Snippets from an Irish Holiday

In front of me at the self-checkout at the grocery store was a guy who was buying a six-pack of Killian's Irish Red. At the self-checkout, there's no cashier, of course, so he had to go track down somebody he could show his ID to, and then he came back to put his own money into the slots. He paid for the whole thing in quarters. Maybe his hands weren't big enough, because halfway through dropping quarters one by one into the coin slot, he went back into his pockets. I thought he might be pulling a couple of bills out to take him the rest of the way, but--more quarters.

One the way home, a city bus appeared to have been pulled over by a cop.

Earlier, my brother had a friend in from Japan, so we did much of the traditional Chicago celebration (though we didn't brave the crowds and venture down to the see the river died green because they drove by and saw it quickly from the car window). We drank the green beer and ate the corned beef and cabbage (which I actually like throughout the year).

This really has nothing to do with St. Patrick's Day, but back at the grocery store, I noticed that the headline on The Weekly World News was about the ghost of an alien haunting Roswell. I was looking for an online version to offer a link, but I couldn't come up with one. At The Weekly World News site, though, I did find an alternate headline that made me laugh out loud: "Ghost of Famous Skeptic Extremely Embarrassed." I guess, after a lifetime of debunking that would be a difficult position in which to find oneself.