Hilltopics
Page 8A
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY
KANSAN
March 17, 1997
St. Patrick's Day!
By Ann Marchand Kansan staff writer
Today is the day when those not wearing green should be prepared to feel a pinch: St. Patrick's Day.
Today is the day when bars will be filled by 10 a.m. with patrons clamoring for green beer.
Today is the day when a parade downtown will prompt residents to dance and be merry in all shades of green.
Today is the day when leprechauns sprout, the Irish will be kissed and shamrocks
It is also the day when every thing will be green, including the limeade sold by Student Senators on Wescoe Beach.
All this in honor of that elusive man, Saint Patrick.
Chris Coburn, Wichita junior.
couldn't really explain why the nation went crazy on March 17.
"I know it has something to do with the Irish," he said.
Michelle Dennard, Chapman junior, said St. Patrick's Day was a popular holiday because people liked it.
"It's tradition," she said. "It gives people an excuse to drink green beer and wear clovers." In fact, St. Patrick's Day is a holiday steeped in history.
While a slave herding sheep, Patrick had a lot of time to think about religion. He began to have dreams and visions which, he claimed, were divinely inspired.
At 22, Patrick managed to escape Ireland and went to Gaul, which is now France. While
there, he devoted his life to Christianity and became a bishop. He was sent to Ireland
sionary by Pope Celestine I, where he remained until his death in the mid-fifth century. By the time he died, Patrick was said to have founded over 300 churches and baptized over 120,000 people.
The Irish were in awe of this man, who not only brought them Christianity but also helped them become literate through his writings. As time wore on, legends about his life began to spread.
One such legend, which can be traced to the seventh century, was that St. Patrick saved Ireland from snakes by driving them into the sea.
Another legend is that he demonstrated proof
of the existence of the Holy Trinity by showing unbelievers the shamrock, a small plant which is plentiful in Ireland. Patrick claimed that the plant, which has three leaves from one stalk, represented three persons — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit — in one God. But he could not explain the four leaf clover.
In honor of Patrick, who was later deemed a saint, the Irish declared the shamrock as their national flower and March 17 as the St. Patrick's Feast Day.
To many, the day is a great time to feast.
Bagel & Bagel, 1026 Massachusetts St., will sell green bagels to celebrate the occasion.
Lisa Limanni, manager of Bagel & Bagel, said that all the chain's stores in the Kansas City and Lawrence area offered the tinted bags Friday through today at the same price as other bagels they sell.
Shannon Norwood, manager of Molly McGee's, 2429 Iowa St., said that the restaurant would offer traditional Irish food and atmosphere for lunch and dinner.
"We're running corned beef and cabbage with new potatoes Saturday.
Sunday and Monday," she said.
"We're also having bag-
pipers from the Topeka
area on Saturday night."
Free State Brewery, 636 Massachusetts St., will also celebrate the day in style.
"We don't serve green beer,but we do have traditional Irish food specials," said manager Alex Hamilton
various Irish dishes, including corned beef and lamb stew.
"We have corned beef and cabbage, we have green beer delivered by the lep-
beef and lamb stew. Rick Renfro, a partner at Johnny's Tavern, 401 N. Second St., claimed that the bar had all the bases covered.
Diners at Free State may select from
rechaums, and we are on the parade route," he said. "You've gotta get here about 9:30 to get a seat."
Renfro would not discuss the source of the bottled green beer, which is the same price as regular beer, except to say that he believed it would be superior to the green beer sold other places.
"It's not the food dye kind, because that would stick to your teeth. Our beer keeps your teeth white."
Harbour Lights, 1031 Massachusetts St., will have green beer as well. But according to assistant manager Johnny Kayaian, those wanting to sample the beer while they watch the parade should arrive early.
The bar will open at 9 a.m. today. It usually opens at 2:30 p.m.
"We're going to have all of our Irish-influenced beverages on special, and we're adding green food coloring to the domestics," Kayaian said. "There's no extra charge for that."
