UNCLE PADDY AND THE CRAPPING HAT, AND OTHER ADVENTURES IN THE UNKNOWN: As is well-known, which was something Soviet diplomats used to say just before they said something previously unknown to anyone not paying attention to what Moscow wanted that week, my Uncle Paddy wore a hat whenever he had to move his bowels. It was one of those Irish floppy bucket hats, the kind that the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, God bless him, used to wear all the time, and the hat even had its own peg on the bathroom wall, right there between the toilet paper and the towel rack. The hat never left the bathroom, except when Uncle Paddy went home to Ireland on his annual visit. I assume that the hat never left the bathroom in Ireland either, but I don’t know that for certain. I am also not certain about what the connection between headgear and colorectal activity might be, except to say that there must be one—a man of such stern common sense as Uncle Paddy would hardly wear a hat in such situations simply for the sake of style.

Much of life, it seems, is about the things that people do without some sort of reasonable explanation for why they are doing these things. With Uncle Paddy, and simply as a side note here I should point out that yes, a good many Irish people have uncles named Paddy; some stereotypes are vaguely true, even if you might wish otherwise; the thing was his hat and its alleged psycholaxative effects on his intestines. With other people the thing can be as simple as refusing to make the left turn just two hundred feet ahead of them when they can travel three miles to make a right turn instead, or as complex as collecting twelfth century Mongolian stone merkins for fun and profit. I am still pondering the hows and whys of that particular hobby, especially the whys, since I am not usually one of those people who waste a lot of money I don’t really have on something I don’t really need. For example, the government recently gave millions of dollars to a solar panel company that quickly went bankrupt, and now the government is both upset and surprised at the speed with which this enterprise tripped over the light fantastic and fell flat on its face. For the life of me, I cannot understand the government’s surprise at this; solar energy is a great idea if you live in a place with a lot of sunshine, but the further you get away from the equator you get, the less sunny the planet gets. You’d think that someone would have pointed out this particular fact to the government, a fact that I learned in fourth grade geography class from Sister Mary Agnes, who not only knew the capitals of every country on the planet but drove the school bus on class trips as well and knew how to bypass every pothole, traffic jam, and overly enthusiastic traffic cop in the City of New York, but you would be wrong. That the government could not figure this our from their own experience suggests to me that there are too many Hawaiians and south Floridians working for the Federal government these days and that the civil service would do well to recruit some Minnesotans or Montanans or even the odd North Dakotan or two in order to bring a different perspective to the work at hand. That so many allegedly smart people think that the four seasons is a pricey place to eat in New York or a set of concerti by Antonio Vivaldi implies, to me, a dangerous parochialism that is unbeneficial at best and harmful at worst with understanding the needs of the American people as a whole.

And then there is the question of women getting romantically involved with married men, a subject that has little to do with government waste or collecting twelfth century Mongolian stone merkins, but has something to do with the strange things people will do if you give them half a chance, which seems to have become the theme of this piece. For those of you involved in such a relationship, and you know who you are, you are the living breathing avatar, if that’s the word I want to use here, of Uncle Paddy’s crapping hat and the government loaning money to people who don’t know how to stay in business. The object of your affections is not going to divorce his wife to marry you, simply because the objects of his affections; i.e., the house, the car, the business, etc. etc. etc.; are all in his wife’s name and he’s not going to give up all of that just because you do whatever it is you do better than his wife ever did. Even if through some miracle, and I should point out here that hoping for divine intervention is probably a waste of time, given the Almighty’s clearly stated position on this sort of thing, your paramour actually did divorce his wife and marry you, what makes you think he’ll be any more loyal to you than he was to his first wife? He wouldn’t do that, you say, he loves me too much. Allow me to rain on your parade for a moment—why wouldn’t he do that to you? He loved his first wife too, you know, or at least he did before you convinced him to give her the boot. And he promised not to cheat on her too, and you already know how that promise turned out. You shouldn’t let your beating the astronomical odds in getting this cheating lout to the altar to cloud your judgment; you’re the old ball and chain he’s going to want to get away from now and don’t you ever forget it. Strange how life turns out, isn’t it?

