Today is apparently the single biggest excuse for going out and getting absolutely HAMMERED, because it is St. Patrick’s Day. From what I gather, this is an historical celebration of the death of the eponymous saint, who arrived on the Emerald Isle some 1600 years ago and chased away all the snakes – and then set about baptising and Christianising the pagan Hibernians, Celts, Picts, and other assorted characters that peopled the very inhospitable northern lands.

Somewhere along the line, history became legend, and legend became myth, and myth became a drinking game.

Ireland, for instance, has never had snakes (to my knowledge). Nor was the wearing of shamrocks particularly common amongst the Hibernians, to the extent that most people can determine.

So, what started off as a Christian feast day, eventually became a global excuse to get dressed up in green – and, in the case of the Irish inhabitants of Massachusetts, an excuse to dump green paint into the Charles River – and go out to get completely SMASHED while drinking pint after pint of Guinness.

(I’ve never been able to figure out the point of Guinness, personally – though, having mathematical training, I can certainly appreciate the fact that the originator of Student’s t-distribution, a very widely-used generalisation of the Gaussian probability density function, was introduced into the English-language mathematical literature by one William Sealy Gosset, who worked for the Guinness breweries. To me, the beer itself is just… well, beer, really, and therefore much of a muchness.)

None of that changes the fact that today is a great excuse for hot redheads to get all dressed up in green and make complete fools of themselves in your neighbourhood pub.

And, since so many of my readers are gingervitis sufferers, here is some proper Irish music (sort of), with a redhead in it, to get the day off to a suitably drunken start:

On a more serious note – gingers make up only a TINY percentage of people, anywhere. Ginger women are, apparently, the craziest and most difficult to handle out of the whole species. That does not change the fact that they deserve to have their bloodline carried on through time.

So, be like Dire Badger and MrUNIVAC, and do your solemn duty to find a ginger and continue the line of soulless characters – like this lot below:

Yes, they are crazy – but, for some of you, they are the BEST kind of crazy. (Not my cup of tea, personally, but that’s me.)