Happy St. Patrick’s Day to my Irish friends. Unless the celebrations there are as humiliating as they are in the US. It’s the only day I claim to be Norwegian, an admirable, good-looking people with much more dignified cultural celebrations. In my youth, the St. Paul St. Patrick’s Day committee asked me to be in their beauty pageant to lead the march but I was already old enough to know that a young woman has to fight for dignity & can’t let a second-rate honorific like playing queen for a day take it away. But hat’s off to St. Patrick who chased the snakes out of Ireland & sent them to the US where they morphed into politicians like Paul Ryan.