I’ve never been a big fan of St. Patrick’s day. Somehow, even though I’m a wee bit Irish, I can’t validate it as a holiday. I still have to go to work.

When I was a kid my Mom would bake Irish soda bread and we’d eat corned beef and cabbage and I’d hear tales of our earlier ancestors, who apparently brought nothing with them from Ireland except a foul mouth, which has become my only legacy.

“Our family came from County Cork,” my mother would say with pride, as if she could find it on a map. “Nanna used to say we were what’s known as shanty lace Irish.”

I believe that to mean that they didn’t have a pot to piss in but had notions of being more respectable. Sounds eerily familiar.

I’m a pretty fair genealogist and I’ve found that some of my Irish forefathers were tavern keepers in the 1870s. Sample rooms, tap rooms and taverns. They couldn’t have been very successful because they’re long gone now. Once on a trip back to where I grew up I went downtown to find the old addresses of a couple of these places. I wanted some photos but it didn’t turn out too good. What used to be a shitty Irish neighborhood one hundred years earlier was a full-fledged ghetto now, and once the first bottle bounces off the rental car I usually take the hint.

Maybe writing this post has had an effect on me as I suddenly feel the need to have a drink. I wouldn’t mind a Bushmills. Or some vanilla extract. Who’s kidding who, I’d drink cough syrup right now if I could get it.

This just in:

Twenty Major is live blogging from a pub in Ireland.