Norwood said that Molly McGee's customers preferred undived beer.
But at least two places in town will not feature green beverages.
"The majority of our customers want it without the green dye," she said.
And Troy Clifton, manager of Louise's Bar Downtown, 1009 Massachusetts St., said the staff had learned from previous mistakes with green dye.
"We did it before in the past, but everything got stained and it was just a big mess," he said.
Retailers said that St. Patrick's Day was not typically a major sales event.
Joe Flannery, president of
Weaver's 901 Massachusetts St.
said the holiday was important to him because of his Irish heritage, but the store would not have any special events to celebrate it.
"We don't have any special promotions planned, but we always celebrate them."
Weaver's are of Irish descent," he said. "It's one of our favorite holidays, but we celebrate it in our individual ways."
"It's just not a big gift-buying holiday," said Marci Shalz, sales associate at The Etc. Shop, 928 Massachusetts St.
But those not buying gifts still have grand plans to celebrate.
"I'll definitely load myself up with some green and get myself some green bottled beer and
drink it up," said Clint Rexford, Meade junior. "Green is the best color in the universe, and everyone should experience it."
Coburn said that he planned to go to Kelly's,
Journ said that he planned to go to Keny's, an Irish pub in Westport, if the lines weren't too long.
weren 100 tong.
Denise Williams, DeSoto freshman, said she planned to spend the day in a different way.
"Im in the 'Women of KU' calendar, and I'll be busy with that," she said. "I haven't picked out my swimsuit yet, but if I find a cute green one I'll probably wear it."
Some students will be more subdued throughout the day.
"The only time I really celebrated it was my senior year in high school, when I was in Chicago and the river was dyed green," said Andrea Cozad, Lansing sophomore.
Kara Heitz, Topeka senior, said that St. Patrick's Day in the United States was definitely a different experience than it was in Ireland.
"It's a very Americanized holiday," she said. "It's a chance for Irish-Americans to celebrate being Irish, but in Ireland they celebrate being Irish every day."
Heitz has been in Dublin, Ireland, the past two years on St. Patrick's Day. She said that last
versity College of Dublin, the holiday was much more commercialized than the year before.
"In 1994, it really wasn't that big of a deal," she said. "But last year they had a huge parade and a huge carnival, and the celebration in Dublin probably rivaled the ones in Chicago and Boston."
She also said the attitude of the Irish toward the holiday of their patron saint was less exuberant than she had expected.
pretty big party," she said.
"It's nothing like the Fourth of July here or anything, but it's still a
she sait
"Mostly it's
just a good
day to relax.
It's a bank
holiday, a
day you
don't have
to go into
work, and a
chance to get
drunk all day."
Medical Breakthroughs: In February, surgeons removed a cataract from the eye of the National Zoo's 6-foot-long Komodo dragon, Muffin, in the hope that she could better see how studyd the male, Friendly, was and thus would mate with him. And in January, doctors in Johannesburg, South Africa, performed spinal surgery on a 10-foot-long python, which had been run over by a car. (Contrary to what our eyes tell us, the python has 306 vertebra and 268 ribs.) And in Jackson, Mich., in February, veterinarian Timothy England fitted a stray rooster with artificial legs after he had to amputate his natural ones because of frostbite.
Gas in the News: In Hanesville, Wis., police responded to a 911 call in December regarding a domestic disturbance, which began, the wife said, when the husband inappropriately passed gas as they were tucking their son into bed. And in January in Perth, Australia, John Douglas Young, 47, was convicted of a child-abuse charge for attempting to hire two boys for $5 each to pass gas in his face. According to Young, he wanted to masturbate
later to the mental picture of the encounter. (Young's unsuccessful defense was in part to recite a long list of movies, literature and TV shows, like Benny Hill in which gas-passing was a popular theme.)
