This morning, I thought it would be fun to figure out which animal a bunch of college football coaches each most closely resemble.
It went awry.
First off, I couldn’t decide if Nick Saban really looked like a duck or not. With that up in the air, and the image search for Dabo Swinney pulled up for future reference, I turned to Ohio State’s coach, but couldn’t remember his first name. Was it Zach? No. I was thinking of Zach Smith. Could I think of anything else it might be? No. My brain was stuck on Zach.
After searching “Ohio State football coach” to, I thought, settle things, it didn’t get much easier. Because it turns out Ryan Day looks a lot like a specific animal I can’t place.
I tried gopher.
Nope.
Badger?
Wrong again.
Groundhog?
No sir, but maybe? Kind of close.
This went on for a few minutes.
Finally, while looking for animals that looked like groundhogs (I was half-hoping the search would just return “Ryan Day”), I saw the word “whistlepig.”
When you see the word “whistlepig,” everything changes.
No more blog post about football coaches and animals.
It was time to find out what a whistlepig was.
That didn’t take much time:
What a name.
Upon further research, The Internet™ yielded that whistle-pigs or whistlepigs or whistle pigs (there was some disagreement upon the proper grammatical structure) are groundhogs who whistle. Which are all groundhogs. Except Paul. Paul can’t whistle. Paul is only a groundhog, woodchuck, wood-shock, chuck, groundpig, thickwood badger, Canada marmot, monax, moonack, weenusk, red monk, and, among French Canadians in eastern Canada, siffleux.
Why groundhogs, among the whole of the animal kingdom, received the coolest collection of names is obvious. Groundhogs are awesome. One time I saw a groundhog hustle across a muddy bike trail and do a hybrid Superman dive/belly flop into the underbrush. It was near Richmond, Illinois, which is right by Woodstock, which is where the critically acclaimed (it’s my favorite movie) Groundhog Day was filmed. There’s a gazebo there. I don’t know if the gazebo predates the movie or was constructed for it. I’m guessing the former but would accept either with pride. I should go back for Groundhog Day this year. Or Milk Days up in Harvard. Probably both if it’s in the budget. This concludes our McHenry County portion of the blog post.
Will I call groundhogs whistlepigs now? Probably only at parties. But I’ve been known to attend one or two of those.
If you figure out what Ryan Day looks like, please call me.
