All good things . . .

This seems like a good spot to watch the parade. Right on the edge of the street! Only mind the storm grate … oh, not again. Damned if that wasn’t the emerald flash of Greenweek, hiding in the sewer for a peek up my kilt. Greenweek, you are fast wearing out your welcome.

Did you know …

That the American celebration of St. Patrick’s Day is a manufactured holiday invented by Kraft (Philip Morris) in partnership with GlaxoSmithKline as a way to determine the half life of radioactive green dye in the human body? It’s true!

As we’ve discussed previously, St. Patrick is his own thing, and like all the best saints he has his own feast day. But in Ireland “the Feast of Black Patrick” is celebrated in an entirely different way than how we do it in America. St. Patrick has become something of a Krampus figure in Ireland, and each year on March 17 they celebrate by butchering lambs, and then covering their faces and clothing in the lambs’ blood. Then, families will lie in a bloody heap on their living room floor, pretending to be dead. On each doorstep is a pile of dead snakes (or, these days, more often rubber snakes), and on each door is nailed a note reading, “Patrick, we’re already all dead, so back to the Black Pit with you.” Pretty weird, I know, but as Tevye says, “Traditioooon!”

In America, of course, the holiday is very different. What American readers likely understand to be a typical St. Patrick’s Day is actually quite new. Until the mid 1980s, Irish Americans celebrated in much the same way as Irish Irish in Ireland. That all changed with the Philip Morris/GlaxoSmithKline Initiative. The parades, the plastic hats, the green beads, the novelty shirts—all of these things came out of the PMGSKI, and all of them are a smokescreen for the radioactive dye study. What’s more remarkable, perhaps, is that the study isn’t yet complete—PMGSKI scientists haven’t yet determined the length of time it takes for your body to eliminate, through one method or another, half of a dose of Green 84. The upshot of this is that if you drank even a single green beer in 1986 (or any year since), a significant quantity of radioactive dye is still in your body, wreaking havoc on your sperm (seriously, gametes exposed to Green 84 look like microscopic Graboids. Yuck!)

Happy St. Patricks Day, everyone!