As the saying goes, Saint Paddy’s is the day that everyone is Irish. We at CitySpk also like to think that it is the day when the liquor puts a certain greenish hue to the whole damn world. So if someone asks you how you are, tell them that you are grand. And more to the point, so bloody godamned grand that it is all coming at you in green flashes… we raise our glasses to you, with a smattering of selections from our copious photo bank. ta.

From the young lad Eamon MacMahon. The Green Mill Lounge in Chicago, where “Machine Gun” Jack McGurn used to haunt.

And from the man with Hiberno-Lebanese roots that go so far back his ancestors never even made it to Ireland — Ghassan Fayad.

Some shots of the St. Patrick’s pub in Vieux Québec — the third most common entry point of Irish to N.A. during the Great Famine (after Boston and New York).

This American Life is an excellent longstanding wkly radio show on NPR radio out of Chicago and hosted by Ira Glass. It does profiles of standout people and gives intimate portraits that look into the soul of America.

They now have TV episodes as well on Showtime based on the same idea. This video is about the Chicago hot dog stand and landmark The Weiner Circle . It starts off seeming like an amusing episode of Seinfeld with the chap who loses his crap when he sells his soup, but it goes south, and fast. It turned my stomach, and not because of the dogs. It says a lot about the hyper-segregation between North and South Chicago. Already covered by CitySPK from a South side perspective here .