Finally, we come to the question of Oktoberfest, which again doesn’t really have much to do with Uncle Paddy and his laxative headgear. My specific complaint about Oktoberfest arises from the apparent unwillingness of the German police to do anything about the growing tide of lawlessness at the event. I find it beyond monstrous that thieves made off with 150,000 one liter glass beer steins last year from the Oktoberfest fairgrounds, which in the interests of historical and lexicographical accuracy are called the Theresienwiese, after a 19th century Bavarian princess with a pretzel obsession, and the Bavarian police have done nothing to break up what is clearly an organized gang of stein thieves. In the United States, by contrast, the FBI cracked down on a ring of thieves boosting mountains of Styrofoam cups and plastic forks from McDonald’s franchises all over New York and selling their ill-gotten goods to Taco Bells in Connecticut. And only a few years ago, the Chicago Police Department arrested a man for stealing no fewer than nine hundred and sixteen deep dish pans for Chicago-style deep dish pizzas and selling them to a known organized crime associate, who for reasons best known to himself believed the thief’s story that the pans were hubcaps taken from foreign cars on Chicago’s affluent North Shore. But in Germany, a mountain of glass vanishes and no one in a position of authority seems to have noticed that a mountain of glass has vanished nor do these same authorities propose to do anything to prevent further mountains of glass from vanishing. Someone is not taking their job seriously here, folks, no two ways about it.

Could the German police simply not care about what happened to all of those steins? I hardly think this likely; 150,000 one liter glass steins filled, one presumes, with one liter of strong Oktoberfest beer in them amounts to a lot of drunk drivers on the autobahn and a lot of incentive to get rid of the hot glass quickly. I would think that the highways and byways of the Bundesrepublik would fill with crocked stein thieves hurling anathemas and evidence at each other as they competed like NASCAR drivers for the left lane in order to get out of Munich quickly and that the cops would favor a chance to round up these desperadoes in one fell swoop, but that does not seem to be the case.

I know nothing about the history of corruption in German police departments, but it seems to me that this would be a profitable line of inquiry for any ambitious young journalist out to win whatever the German equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize us. Such a malfeasant attitude seems a bit unnatural, at least to me, and I think the good citizens of Bavaria have a right to know whether or not the men and women sworn to protect them from such illegalities are in cahoots with glass thieves and stein smugglers. I can’t imagine why anyone would be in league with such obvious lowlifes, but then I have a hard time imagining why the Red Sox are in any league except the one in Van Diemen’s Land along with the rest of the hoodlums. I suppose that that is just a failure of imagination on my part. And it still doesn’t explain why Uncle Paddy needs to wear a hat in order to evacuate. Remember that? That’s what I was going to write about when I started this thing a few hours ago and I’m still no closer to understanding that than I am about understanding the rest of this stuff. So there.

PUNCTUATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS: National Punctuation Day was September 24th this year and it pains me to admit that I missed the great day completely. This was entirely my own fault; I simply wasn’t paying enough attention and the day went by with nary a hosanna in praise of the period or a paean to the delights of the semicolon from me. To all, I wish to apologize deeply for this unconscionable oversight. People do not pay enough attention to punctuation; punctuation lacks the solemn personal dignity of the nouns or the vigorous get up and go of the verbs, and punctuation certainly lacks even the sheer descriptive power of even the most overworked of adjectives; but in its own small way punctuation makes the simple English sentence both simple and possible. How would anyone know what a sentence is supposed to sound like without the punctuation? If a true sentence must, as the nuns taught me, contain a complete thought, how would I know when the thought, and therefore the sentence, was complete, beyond the traditional one of graduating from high school? Without punctuation, The Cat in the Hat would be as difficult to read as Finnegan’s Wake, and a troupe of actors on Benzedrine could perform the complete works of Shakespeare (including the sonnets and the long poems) in just under forty-five minutes, if you don’t include the time spent on psychotic giggling, bathroom breaks, or police raids.

