Bob Stepno: Life, the Universe & Everything

Wed, 17 Mar 2004 17:03:20 GMT

Happy St. Patrick's Day!

The St. Patrick's Day parade isn't until Sunday, but it's still Evacuation Day in Boston, as I mentioned yesterday. And it snowed all night, so one of the predictable newspaper headlines is about "The Wearin' o' the White."

(Evacuation Day is a Boston-only holiday, supposedly marking the departure of the English troops from the city in 1776. Coincidentally, it gives city employees St. Patrick's Day off, and I think they turn off the parking meters even though it's not parade day. I don't know whether the snowplow drivers get overtime.)

Is it some kind of comment on the current state of journalism that the Boston Globe's excellent St. Patrick's Day webpage uses a Reuters photo of a pint of Guinness instead of a shot of its own? In the old days at the Courant, we hated to use syndicated versions of anything we could do ourselves. You could always find a one of our own photographers at the Press Box bar or Kenny's on Capitol Avenue, and I'm sure they would have been happy to take their own picture reflected in a pint glass rather than use one from a British wire service.

Of course that stuff about the hard-drinking Irish is an old fashioned and silly stereotype invented by anti-Irish propagandists 100 years ago, followed by pro-Irish comedians, journalists, politicians, the Hallmark card company and a lot of breweries and tavern entrepreneurs. ("It's just an excuse for fake Irish people to go out and drink,then throw-up on other people. This is the reason South Boston will always be considered third class,"says one of the first comments on the boston.com discussion board.)

The stereotype of the hard-drinking journalist is another tradition I hope is fading, thanks to health insurance and anti-depressants, or maybe they're taking their jobs seriously because of all the webloggers around.

The best lessons I take from the Irish, including my mother and many other singers and storytellers, all have to do with faith (in God, or your dreams, or each other), finding music in language (and everything in music), a general attraction to the color green, and a fondness for symbols of not giving up. The long-lasting head on a proper pint of Guinness will do for today's toast... Slainte!

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By the way, the music articles on that Boston.com page are excellent. And here's my final St. Patrick's Day suggestion for the snowbound: a visit to the Internet Poetry Archive at iBiblio to listen to Seamus Heaney.

Tue, 16 Mar 2004 22:05:13 GMT

Happy Other "Days"

Today, March 16, some say, is St. Urho's Day, but there are probably still more Finnegans and Fenians than Finns in Boston.

Tomorrow is St. Patrick's Day, March 17. In Suffolk County (primarily the City of Boston), March 17 is also an official holiday called "Evacuation Day," although the Farmer's Almanac hints at an ulterior motive in the choice of the exact date on which to commemorate the British departure from the city in 1776.

Although there's little mention of Evacuation Day on the official City Website (whose manager, like most city employees, probably gets the day off), the calendar does list the Chieftains' St. Patrick's Day concert at Symphony Hall on, appropriately, the Green Line. It only took a little poking around the city site to find a link to the Evacuation Day Events List (some started two weeks ago!) at the somewhat shaky SouthBostonOnline.com.

The South Boston Tribune mentions a 228th Annual Evacuation Day Banquet and the fact that the St. Patrick's Day Parade and Road Race (separate events) will be on Sunday the 21st this year. The race begins at 10 a.m. It slows to parade velocity at 1 p.m., according to the city calendar. After the parade, the Shanghai Circus is at Symphony Hall, a fine combination for a multi-ethnic city like Boston.

With a little more searching, I did uncover a surprising multi-city resource: SaintPatricksDayParade.com. For a more far-reaching look, try the Irish Times at Ireland.com. And, last but not least, here's the Boston Globe's special treatment of the day.

Sun, 07 Mar 2004 23:26:32 GMT

Computers 'must become greener'. PC production needs to use less energy and fewer chemical inputs, a report from the UN University says. [BBC News | Technology | World Edition]