St Paddy's Day. Anyone doing anything?

[Greybeard]

Well, you may not know this, but St. Patrick is the patron saint of engineers.

One thing of note that St. Patrick did was drive the snakes out of Ireland. Since snakes and worms both move on their bellies, this could be considered the invention of the worm drive. Worm drives are a very important component of many machines. Therefore, the adoption of himas the patron saint.

[oleg]

Unfortunately, there were no snakes in Ireland in the first place. At least that is what I read. Ireland was cleansed from snakes by the Last Ice Age and snakes did't find a way back. Why it is attributed to St. Patrick - no idea.

[TerranC]

Originally posted by oleg:
Unfortunately, there were no snakes in Ireland in the first place. At least that is what I read. Ireland was cleansed from snakes by the Last Ice Age and snakes did't find a way back. Why it is attributed to St. Patrick - no idea.

Some people think it's a metaphor of his evangelization of Ireland; some Irish tribes had tattoes of snakes on their arms, and as soon as they were brought into the fold, the tattoo-ing stopped; thus driving out the "snakes".

[Thermodyne]

Here in the new world, many of the Irish are Black Irish, having fled the Black Blight. But with that set aside we then have the Greens and the Orange. For the most part the Orange are not permitted to drink in public, if at all. (Which is why we don’t have a drinking day in honor of the Earl. And many of the Orange try pass as Greens.) And the Greens are allowed to drink all they want, so long as mind a few other “minor” rules. Now the Greens have been fighting the Orange for quite a long time now. Not to mention the little spat with the Crown. But then the Orange have a few very old issues with the Crown too, which is why many of these Scots and Celts have ended up being Irish in the first place. Actually, it seems that almost everyone has some kind of axe to grind with the English. But then that could be because of the Normans and their despotism I guess. Or perhaps it all goes back to the Romans moving in and driving up the property values. If the Romans had not brought beer with them, we would not be getting ready to dye it green so as to celebrate some guy allegedly driving the snakes/Pagans out of Ireland. Personally, I think we need to find some guy to drive the English out of Ireland, and then we can have another “out of Ireland” holiday and more beer. Then after that, some of us Orangies can figure out that we are not really Irish, and find some other guy to free the Scots. That gives us the Scots out of Ireland and the English out of Scotland. Two more beer drinking holidays. After that we can run Normans out and free the English, another beer holiday. Let’s see, that gives us almost a week of holidays, so if we are careful and stick to a tight schedule, we can make a holy-week out of it. Arg, sounds like a lot of work to me. Perhaps we should just meet at the road house (pub) and plan and plot over a few pints.

[capnq]

I will probably be shovelling the 3-6" of snow we're expecting to get tomorrow. Fortunately, we had our St. Patrick's Day Parade on Saturday, when the weather was nicer.

[Followup] Luckily, it stayed warm enough in the city that we only got a coating. So I'll be spending the day conquering green Amon'krie planets in my current solo game.

[ March 17, 2004, 17:47: Message edited by: capnq ]

[Atrocities]

I rode my quad at the beach and went really really fast.

[dogscoff]

Happy Guinness day everyone! I'm at work this morning, then at lunchtime I'm off home for some food, and fromthere it's stright to the pub!

Hopefully if we get there early enough we'll be able to bag a table and hang on to it all night.