Popular Misconceptions about St. Patrick’s Day

 

  

MYTH: Somebody else out there has a shirt that reads “Kiss me, I’m Irish,” so you probably shouldn’t wear yours.

FACT: We’ve never heard this joke before. Come here and give us a kiss.

MYTH: Actual Irish—that is, people found in Ireland and were born there—don’t habitually wear shirts that read “Kiss me, I’m Irish.”

FACT: Believe it or not, they wear them all the time. Of course, being in Ireland, they already know they’re Irish, so they don’t bother with that part of the phrasing. Also, because certain regions of the world express certain sentiments in slightly different ways, their shirts read simply “Fuck you.”

MYTH: Wearing lots of green will make you seem more authentically Irish.

FACT: Wearing lots of green actually makes you authentically Irish. In fact, any sort of association with green qualifies you for citizenship.

The most famous Irishmen of the twentieth century.

 

MYTH: If you don’t wear green on St. Patrick’s Day, you will get pinched.

FACT: We refused to wear green on St. Patrick’s Day throughout our high school career, and claimed that the reason for our stance was that we had actual Irish heritage and didn’t need to bother.¹ In truth, this was secretly an ingenious ploy to get pinched by the girl we liked at the time.² It didn’t work. Never—not once—did we get pinched. It’s okay, though, because she’s dead now.³

MYTH: The Irish are a belligerent, violent people.

FACT: Why don’t you say that to my face, you rotten son of a bitch.

Fortunately, stereotypes of violent Irish are
nowhere to be found in today’s sensitive culture. 

 

MYTH: Didn’t you just love Braveheart?

FACT: Most of the characters in Braveheart were Scots, who come from Scotland—which is a totally different country than Ireland. Really! they have a flag and everything. In fact, the only Irish people you’ll find in the film are one unkempt eccentric and several thousand humorous, belligerent, and easily dispatched extras. The bad guys were English, as all true bad guys are, and of course the hero, William Gibson Wallace, is equal parts American, Australian, and crazy.

It could be worse. I’m only playing a crazy person.

MYTH: Some Irish, and even some Americans of Irish descent, might find it a bit disappointing or even insulting that Americans “honor” the Irish culture by getting blind shitfaced and vomiting on things they’re too drunk to identify.

FACT: The Irish are so constantly, uniformly paralytic drunk that they don’t realize they’re being stereotyped.

MYTH: Drinking green beer will make you more Irish.

FACT: Drinking green beer will make you a fucking idiot.

NOTES

1. We are absolutely 100% half-Irish, if you don’t count the technicality of having been born in the United States of America, just like both our parents, all of our grandparents, and most of our great-grandparents.

2. This is true.

3. Technically she’s not dead; a shocking time-travel accident caused her to kill her own grandfather, so it’s more accurate to say that she simply never existed.

November 11, 2011: A Mystically Portentous Date, If You Believe In That Sort of Crap

  
Today—November 11, 2011—is the eleventh day of the the eleventh month of a year that ends with “eleven.” Or, to put it in big orange letters,

11/11/11. 

Kinda neat, huh?

For those who don’t pay particularly close attention to this sort of thing, or have little patience for certain brands of semi-mystical baloney, this is a nifty, neat-looking little coincidence, but nothing more. Sure, time itself does in fact exist,¹ and it is concrete and unchangeable, except of course when it’s not.² But our systems of measuring and recording time are just as arbitrary and subjective as most other human inventions, so there’s no reason to view a particularly interesting alignment of dates as being intrinsically more important than any other day. 

To illustrate this point of view, what follows is today’s date³ according to several different calendars, all of them created by meticulous observation of the sun, moon, stars, and seasons, but nevertheless ending up with different and decidedly non-mystical ways of indicating the very same date:

• Chinese calendar: Cycle 78, year 28 (Xin-Mao), month 10 (Ji-Hai), day 16 (Geng-Wu)
• Coptic calendar: 1 Hatur 1728     
• French calendar: 21 Brumaire an 220 de la Révolution
• Hebrew calendar: 14 Heshvan 5772  
• Indian calendar: 20 Kartika 1933   
• Islamic calendar: 14 Dhu al-Hijjah 1432
• Julian calendar: October 29, 2011  
• Maya calendar: 12.19.18.15.4; tzolkin = 1 Ix; haab = 2 Ceh   
• Persian calendar: 20 Aban 1390   
• YOOB calendar: February 2, Year 3⁴

It’s hard to imagine that the ancient Romans, for example, are all excited about today being October 29, 2011. Granted, the ancient Romans are all long dead, and so aren’t very excited about anything, but we argue that another reason for this is that there’s no more mystical significance to a Julian 10/29/2011 than there is to a Gregorian 11/11/11.