We use punctuation every day, and yet many people cannot identify any but the most common punctuation marks. Everyone can identify a comma or a period, of course—they are the stars of the punctuation universe—but not many people can tell you that # is an octothorpe. Fewer people still can tell you that an umlaut (¨) is not some creepy guy who tries to take advantage of intoxicated women during Oktoberfest, that tilde (~) is not the character Rosalind Russell played in His Girl Friday, or that the circumflex (^) is not an incredibly popular French exercise machine. Even if they know the name of the mark they are using, many people still misuse punctuation all the time. Is there a more abused member of the English punctuation family than the simple apostrophe (’)? In a classic error, one that almost every Anglophone has made at one time or another, its and it’s are not the same word and do not mean the same thing. Its is a possessive pronoun; it’s is a contraction of it is. And since contractions fill the English language in much the same way that the dead fill the voter rolls in Chicago, the chances of some careless writer dropping the apostrophe grow exponentially with every word they write. Some writers choose to eliminate the apostrophe altogether, even if, as in the case of cant and wont, the words have nothing to do with can’t or won’t. Punctuation is, I think, one of the great inventions of the human mind; it clarifies the dense and often opaque mush of language into an easily understandable form; and it boggles the imagination that people went for thousands of years without it.

Punctuation, it may surprise you to learn, did not arrive along with the invention of written language, although you’d think the need for it would be immediately obvious. The Sumerians, who invented writing to help them collect sales taxes and then used their invention to help them dodge those same taxes, did not use punctuation at all. If a scribe reading his cuneiform tablets droned on for longer than the listener was prepared to listen, the listener would ask the scribe to stop, or, if time was short, the listener would simply bash the scribe into unconsciousness with a large rock. Being a scribe was a dangerous trade in Sumer, and among the first occupational safety laws archaeology knows of are found on a cuneiform tablet that dates from approximately 3500 BCE, which required scribes to wear helmets whenever they had to read any document longer than two tablets to the easily distractible public.

The Egyptians had no apparent need for punctuation, a contention that many Egyptologists now feel is not altogether accurate; a hieroglyph of a boy choking a cat is, many scholars believe, the first use of the semicolon. The ancient Hebrews eliminated punctuation along with vowels in order to save space—the Ten Commandments did without both, for example, so Moses would not herniate himself on the way down Sinai—the lack of both does lead one to think that the Ten Commandments may qualify as history’s first tweet—and the ancient Greeks could have used punctuation—Aristotle first advance the possibility in the Nichomachean Ethics—but chose not to do anything with the idea; keeping the punctuation out kept everyone except the speaker from getting a word in edgewise, an always important skill in Greek politics.

After the Aristotelian false start, punctuation waited for another millennium for its ineluctable rediscovery, if can call Aristotle’s one line afterthought a discovery in the first place, by Christian monks in the years after the conversion of the Irish. Soon after St. Patrick converted all the land to Christianity, it became clear to him that the traditional Irish form of writing, Ogham, was not adequate to meet the needs of his ever-growing congregation. Ogham, a series of lines and symbols cut into a vertical axis, looked good cut into a large stone, but to Patrick’s Romanized eye Ogham lacked the both the dignity and the utility of the Latin alphabet. The introduction of the Latin alphabet, which, if you didn’t already know, is what you’re reading right now, proved a boon as the Irish (except, of course, for the Ogham chisellers, who had to find other work and were therefore not inclined to help Patrick at all) entered into the spiritual life of the Church with the zeal of the newly converted, giving up everything to lead the monastic life and serve the Church by leading lives of piety, poverty, chastity, and copying.

Copying was a big part of Irish spirituality in those years. The Roman Empire in the West had shuffled off this mortal coil the century before, leaving a big stack of stuff in the Church’s in-basket to do by the time it got back from vacation. Well, the Roman Empire in the West never did make it back from vacation (the Roman Empire in the East continued onwards and upwards for another thousand years, but that’s another story, and one that did not require copying and collating parchment in bulk), but the Irish Church decided that this was work that needed doing anyway and that the swarms of devout new monks were just the ones to do it. The monks agreed and set off on their tasks with a high heart and a prayer on their lips. It did not take the monks long to discover, however, that the Romans, the Greeks, and the Israelites all suffered from the same curse—they didn’t know when to shut up, a failing that carried over into their literatures and even into Scripture, and if they (the monks) were ever going to get a bite to eat or something to drink down at the pub they would have to do something to cut the graphomanical enthusiasms of the ancients down to a reasonable length.

