noise."Happy St. Patrick's Day! · 12:37am Mar 18th, 2016
Today's St. Patrick's Day, and while I did consider writing a semi-serious pony-goes-to-a-bar-and-drinks-with-a-bunch-of-humans fic, I've done that a time or two.
Then I thought about something with leprechauns, but that really wasn't working out for me, either.
Naturally, the next thing my mind landed upon was the humble potato.
Uncooked potatoes are toxic to horses, possibly fatally so. They're also toxic to humans, in case you were considering trying one.
Interestingly, the symptoms of solanine poisoning are excitability followed by depression, gastric problems, coordination problems, decreased heart and respiratory rate, convulsions, and death, which are not that much different from the symptoms of overindulging in your favorite green adult beverage.
So, in summary, don't feed raw potato to horses (or yourself), and don't overindulge today. Your friends might draw on you. Have some Lucky Charms instead.
Unlucky Charms, the only cereal that has a warning about spontaneous combustion.
Oh yeah... it's St Patty's Day. Huh. You'd think I'd know this, living in Chicago. The city that loves the holiday so much, we dye an entire river green.
3813644
I thought the pollution made it green year-round, and they just claimed it was dye on St. Pat's.
3813526
It could happen!
3813647 LOL
I guess it's a little green normally. But it's like neon cloverleaf green today.
What? I eat raw potatoes all the time! What are you talking ab
3813670
>inb4 Candlejack joke.
3813647
3813644
Actually, this is an interesting question. How do you lot celebrate the day over there? Just the drinking, or is there more to it?
3813738
Stores have sales announced in a bad fake Irish accent, usually also with a leprechaun; we dye our piss-water beer green, and you're supposed to wear something green or else other people are allowed to hit you without consequence. The stores sell a bunch of glittery crap with shamrocks on it or shirts and buttons that say 'kiss me, I'm Irish,' and that's pretty much it. Also, lots of people use it as an excuse to get stupid drunk. St. Patrick's day is one of the few days in the year where it's socially acceptable to be drunk by 8 am.
3813738 Heh, I'm not really in the party scene, so I don't really know. Like I said, I forgot today was even the day... well I think one of the radio DJ's might have mentioned it.
Still though, I don't watch the news, but I'm pretty sure we Chicagoans still have the St Patty's Day parade, and then of course...
elitemgtservices.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/Green-Chicago-River-for-St-Patricks-Day2.jpg
Well it's a good thing we thought potato shavings were so awful we wouldn't eat them despite being practically famished during prep...
I celebrated today by getting up at 5:45am getting to the office at 6:45am for a carpool. Carpooling out to a shift for 8am, working until 6pm where we then drove an hour to my next shift starting at 7:30pm where I then finished at 2am and just got home now at 3am.
Best case I get paid 18.5 hours.
3813754
I'd like to see someone try the punching thing in one of the pubs 'round here. Heh.
3813808
That looks like it came straight out of some budget 90s dystopia flick. Make it stop. 
3816321 lol I could see that. It really is that green though, despite the B&W.
3816555 . . . is this the river that once caught fire?
3816643 I'm not entirely sure. I think that might be Bubbly Creek, which is a branch of the Chicago River a bit southwest of downtown. Though I suppose the channel up north by me might've been on fire within the past 30 years, when it was still labelled 'toxic' by the EPA. (We used to dump our shit there.) It's now called 'polluted,' which is much better, you're allowed to go canoeing in it now. Depends on how recently you're talking. Like a century ago, Bubbly Creek was used by the stockyards for dumping waste. It bubbled because of the decomposition of all the animal parts and fat, and it didn't have much of a flow to it. It actually had so much fat on it, some clever people started skimming it off and selling it as lard. The stock yards got mad about that, and had the cops shoo away those peddlers. Then they started selling the river-lard themselves. Read The Jungle. You'll never eat sausage again.
Heheh. I'm sure it's much cleaner now.
3816643 That was most famously the Cuyahoga River, due to an oil slick on the surface of the river catching fire in 1969.
Things have improved since then, thankfully.
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3816746
Can I say that it frightens me slightly that you were both able to name different rivers, off the top of your heads, and with the suggestion that there might have been more than one?
3822417
The Rouge River used to catch fire a lot. I think the Rasin River did occasionally as well.
My high school history teacher said when he was a kid, they were still dumping paint in the Tittabawasee River, and all the kids would make bets on what color the river would be any particular day.
3822442
Well, at least that's no longer the case, yes? Your EPA is (nominally) keeping you safe?
3822460
Well ... There was a little problem with accidentally poisoning everyone in Flint, but other than that the system works.
3822484 . . . would this be the appropriate time to drop a 'thanks, Obama'?
3822486
That was our governor's fault, mostly.
3822417 To be fair, I Googled it...
The problem in Flint is more complicated than most news coverage has presented it, dealing with such disparate things as price increases for water the city of Flint was buying, to many of Flint's home owners refusing to pay for their water service and the city being unwilling to shut them off, leaving the city giving away free water while lacking enough money to buy that water... Then jumping for what looked like a safe and cheaper source...
PS: Potatoes! Most of the toxins are in the skin, so a potato peeler helps. If the potato has been exposed to light, the skin will develop a green color--I've heard that the solanine content is higher then. So remember! Potatoes should be treated like people--keep 'em in the dark, and then skin 'em for all they're worth!
3822417 Hehehe. Well like I said, the water reclamation people do actually work on these things. The channel is legally considered safe enough to go canoeing in. Consider that in the '70s it was actually illegal to do so, probably because we still dumped shit in it. Which, btw, that was actually a good thing. It was actually the reason why we stopped the cholera epidemics of the turn of the century. We dumped our shit in the channel and the river, which emptied into Lake Michigan, where we sourced our drinking water. See the problem? In the 1890s or so, they went about reversing the river and the channel, and so our shit ultimately wound up in the Mississippi. By the time it got there though, it would've been... you know, not shitty anymore. I forget the word for it, aeration I guess. It's the same way sewage has been treated manually for... over a hundred years.
So it worked. Also, I studied this shit (pun) when I was younger.