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 just in from our roving cityspk adept Karl-André St. Victor. He just sent me these tantalizing snaps of sun drenched signs from the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Truly, i cannot say enough about hand painted signs, it is a lost art up here. Back in the days, guys like the father of Casius Clay (Mohammed Ali) plyed it as their trade all over America. Here is remembering the glory days, albeit in a more rustic version. So, here is saying a big sak passé to Karl from Cityspk.

In an only somewhat related news item, local tensions have peaked between youth in Montreal’s mainly Haitian community of Monteal North and MUC police. In suburban Little Haiti, riots flared up after a suspicious police shooting — akin to the Parisian banlieue’s in 2005. Much could be said about the anomy of these type of far flung urban consellations and the overall périphérique/centre split.