To that worthy end, one Father Ambrose, a young monk at the monastery at Clonmacnoise, one day decided that he’d had enough of Roman politics in the form of Cicero’s denunciations of Catiline in the Roman Senate (Cicero thought that Catiline was a lying traitorous two-bit punk and wasn’t afraid to say so, but Cicero was also a politician who loved the sound of his own voice—what politician doesn’t—and so expounded on Catiline’s faults at considerable length and for hours on end, something politicians could do in ancient Rome, given that no one had cable yet) and in disgust threw his quill pen down at the manuscript. A bit of ink flew from the nib and landed at the end of the last word Father Ambrose had copied. The good monk looked at what he had done and in a flash of incredible insight saw that it was good. In fact, he shouted, ‘Hallelujah,’ or something roughly equivalent to that worthy word of divine praise. One witness to the event said later that he was pretty sure Father Ambrose had said, ‘Hot Damn,’ but very few people credit his account.

After the invention of the period, Irish monasteries entered an age of punctuational brilliance; the monks invented the colon, the semicolon, the comma, and the dash in short order. They had to give up the dash; the Pope declared its use sinful in 619 CE; but they invented the ampersand (&) and the asterisk (*), and were working on the apostrophe when Viking raiders sacked Clonmacnoise and took the punctuation back to Scandinavia with them. From that time punctuation has spread like high taxes from one end of the earth to the other, and yet people still do not know how to use it correctly, leading to the popularity of such usage guides as Eats, Shoots & Leaves. In other cases, punctuational overuse has led to a backlash. The constant use of colons in modern society, for example, led to a movement that demands that we rid the language of the mark entirely. On the cable channels, one can see one infomercial after another telling the gullible American viewing public how to detoxify the user’s constant use of the colon. Such extremism will not catch on with much of the public; the colon is simply too useful for anyone to do away with it entirely; but it is clear that punctuational abuse and misuse are among the largest obstacles to teaching schoolchildren how to write properly and that the schools are simply not doing enough to address this unfortunate situation.

THE KNOW NOTHINGS HAD A POINT: First of all, I would just like to say for the record, and just for the record I’ve always wanted to say that something was just for the record, as if someone was actually keeping a record these days, except for St. Peter, the credit bureaus, and the IRS—that I have nothing against foreigners per se, despite their ongoing and persistent foreignness. I know that there are people who will go out of their way to make excuses for foreigners retaining their foreign ways, even in their own native foreign countries, but I have never been one of these poor benighted individuals. The sooner these aliens start cleaning up their acts and start acting like normal people—ordering pizza, going to the deli to buy a baloney sandwich and a handgun, joining the Republican Party, and speaking English 24/7—the better off they and the rest of the world will be.

At first, of course, the transformation from heathenish foreigner to solid American citizen will be difficult and not everyone will be able to make the grade. There are members of my family, for example, who never bothered to get right with God and remained foreigners until the day they died. Some of them even came to this country and remained foreigners. My aunt Ellen, to use another familial example, has lived in deepest, darkest New Jersey for most of her adult life without ever losing the mindset of the small Irish village in which she was born or her Irish citizenship, either. But for the vast majority of the wretched masses yearning to breathe free, the change will be beneficial in the extreme, and will lead inevitably to cleaner skin, whiter teeth, and perhaps even a well-paying job at the department of motor vehicles, where their inability to speak English properly will make our standing in line only for them to tell us we’ve got the wrong form an even more hellish experience than it already is and will go a long way towards advancing the DMV’s longstanding goal of making their agency even more hated than the Internal Revenue Service, if such a thing is even metaphysically or metaphorically possible. But the one thing that foreigners will absolutely have to change, beyond their propensity to stand around hollering at each other in utterly incomprehensible gibberish and not understanding that the inventor of the shower intended that people use his device for the promotion and advancement of personal cleanliness and not as a convenient way to water their marijuana plants, is their unfortunate tendency to show up at my house and eat corn flakes.

