...this one repeated by the CBC about a bartender in England:

Blakeney will often stand at the other end of the bar if any customer is sipping a Guinness. Her phobia of the popular brew was triggered when she spilled a pint of Guinness over herself as a child, she said. At six or seven, she knocked over a table upon which a glass of Guinness was standing. She was coated in the dense, black liquid, and began crying her eyes out, she said. "Everything about it makes my skin crawl," she said. "I don't like how thick it looks when it's poured and I can't stand the sight or smell of it. Even talking about it makes me squirm. I've never been diagnosed with a medical condition but it is definitely a phobia."

Lew is right. St. Patrick's Day is fairly pointless when it comes these sorts of stories, the PR news releases and bad partying. Happily, I am Scots so I have no desire to pretend to celebrate a fraud on someone else's national day. I have to focus on being dour. Still, it must burn the earnest Irish to witness a global rubbishing of their culture on an annual basis. What have they done to deserve this? What have they done that some personal phobia becomes a news item worth spinning around the world as opposed to a private cause for dismissal from employment?