's publicity team. "If the media had been doing their job they would have seen the stitches on the belly."
But, why fake it?
"People needed closure," Ashman explained.
Groundhogs are woodchucks, members of the squirrel family, marmots, sometimes called "whistle-pigs." They are not the sharpest knives in the drawer. When nervous, they emit a high-pitched squeal, which might as well be an embossed dinner invitation to predators who follow the squeal until they find and eat the groundhog.
So how did they gain a reputation for predicting weather? Fact is, they aren't very good at it. The people of Wiarton insist their Willie was accurate 90 per cent of the time, but what do you expect them to say when the Groundhog Festival attracts 20,000 free-spending tourists to the town every February?
Scientific studies show groundhogs are accurate only 37 per cent of the time, which means you'd do better flipping one of the pennies that covered ol' Wiarton Willie's eyes.
Loyalists insist that Wiarton Willie possessed an uncanny ability to predict because he was born exactly on the 45th parallel, midway between the Equator and the North Pole.
Bell Canada has taken out full-page newspaper ads warning customers they are responsible for costly long-distance calls made through their voicemail systems, even if they were done so fraudulently.
In the ad, Bell says it has received several complaints about a voicemail fraud scam whereby "experienced criminals...illegally gain access to company voicemail systems and then place long distance calls from within those systems."
While a spokeswoman for BCE's Bell Canada says the bills have been reduced by the phone company, the businesses insist they shouldn't be forced to pay for any of the illicit calls.
Businesses are crying foul after receiving sky-high phone bills that charged them upwards of $200,000 because hackers were able to break into their Bell voicemail system and hijack it to make long-distance calls.
The warnings come too late for Burlington, Ont. law firm Martin & Hillyer.
Martin & Hillyer, says it has been hacked and is battling to erase a bill that includes charges worth more than $207,000 in calls to Sierra Leone in western Africa.
The law firm isn't alone in but Bell Canada spokeswoman Julie Smithers calls the situation "really rare" and a "very old scam" that affects primarily business customers, although she said some residential consumers have been caught as well.
Here's how Bell thinks it works: an automated dialler will target a specific phone number, and wait for the voicemail to respond. Then, the computer will go through standard voicemail passwords.
Often the voicemail passwords have never been changed from the original programmed default, they are the same as the phone number or extension, or they are easily guessed, such as 1234.
Once it finds the correct password -- often a predictable number combination -- the automated dialer will choose an option on the voicemail that allows it to make long-distance phone calls.
On the phone bill it will appear as though the calls were made directly from the office or home number.
The Bell ad says its systems come with adequate security devices, but "like locks on your car or on your house, they have to be used properly in order to be effective."
Smithers said Bell does have technologies to detect "bizarre calling patterns and in a lot of cases we can stop it by placing a block on long distance."
But she added "it is extremely important and it is the customer's responsibility to put passwords in place that are difficult to guess."
In Oakville, Gordon Cowan, the president of GPS Consulting Group & Insurance Agencies, faced a similar problem but on a smaller scale.
His offices rung up more than $60,000 in charges, starting with a 14-hour period on a weekend in early October.
"I came in on Sunday and there was a call from the Bell Canada fraud squad saying we had been breached. They shut our voice mail system down," Cowan said in an interview.
"They told us to change our passwords, which we have been doing anyway, and they would be in contact with us."
Cowan says that a week later the hacking happened again.
In both instances, Bell Canada agreed to reduce bill as a "goodwill gesture" -- in the law firm's case they cut it down to about half of the $207,000.
Cowan's $60,000 bill was slashed to about $7,000.
Bell says that Canadians are responsible for taking steps to prevent their voicemail from being hacked.
"It is something that's not unique to Bell -- it has been seen by pretty much every telephone company in the country, the U.S. and internationally," Smithers said.
Last week, reports from Australia said that police were investigating claims from a Perth business that its Internet phone lines were hacked, resulting in a $120,000 phone bill from more than 11,000 international calls.
Bell offered up a number of tips for companies to ensure their phone systems are not compromised. But Bell also says companies will have to pay for those calls made when the systems are hacked.
"Remember that you are responsible for paying for all calls originating from, and charged calls accepted at, your telephone, regardless of who made them or who accepted them," the ad states.
The following is a list of steps Bell says companies can take to protect their voicemail systems.
- Ensure employees change default password immediately after being assigned a voicemail box.
- Program systems to require passwords of six or eight characters.
- Avoid easily-guessed passwords.
- Require users to change their password every 90 days, as a minimum.
- Disable the offsite "through-dialling" option if it isn't necessary.
- Remove all unassigned mailboxes.
"While these precautions are of a general nature, and might not protect every aspect of an individual telephone system, they will go a long way to reducing your vulnerability to this type of fraud," the ad states.
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