Allow me to say here that I am sure corn flakes are a wonderful product; they are certainly one of the staples that has made this our Great Republic the nation that it is today and that more Americans would be better off if they would abandon the milk-covered camouflaged candy bars that constitute a large portion of the nation’s breakfast menu and eat corn flakes instead. It does not necessarily follow, however, that I should eat corn flakes. Since we’re speaking plainly here, let me just say that there are few things in the world that I dislike more than corn flakes. Corn flakes are boring, insipid, boring, mind-dulling, and very likely to bring their galoshes to work with them on a sunny day on the off-chance that an out of season monsoon might occur sometime between nine in the morning and five in the evening. Corn flakes are, in short, too much like me for my psychic comfort and so I won’t have them in the house. So when I open the pantry door and see box after box of corn flakes, I know that the relatives are coming to town, emerging from their dark foreign earth into the bright sunlight of the American day, arriving like a swarm of passport-carrying locusts looking for a place to sleep and directions to the nearest ravageable amber wave of grain.

And so it was that, despite my best efforts to prevent the disaster, foreigners came into my home, ate their vile corn flakes, drank everything alcoholic in the house down to my aftershave, and then stayed to shop. Shopping is all-important to the flotsam and jetsam of Europe accumulating at my house, taking, as it does, the place of Christianity as a system of belief and worship, and unlike their predecessors from the Emeril Aisle (yes, I know that it’s Emerald Isle; this is a pun, a double pun, in fact, which I tossed in for the hell of it, and therefore you do not have to tell me that the Food Network’s own Emeril Lagasse does not rate his own aisle at the supermarket yet—I already know this, thank you, and he’s working hard to rectify this situation) this lot has no intention of staying on and building a bright American future for themselves; they are here for as long as it takes to push their bloated piles of swag through the fifty tons or more line at Sam’s Club and then they are blowing this red, white, and blue Popsicle stand while the blowing is good, and not a moment too soon, if you ask me.

Still, the experience has been more than a little instructive, in a strange sort of way. Apparently, there are large numbers of young Europeans who honestly believe that American citizens must shop at Wal-Mart twice a week in order to vote in presidential elections and that the United States Army is not doing enough to secure the borders here against Indian attacks. I am not sure where these young people get such nonsensical ideas—I suspect that one of the brothers has been making up stories again—but they believe these things with every fiber of their beings, in spite of my trying to tell them otherwise, and I think it might not be such a bad thing for Americans to realize that real live foreigners regard our beloved land, from sea to shining sea, from alabaster cities’ gleam to purple mountains’ majesty right on down to our fruited plains, as one vast emporium where almost anything they want can be bought dirt cheap. It’s a bit disheartening to suggest that we might go to some nearby historic site, just to do something a little out of the ordinary, and all these people want to know is if there’s a mall nearby. It is equally disheartening to know that the taxpayers of the Irish Republic, who are paying for this extended raid upon our Chinese made American goods and services, are also actually paying some of my cousins to be asthmatics.

As a result of my two decades in the library profession, I am more than a little familiar with that outstanding reference work, the Occupational Outlook Handbook, which the U.S. Department of Labor publishes every two years or so to outstanding reviews, except for the deconstructionist critics, who think the work smacks too much of 19th century Russian realism, you know, Tolstoy and all that sort of thing. I have been through that work from the beginning of Volume I to the end of Volume II, and I know, with a fair degree of probability, that asthmatic is not one of the career choices listed. If I looked really hard, I think I could probably find a couple of interesting lines of work like aardvark acupuncturist or celebrity celery salesman, but asthmatic? I don’t think there’s a job listing for that. As a general rule the United States government does not pay people to be sick. There are some exceptions to this rule, of course. The government will pay a person a pension if that person is disabled or in some other way unable to work, but I think we can all see the difference between supporting someone who cannot work because of a disease or disability and actually paying that person to have the disease. In this our Great Republic we do not pay people to be sick; we encourage them to get better quickly, preferably with their own money.

