Okay. The fact that today is St. Patrick's Day has caused me way more angst than it should have when it comes to getting today's thread up. For one thing, it's my understanding that St. Patrick's Day is a much bigger deal here than it is in Ireland and that Irish SPD celebrations tend to be for the benefit of idiot American tourists (someone can correct me on this if I'm wrong -- it won't hurt my feelings). For another, Americans with Irish ancestry tend to suffer what I call "Shamrock & Shillelagh Syndrome" -- a simplistic and overly-romanticised notion of Ireland and a tendency to identify themselves as Irish first, American second, regardless of whether they actually know anything beyond the fact that they have an Irish surname. I've always (well, since I was a teenager, anyway) found this as irritating as the 1/16th Cherokee ancestry that nearly every white person in America will claim to have. Having Irish ancestry myself (no -- really), I have an almost allergic reaction to the whole thing. So, even though most of you wouldn't have known that I have Irish ancestry, I just couldn't bring myself to treat today the way I did St. Andrew's Day or St. David's Day. It would have felt like I'd come down with S & S Syndrome, if only for a day. So, Thauma & Scherfig: Happy St. Patrick's Day or not. It's your call.
Now that I have that out of the way: Edward, the Black Prince, became the first Duke of Cornwall in 1337. Stephen Perry received a patent for the rubber band in 1845 and 919 members of a Ugandan cult called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments were killed/committed suicide in 2000.
Born today: Gottlieb Daimler (1834-1900), Kate Greenaway (1846-1901), Mikhail Vrubel (1856-1910), Nat "King" Cole (1919-1965), Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993), Paul Kantner (1941), John Sebastian (1944), Kurt Russell (1951), Lesley-Anne Downe (1954), Gary Sinise (1955), Clare Grogan (1962), Rob Lowe (1964), Billy Corgan (1967) and Stephen Gately (1976-2009).
