With any luck o' the Irish, tonight you'll stay home with corned beef, make yourself some Drunk Irish Beer Bread, and watch your fave Irish flick and kiss on your favorite lad or lass. St. Patrick's Day is often a green-beer amateur-hour evening of pinching, singing, Guinness and Jameson. A recipe for a good time, bad decisions and and even worse hangover, it's the one day of the year where everyone's Irish. Go get your sham-rocks off. more ›

St. Patrick may have effectively become the patron saint of drinking, but the man was a pretty austere dude. As he wrote in his Confessio, "I used to stay out in the forests and on the mountain and I would wake up before daylight to pray in the snow, in icy coldness, in rain, and I used to feel neither ill nor any slothfulness, because, as I now see, the Spirit was burning in me at that time." Hardcore, Pat. more ›

MvB is going to get his pound of opening night hors d'oeuvres after seeing the The Merchant of Venice at the Seattle Shakespeare Company tonight. Saturday, if rainy, may involve an all-day LOTR-athon at a friend's in LQA.
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Gregoire just got hit with a second lawsuit over her proposed 2009 budget, which--unlawfully, according to the unions suing the governor--reneges on certain contracted pay raises for state employees and home-care workers. Gregoire's office has responded, saying the money simply isn't there to fulfill the terms of those contracts. Seattlest is a union girl (we have a fraction of Irish blood coursing through our veins, and some stubborn Midwest farmer blood in there too), but we have to wonder: what exactly are the two angry unions hoping to accomplish? A different budget allocating non-existent money? A token acknowledgment that though what's done is done, what's done was illegal? Good luck with that. more ›