I could not get any of the visiting vultures to see just how unfair this situation is to America’s ailing, most of whom are actually sick and had to stay home from work, as opposed to traipsing all over the countryside of the Vampire State looking for the stray mall to buy out. For foreign governments to finance shopping raids on American malls for people who really aren’t feeling that poorly deprives America’s ill of those goods and services and makes it impossible for our sick to compete on the global unwellness market. Sick Americans deserve better than to have commercial outlets push them to the back of the line in order to serve the not so wretched refuse of someone else’s teeming shore. This sort of attitude puts a considerable strain on my deeply held beliefs about free trade and there are just times when I want to raise the tariffs on foreign diseases a good two or three hundred percent—at times like these no one should be driving a German measle around, anyway, not when there are American measles getting laid off every day of the week. Yes sir, raise them tariffs; that'll show them that Uncle Sam’s no sap, you bet it will.

MY APOLOGIES: I'm sorry for the lack of posts this past week, but my home is currently infested with foreigners and it is difficult to think whilst they eat me out of house and home at such a high decibel level that it is impossible for me to think. When they depart, which cannot be soon enough to suit me, I will have something new for everyone to take a gander at. Until then, I'm screwed.

A GREAT DAY FOR THE IRISH: Saint Patrick’s Day has come and gone for yet another year, as it is wont to do at about this time, and the cause of Irish liberty from the tyranny of the knuckleheads continued unabated this year as it has for the past I don’t know how many years. I went down to the parade in the great metropolis, there to photograph the goings on, or so I told myself. I don’t often get to the metropolis; I think this was the third time in eight years—Midtown is a place I go, on the rare times I do go, in order to cultivate and indulge my inordinate fear of heights. I went with my sister in law and her brood of nieces and nephews, none of whom I sold for organ transplants. I think very highly of myself for not selling them off for spare parts, given their repeated provocations. They are children, or so people keep telling me, and therefore we must make allowances for their behavior. The next time this happens, though, I’m selling them, if not for organ transplants, then for hot dogs. There’s plenty of those dirty water dog salesmen who’d be more than happy to take the little wretches off my hands.

But I digress. St. Patrick, for those of you who may not have heard, was a British boy kidnapped by Irish pirates in the fifth century, escaped from them after six years of watching their sheep, an unattractive job given that sheep, as a rule, tend to be lousy conversationalists and smell bad to boot, and returned home, there to become a priest and eventually a bishop. But he never forgot Ireland and the Irish, much as he might have tried, and he soon he received a call from God to return to Ireland and convert them to Christianity; whether the Almighty chose to use Sprint or Verizon for the call is lost to history. That the Irish had no burning desire to be Christians at that time did not trouble the Lord or Patrick one whit; if converting the heathen depended on what the heathen wanted at any given moment, nobody would be a Christian or a Democrat today and large numbers of cannibal tribes all over the world would have starved for want of a juicy missionary (preferably Southern Baptist or Assemblies of Christ—for reasons that do not bear examination they taste the best, while Dutch Reformed and Presbyterians taste the worst. There’s something about Calvinism in all its guises—one suspects the malign influence of predestination—that adversely affects the taste of the missionary) to tide them over the rough economic patches.

But be that as it may, Patrick did return to Ireland, and in one of the greatest works of conversion in history, managed to convert most of the population before he died on 17th March 493. In all of that time, though, most historians agree that St. Patrick never wore a funny hat, unless you count a bishop’s miter as a funny hat and, let’s face it, many people do, and he certainly never wore a tall green hat that said Let’s Saint Party Dudes or Erin Go Braless, which, while certainly ecumenical in their spirit, do not really embody the Christian message of faith and salvation that Patrick was trying to impart to the Irish. As with these young dopes, Patrick was not always completely successful in getting the Irish to understand the fine theological points of the Christian faith. There was, for example, one tribal king who boasted that he had killed one man every day of the week for many years until his conversion to Christianity, whereupon he killed one man on every day of the week and then two on Saturday, so as to avoid profaning the Sabbath. Clearly, cultural lag was a problem that Patrick had to deal with, but what is remarkable about the man is that he did what he set out to do and he did it without the use of force. Patrick did not have an army to enforce the Irish to comply with Christian doctrine; he had to convince them that Christianity was a better idea than their old ways.

