[SML] St. Patrick's Day - fractured explanation

[Richard Niederberg]

Dear Jim,
The anecdote was entirely tongue-in-cheek, that I wrote before my morning
mint-tea, as a break from writing legal decisions and other somewhat more
serious items in the quiet of the dawn. This misspelling was intentional; I
didn't want to offend anyone from the Lake Erie area by thinking that I had
misspelled their bailiwick. I know the history as you have recounted it.
Would you rather that I had blamed the New England industrialists for
creating a Potato Blight to get plentiful cheap labor delivered to them for
free? The Slave Traders in the Deep South had to pay for delivery of
personnel across the Atlantic Ocean, but the New England Factory, Mine, and
Railroad owners did not.
/s/ Richard
_________

On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 1:09 PM, Dougherty, Jim via Stagecraft <
stagecraft at theatrical.net> wrote:

> On 3/17/15, Richard Niederberg wrote:
>
> >A long time ago, a well-meaning gentleman named Patrick took it as his
> >task
> >to drive the snakes out of the Land of Ire. Whether they were literal
> >snakes or nonbelievers is open to debate, but the result was the same:
> >without the snakes killing the rodents, the rodents ate up
> >the still-growing potatoes, contributing to the Irish Famine.
> >This demonstrates both 'butterfly effect' and the law of unintended
> >consequences.
>
> Don¹t sell yourself short, Judge - it¹s not fractured, it¹s downright
> broken! :)
>
> -  St. Patrick and the famines (the big Œuns, in the late 1840s) were
> separated by almost 1500 years
> -  The famine was caused by potato blight, which isn¹t rodent-based.  Or
> snake-based.
> -  Land of Ire should be Éire, or Erin, but since the other one's pretty
> hilarious I¹m keeping it.  Sort of explains the temper, that does.
>
> Anyone interested can look into why the Irish were so dependent on one
> crop, and mostly ONE variety of that crop, that the effects were so
> devastating as to lead to the death or mass emigration of so many (hint,
> it¹s complicated and not so nice).  It eventually led to my being here,
> though indirectly - it had more to do with one particular family store
> failing (rather than to the lack of potatoes), leading to a permanent trip
> to NYC.  Where the whole store-failing-thing happened again, but that¹s a
> different story.
>
> Regardless, Happy St. Patrick¹s Day to one and all!  I look at it more as
> a way to celebrate Irish immigration to the US.  Since most of us are
> immigrants here of one sort or another, I¹ll raise a pint or a glass to
> all y¹all today. To those not in that category, it¹s just a regular night
> at the SML bar, so I¹ll do the same for you.  Sláinte!
>
> - Jim Dougherty
> ATD, Middlebury College Theatre Dept.
> (part Irish, all mutt)
>
>
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-- 
/s/ Richard
_________
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