I'm a rover of high degree

Happy Amateur Night! Hey, I’ll still be Irish tomorrow.

And beer, should we need to belabor the point, is not green. Gold, yes; red, certainly; dark brown, absolutely; nearly black with a thick beige head, Katie bar the door! But it Is. Not. Green.

This is the one day of the year when I miss DC, and specifically working at The Catholic University of America, the least. Over on 12th Street, there was a dive bar called Kitty O’Shea’s which made a point of opening early on the 17th to get the undergrads good and liquored up. By the time I got to work (around 9 AM), I could usually see some impaired kids wobbling toward their dorms or classes, and the Metro station smelled like the end of a frat party.

(Sidebar: Kitty O’Shea’s is about the worst name I can think of for an Irish bar short of Semtex. Consider opening a bar in Springfield, Ill. called John Wilkes Booth’s. Or an Italian place called Brutus’. More appropriately, open up a bar across from DNC headquarters called Monica’s. Charles Stewart Parnell may have been the best hope for peaceful self-governance that Ireland ever saw, and to name a bar in memory of the fact that he was taken apart in an adultery scandal is not a joke, it’s a low down dirty shame.)

I will be heading to a friend’s St. Patrick’s Day party tonight, loaves of soda bread in hand. I will not, however, be wearing green. Sue me. Before the day’s out, I’ll probably crack a volume of Yeats and then read some more of Neal Stephenson’s Confusion, in which William of Orange is a hero. (Which is a new idea to me.) On this day, I stand with Stan Rogers, God bless him.

(Rats! There’s not one Stan Rogers song in the iTunes Music Store. Here’s the form to tell them to fix that. There’s my St. Pat’s contribution. If one guy says they should put a peace song up, he’s crazy, and if two do it, they’re both a couple of drunks, but if three I say if three people filled out that form and said “get a copy of House of Orange up here”, why, friends, that’s a movement. Sorta.)