And so he did, not that this mattered to the young dolt found on the station platform here in our happy little burg with beer in a bottle of Pepsi. There is something a bit unseemly about anyone so young drinking beer before nine in the morning, I think, and only someone so young and already three sheets to the wind would try to convince a cop that he was, in fact, drinking a Pepsi. In a sober state, the young man would have realized that while Budweiser and Pepsi are both liquids meant for human consumption, they do not share a common color, a fact known to a good many policemen. In short, in order for this subterfuge to work, our young bacchanalian should not have tried to transport Budweiser in a clear bottle of Pepsi. The Metro-North police officer, no doubt a man much acquainted with beer in all its guises, did not believe the young simpleton’s story for a New York minute and the beer made its probably predestined way from the bottle unto the train tracks, to the great consternation of the young man and his friends.

I did not see this young man again, but I did see thousands more like him. I also watched the beginning of the parade, or rather, I watched the backs of the heads of people watching the backs of the heads of the people watching the backs of the heads of the people actually watching the parade. And I certainly heard the beginning of the parade, with its pomp and circumstance, bagpipers and drums; no one except the profoundly deaf could have missed the opening. But even after the crowd thinned just enough to let me get up to the front, I did not stay for long. Watching uniformed pedestrians only has so much in the way of entertainment value, even if you toss in the baton twirlers and the bagpipers, and I think it says a lot about a culture that thinks an instrument that does a credible impression of a hog screaming in pain is in some way musical. There are no Mozart concertos for the saxophone, you know, primarily because there were no saxophones when Mozart lived; Antoine Sax hadn’t invented his eponymous horn yet; but the bagpipe did exist when Mozart was alive and for a long time before and after he was alive too, and there are no Mozart concertos for the bagpipe, either. There’s a reason for that, I think. People neither need nor want musicians to remind them of how their sausages get that way.

So eventually we wondered away from Fifth Avenue, in order to provide sustenance for the horde of related only by marriage munchkins and to watch the hordes of green-clad knuckleheads who’d come into the city to get drunk. Many had already succeeded, like the dolt behind me that insisted on shouting, St Patrick’s Day, St. Patrick’s Day, over and over again in my ear while I was trying to buy myself a pretzel, as if the rest of us didn’t own a calendar or couldn’t figure out for ourselves why a lot of fat guys in skirts and funny hats were causing a racket while walking down the middle of Fifth Avenue.

After buying the mob of not really related to me kids hotdogs and sodas, we all toddled off to Bryant Park to consume them, where the littler ones the sis-in-law put on the carousel while I tried to keep the bigger ones from drowning each other in the fountain. They stopped long enough to watch two Chinese guys scream at each other at the corner of 42nd Street and Sixth Avenue. This lasted about ten minutes or so and drew the attention of most of the people in that area of the park. To be honest, I was hoping that the two guys would start beating each other’s brains out; I am easily entertained. But they didn’t; either they weren’t interested in pursuing the argument or they wanted to go march in the parade, but after a bit they decided to go their separate ways without letting anyone know what the contretemps was all about in the first place.

All good things must come to an end, however, and eventually we returned to Grand Central, there to return to our happy little burg. The knuckleheads had not arrived in force, but there were enough of them, including one so totally wasted he couldn’t get off the train under his own power and whose friends were going to leave him on the train. He staggered forward at the last moment and tripped and fell on nothing at all, a problem many intoxicated people face. A young woman in an NYPD Police Academy uniform had to keep him standing upright for long enough for her to get the dummy off the train. As we pulled out of the station, everyone onboard the train got to see this young dolt laying face down on the platform with his friends standing around him laughing like crazy at his predicament. For all I know, he and they are probably still there and this was only around five in the evening. I don’t really want to think about the kind of night the conductors had when the rolling tide of intoxicated adolescents showed up later that evening in full puke mode.

And so it went, the great day for the Irish. I suppose you know your ethnic group has made it in America when you can indulge grotesque ethnic stereotypes in public and no one bats an eye about it, even in these politically correct times. It was a bit of a disappointment too; I really wanted to see those Chinese guys beat the crap out of one another. You can’t have everything, I guess.