In March, Ms. Nadean Cool won a settlement of $2.4 million in her lawsuit in Appleton, Wis., against her former psychotherapist, Dr. Kenneth Olson. She claimed that he had first persuaded her that she had a multiple-personality disorder (120 personalities, including Satan and a duck) and then billed her insurance company for group therapy because he said he had to counsel so many people. Olson, seeking greener pastures for his psychotherapy business, has since moved to Montana.
In October, the Washington Supreme Court reversed the conviction of Benjamin Hull on a technicality. Hull had been found guilty of defrauding the state worker compensation office. He admitted that he had gotten a friend to help him blast a hole in his left leg below the knee with a shotgun, but insisted it was not to get compensation (he received $60,000). He said it he did it because the knee has been painful to him since 1973 after he injured it in an accident. Five years earlier, he had tried to take the leg off with a chain saw, but got only part-way through because the saw kept mal-
CREME DE LA WEIRD
functioning.
In January, the Australian Medical Journal reported a case of lead poisoning by an electrician who chewed electrical cable to satisfy his nicotine urge when he was forced to work in no-smoking buildings. The man said he chewed almost a yard of cable a day for nearly 10 years because it had a sweet taste, especially near the center.
Larry Doyen, 22, was hospitalized in December after chaining himself to a tree just outside the town of Mexico, Maine. He was rescued by the state warden service after spending two weeks with the tree. It was the third time he had done that in recent months.
In November, a 50-year-old man was arrested in Albquiere, N.M., on a complaint by his 13-year-old stepdaughter that he made her perform a series of bizarre acts. The acts were written on index cards and were supposedly to toughen her in her quest to get a learner's driving permit. According to the complaint, the girl was allowed to drive the truck until the man turned up an index card with an instruction, which she had to follow before driving some more. Among other things, the cards called for her to stand naked in the glare of the truck's headlight; and staud told to a bar with a ball in her mouth.
FEUDS
Continental Airlines filed a lawsuit in November in Newark, N.J., against Deborah Loeding. The airline said she endangered passengers in order to get revenge on her ex-husband, who is a pilot. Ms. Loeding had baked him some bread, but unknown to him, had laced it with marijuana so that he would fail the airline's drug test and get fired, which did happen. He was reinstated when the airline learned what happened.
In October, a judge in Baton Rouge, La., abruptly called a mistrial in the 8-year-old lawsuit filed by Mary Ann Turner, now 56, against ex-husband and anesthesiologist Alan Ostrowe, proclaiming that her testimony was over theatrical. According to Turner, when she was hospitalized for birth-canal surgery in 1972, Ostrowe, without her permission, persuaded the surgeons to remove her clitorial hood because, according to the couple's eldest son, his father needed to control his mother's sexuality to compensate for his sexual inadequacies.
In Jakarta, Indonesia, in January, Reuters news service reported that a 29-year-old woman, upset with her unfaithful boyfriend, identified only as TU, went to the crowded karaoke bar where he worked and released a half dozen cobras on the premises.
Pitt understands the seriousness of new movie role
The Associated Press
NEW YORK—Brad Pitt took playing an Irish terrorist in *The Devil's Ounn* very seriously.
"I'm playing a Catholic kid from Ireland," Pitt says in the latest Rolling Stone magazine. "I'm speaking for this situation that has gone on for years. I felt a huge responsibility for that. So I'm not just going to sit there and say, 'Oh, I'm Irish! Give me a Guinness.' I'm not going to make leprechaun jokes."
Pitt denied that there was any bad blood between him and Harrison Ford, who co-starred in the movie, despite numerous stories about alleged behind-the-scenes squabbling.
"He's absolutely cool," Pitt said of Ford. "Look, it was tough. It was the hardest film I've ever been on. But as for reports about out-of-control egos and people hiding out in trailers, that just wasn't the case. It was everyone trying to make the best movie they could under the circumstances."
The Devil's Oun is the story of an Irish Republican Army terrorist befriended by a New York City policeman.