I hope you had a Happy Saint Patrick's Day, if you believe in that sort of thing, and I hope you are not ill from too much alcohol, the official drug of choice of Saint Patrick's Day. I don't judge, I mean, I like to drink and drunk, and if you want to get loaded because it's Saint Patrick's Day, or Tuesday, go for it. I just know what it feels like Later, after too much alcohol, so I'm just saying, I hope you feel OK today and that your liver is not trying to leave your body because you were trying to kill it with fun.

Soon, in [...]

As an alcoholic I have always had a deep-seated hatred of St. Patrick's Day, trivializing as it does the hard work that I and so many of my fellow dipsomaniacs have put in over the years to slake our insatiable thirst no matter what toll it takes on employment, relationships or physical and mental health. As a humanist I similarly despise it, since it furthers the terrible ethnic stereotype that the Irish are the worst kind of drunks—rowdy Sullys and sullen Mollys who can't hold their liquor, keep their voices down or vomit in anything approaching proximity to a toilet or washbasin—when in fact they are some of the [...]

"The Irish fanned out across Europe, salvaging books wherever they could, making copies, reassembling libraries and teaching the newly settled barbarians of the continent to read and write. But they did more than this: they managed to infuse the emerging medieval world with a playfulness previously unknown. In the margins of the books they copied, the Irish scribes drew little pictures, thickets of plants, flowers, birds and animals. Human faces occasionally peek through the tangle, faces of childlike delight and awe. If you were a scribe copying out some especially ponderous philosophical Greek, the margin in which you could reflect on your own world served as a source of [...]