If this doesn’t blow your mind,
try reading it backwards.

 
For other folks, though, this rare coincidence of numbers signals an event no less momentous, certain, and undeniable than the apocalypse that didn’t happen on May 12, 2011, or the next one that won’t happen in late December 2012.

The 11:11 Spirit Guardians, for example, offer an e-mail list to which you can sign up “to receive the beautiful uplifting messages from various types of Celestial Beings.”⁵ Their website also offers a section on poetry related to the 11:11 phenomenon. “Forever . . .,” for example, promises the reader that 

During the time it will take for this poem to be completed,
. . . no animals were either killed or injured in the production
by either this writer, or his immediate friends.

We feel obligated to point out that not once did Shakespeare, Poe, Tennyson, or Maya Angelou promise not to use their poetry to kill animals.

The web page for The N Visible explains that “in May 2004, the 6th Gate Activation turned the Doorway of the 11:11 inside out,” and that “11:11 is a pre-encoded trigger placed into our cellular memory banks prior to our descent into matter.” We can’t pretend to know what any of this means, but we do like that the website features photographs of warm and inviting rituals that could be mistaken for a reenactment of the end credits to The 40-Year-Old Virgin:
 

Definitely not serious.

   

Apparently serious.

As much as we like the idea of receiving messages from Celestial Beings, frolicking on well-manicured seaside lawns while waiting to become part of the emerging universal One Being, or refusing to kill animals with the power of the written word, we’re inclined to take a more practical view of today’s date. According to an online author going by the name paradigmsearch,⁶

Even when taking into account the differences between the Gregorian and Julian calendars, nothing significant appears to have happened 900 years ago during the year 1111; nothing significant appears to have happened 1,000 years ago during the year 1011; [and] nothing significant appears to have happened 2,000 years ago during the year 11. 

So November 11, 2011, will probably be just as dull and un-momentous as those other momentous dates. Except that we have iPads, because this is the future.

If today does indeed turn out to be as mundane and uneventful as we expect it to be, we hope that the mystical optimists among us don’t take it too badly. We suspect that, rather than despairing, many of these folks will latch onto something that happens today—whether it’s a flat tire, a long look from an attractive co-worker, or a free fourteenth donut in their baker’s dozen—and fill it with an entire belief system’s worth of significance that it doesn’t really deserve, much like they did with the date itself.

On the other hand, Harry Potter And the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, is scheduled to be released today, and if that doesn’t make this a momentous, mystical date, we don’t know what does.

Way, way cooler than a
new spiritual awakening: eyelashes.

NOTES

1. As far as we know. We’re not sure if we’d trust us, though, if we were you. Frankly, we’re idiots.

2. Thanks a lot, Einstein.

3. All dates taken from http://isotropic.org/date, http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/calendar, or both.

4. Year of Our Blog. We started on October 10, 2009.

5. Bulk e-mail having been long ago established as the message medium of choice for celestial beings. 

6. Seriously, how weird is that? What kind of oddball uses a fake name?

 

One of These Things is Not Like the Others

Literally¹ trillions of American adults in their twenties to thirties grew up watching Sesame Street, and most will easily be able recall the short sketch in which viewers were presented with four items accompanied by a bouncy little tune that informed us that one of those four things was not like the other. And, sure enough, after several seconds, the car with only three wheels, or the single square among the three circles, or the kid who didn’t like sports was singled out for mockery.

Yes, that’s exactly right: Cookie Monster is the only one without a nose. Well done!

With that common memory firmly in mind, I humbly present my own version of the Sesame Street game:

Q: Can you tell which one of the following is different from the others?

1. Sasquatch

2. The Dungeon Master

3. The Denver Broncos’ running game

4. The Loch Ness Monster.

A: Ha ha! If you said “The Denver Broncos’ running game,” you have my gratitude for refusing to believe that I’d go with the dumbest and most obvious joke available—but you’re wrong. Nice try, but this was a trick question. In fact all four of the above things are exactly the same, in that none of them actually exist.


NOTES
1. No, not literally. Remember the First Rule of National Football League Broadcasting: “ ‘Literally’ is literally never to be used to literally mean ‘literally.’ ”