It is the day after St. Patrick's Day, and all through the house, not a creature was stirring, shaking, or otherwise mixing drinks of any kind, for all the little drunks are now too hung over for words to describe. This is a good thing, I think, primarily because young persons do not learn anything unless the anything involved hits them very hard on their incredibly obtuse skulls. This is a lesson that most educators do not grasp fully. Your average teacher still believes that he or she is preparing young minds for the future, whereas your average American high school is simply a very large warehouse where civil servants can collect large paychecks and where the hormonally engorged can conduct their social lives away from their parents' supervision; if someone actually does learn something every once in a while, this is nice, to be sure, but not terribly germane. For this crowd, this is why St. Patrick's Day, or St. Paddy's Day, as they prefer to call it, exists. The day exists so that they may leave their suburban warrens and descend upon the great metropolis, eager to suck up any alcohol they can get their hands on, sit on the big rocks in Central Park, and smoke pot, if alcohol is not immediately available. They won't spend any time, if they can help it, actually watching the parade, although in their defense, I must say that watching oddly dressed pedestrians strolling down the street amidst a self-generated megadecibel cacophony loses interest after a while; said cacophony also damages your eardrums. But they don't forget the patron of the day, the reason that they are wandering around the streets of the metropolis in a drunken stupor. No indeed, scarce five minutes went by yesterday without at least one of these bright young cretins shouting, "St. Paddy's Day! St. Paddy's Day!" This announcement of what everyone already knows was almost inevitably followed by the pronouncement, "I am so totally fucking wasted!", which was also something everyone else could figure out for themselves. It has been a while since I attended Catholic school, and no, I am not going to give a specific figure for just how long a while it has been, but as I remember it, the importance of Patrick came from his conversion of the Irish from paganism to Christianity. I am sure if the central tenet of Irish Christianity was "Let's get hammered" one of the nuns would have told me so. Or maybe I was just sick that day and missed the class. That's always a possibility, I suppose.

RAINOUTS AND GINA DINAPOLI: Well, in the You can teach some old dogs new tricks department, you will be happy to know that the committee that oversees the annual homage to the power of Gina DiNapoli’s breasts, an event whose history you can read more about here, cancelled this year’s parade due to the threat of rain. The threat was very real; every computerized weather map you can think of had vast seas of green Doppler effect soaking their way effortlessly over our happy little burg, doppling away like they hadn’t a care in the world except to head north and west into Massachusetts and a hearty breakfast of whatever it is they eat up there for breakfast. Seeing the green dopple advancing northwards towards us like a horde of drunks on St. Patrick’s Day stumbling headlong for the nearest men’s room sobered the minds of the organizing committee no end, as well it should, and so they cancelled the parade and the attendant celebrations, much to the relief of everyone involved in the festivities. No one wanted a repeat of last year’s debacle.

Yes, it was only last year when the organizing committee, as game a crew of well-meaning octogenarians and octogenarian wannabes as you could ever hope to find anywhere this side of the river Styx, decided, in a meteorological situation eerily like the one faced today, that hope, a positive attitude, and municipal pride would win out over a fast moving low pressure system coming in from the Great Lakes and that the parade would therefore move forward, an act that literally and figuratively defines parades, now that I give the matter some thought. A parade that moved backward wouldn’t really be a parade, except in one of the world’s more bizarre locations, such as Boston, Washington, and the slough of urban despond that lies directly across the river from our happy little burg, where such things are commonplace, either for political and social reasons, as in the former cases, or because of the incessant gunfire in the latter.

I am not sure what method the organizing committee used to determine that rain was not going to be a problem last year. One suspects that they disliked the whole idea of checking the matter on the Internet—too newfangled, too full of dirty pictures, and too hard to operate without one of the grandkids nearby. No, I think they went with the tried and true methods of weather forecasting: they looked out the window, they looked in the newspaper, and then they sacrificed a chicken to the weather goddess of their choice; our happy little burg is a very inclusive community when it comes to religion and we hold no prejudices against believing theists, whether they are mono, poly, or a, just so long as they are not Red Sox fans—we must draw the line somewhere, you know; and upon slicing open the sacrificial chicken, an augur who also doubles as a balpeen hammer and triples as a designated hitter for the Kansas City Royals examined the chicken’s gizzard to determine that the United States Weather Service had no clue what it was talking about: there would be no rain at all on the great day. Rejoicing at the good news, the organizing committee rejoiced at the beneficence of the Lord(s) and then proceeded to eat, like Mr. Leopold Bloom, with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls, in this case, the fowl just sacrificed on the altar of meteorology.

Suffice it to say that this method of weather divination, which the Romans also used to divine the workings of Mount Vesuvius, worked about as well for the organizing committee as it did for the Romans in Pompeii. The parade organizers had to get everyone ready to march in a drizzle that steadily became a driving rain before graduating to a monsoon before the vanguard reached the middle of Main Street. As you might imagine, and which the organizing committee clearly did not, municipal pride may lead our patriotic citizenry to do many a great thing hereabouts, but standing in the rain getting wet for no good purpose is not one of them. By the time the vanguard of local solons up for re-election reached the end of the route, there was no one on the street for them to wave and practice their most sincere insincere smiles on except squirrels who, shockingly in this day and age, cannot vote in municipal elections here in the Vampire State, and the wet and deeply annoyed, whose voting patterns are inconsistent at best but in general do not favor incumbents of any party.

The reaction to the organizing committee’s decision was swift and none too happy. After the parade the denizens of our happy little burg wander up and down Main Street, the street becoming a pedestrian mall for a few hours, buying food from various vendors, many of which are church groups raising funds for the coming fiscal year, and stuffing themselves silly while music plays and the kids amuse themselves by spraying one another with shaving cream. This is a heartwarming sight, for reasons I am not quite sure I understand at this point, and one that did not occur last year. I could live with that, but the various vendors involved could not, and they let the organizing committee know that the purpose of having and advertising a rain date was so everyone could wait to the rain date if it rained, which, as I’ve mentioned, it did, in buckets, bushels, and bottles, not to mention cats, dogs, and wombats, leaving the vendors stuck with thousands of dollars worth of food and no one to sell it to. The vendors were not happy about this situation and let the organizing committee know that they were not happy. The organizing committee promised to do a better job for the next parade, impressed, no doubt, by Sister Maria Josefina’s threat to stuff several hundred pounds of frozen empanadas up the committee’s collective backsides if they ever did this to the Comite Hispanidad of Our Lady of Fatima Church ever again. There are few things in the world designed to put the fear of the Lord into the souls of the unrighteous faster as one very angry Puerto Rican nun, even if she is older than the beard of Moses, although I must admit, I would pay good money to see Sister Maria Josefina make good on that threat, but then I am easily amused.

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.