#73 - patty boom-ba-latty.

aw yeah, suckas. st patty & his irish posse in the hizzouse! let's give it up for the people i have the highest percentage of ancestry with! sorry my lesser perecentage brethren from canada, france, belgium, germany & scotland. when you create a crazy-ass drinking holiday, i'll give it up for you too.

for now, one-two one-two. check it. i'm from the boston area, so i definitely know me some st pattys day. growing up, we had a green felt erin go brah pennant hanging in our house. whereas st pattys day was a good time as a kid & to some extent up until college, now the holiday makes me want to employ some whacking day tactics a la the simpsons a la st patrick on just about everyone.

that's one of the downfalls to living in a large city. all the sudden, mid-march comes & thousands of people start wearing green like it's halloween & other people from other cities come to your city & take to the streets, get wasted, puke & fight, all in the name of the irish. i wonder how many of them, other than those who are actually irish, have any clue about the recent political violence in northern ireland...or that there is a northern ireland...or what the color green actually represents...or that at one time, st patrick was represented by the color blue.

this year, since st pattys fell on a tuesday, the holiday started two days early for a lot of people...on saturday the 15th. didn't someone somewhere once say something about bewaring ides at some point during this particular month? i seem to remember something, so i tried to stay away from the city this weekend & stayed in brooklyn, where idiots in green cat-in-the-hat getups & drunken girls with green sparkles & beads & stumbly walks in impractical heels are kept to a bare minimum.

#73 - patty boom-ba-latty.
snack: tico's plantain chips
drink: mcsorleys ale

then tonight, on the actual holiday, i left work & fled the chaos of times sq for astoria/queens to have a power meeting at the abode of musical genius & society darling james call of the missing teens. post-power meeting (& a couple yuengling black & tans), we went around the corner to his local pub, sunswick, for the obligatory st pattys day beer. they have something like twenty beers on tap, but it's friggin st pattys so i wanted to go irish & a guinness is way too obvious, so i went with a mcsorleys ale...it sounded irish enough.

turns out that other than the name, it's not very irish at all. in fact, it's made by pabst. the irish have been tricked again! it tastes better than a pabst, but not much.

when i got home, after an hour train ride, i hadn't had dinner yet, so i cracked open a bag of tico's plantain chips to munch on. i know they're not irish, but they come in a bright, ehnaced-kermit green bag that features a cartoon parrot. the color isn't exactly an irish hue, unless you're wearing a long-sleeve shirt of this color under a short-sleeve shirt of typical irish color. then you're just fashionable, which is totally an irish quality.

as to the plantain chips, they're fairly tasty & have a simple list of ingredients, which i like...

- plantains
- vegetable oil
- salt

truth be told, plantain chips are boring though. wee lil crisps made from a bloody fruit. i'll take my hash over those wankers any day o' the week.