Yer not helping yerself wit using spellings like dat, sure and begob yer not.

If the phrase “[i]f Barack Obama …. were to skip across the Irish Sea” isn’t a reference to something elfin, what then is it a reference to? Do Irish folk of regular height ambulate skippily?

“’Tis fine enough,” opined Pat, “but could not he have mentioned County Donegal, and the fields of shamrocks glistening over the cliffs?”

“Stuff the shamrocks,” Mike replied heatedly, “what about the leprechauns? How can a man write of the woes of the Emerald Isle and write nowt of the leprechauns, clad all in green? By the saints and the Blessed Mother o’ God, ‘twas the leprechauns that started this whole Donnybrook, what with their clamourin’ for deregulation in the financial markets, the better to leverage those pots o’ gold they always be carryin’ about with them.”

And they picked up their Guinnesses and laughed bitterly at the thought of the leprechauns, marooned helplessly in their unsellable O’Mansions, bereft of their gold, mortgages unpaid, with nought but last year’s mouldy potatoes to sustain them.

I can do it, and I’m not even Irish.

There’s plenty of oldsters here at CT, so I’d like to ask the older American readers if anyone ever read National Lampoon back in the early ‘70s, and if you did, do you remember the ongoing columns about “Young Patrick Moynihan”? It was all about young Paddy Moynihan growing up in Hell’s Kitchen, with an violent, alcoholic father and a termagant of a mother, fists and frying pans flying and the young Paddy begging his parents not to be killing each other. Very funny parody of cliches about poverty-stricken Irish-Americans.

And no more turn aside and brood
Upon money’s bitter mystery;
For Fergus rules the credit cards,
And rules the debtors of the wood,
And the empty piers on the dim sea
And all bankrupted wandering stars.
— honkhonk——————————————————————

I wouldn’t want to think about how an economic breakdown in Denmark or Sweden would be reported.

“Moose rambling through the Astrid Lindgren-like tranquility of abandoned IKEA stores where SAABs stand rusting in the parking lot…”