Happy St. Patrick's Day to all of my Irish friends and even those of you who are only Irish one day a year!!!! There are a lot of ways to celebrate St. Patrick's Day most of which involve drinking. I've never understood the concept of green beer. I know that everything is supposed to be green on St. Patrick's Day. But c'mon.... green beer? It's just wrong. Why would anybody take a perfectly good beer and add food coloring to it to make it look like it went bad?
In honor of St. Patrick's Day since I am not willing to drink green beer, I thought we should look at famous Irish people. There is a list of famous Irish people in Wikipedia. I think their definition of famous may be a little loser than mine. They are listed in alphabetical order by profession. Architects are listed first followed by actors and so on. The first person I see listed who is of any interest to me is James Hoban the designer of the White House. Now, I would not have known that Hoban had designed the White House if it hadn't said so next to his name on the list. I would simply have scanned over his name just as I did the other 13 architects listed and thought to myself, this isn't really a list of famous people. But the list was thankfully saved with that one note next to Hoban's name. Just for kicks I tried clicking on 3 other architects on the list to see if I would change my mind after discovering what they had designed and I didn't. None of them designed a single building I had ever heard of. So.... LOSERS!
Let's move on to actors. The list of actors is much more substantial but still there is a large group of them that I have never heard of before. If you are really a good actor who deserves to be called famous, then a notation next to your name reminding me of who you are should not be necessary. For instance, if your name is Alison Doody and it says in Wikipedia that you are best known for your roll in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade and the image of some woman in that movie doesn't immediately come to mind, then in my opinion, you are not that famous. After all I have seen the movie multiple times. If she was really "famous" wouldn't I have recognized her name? Turns out she was the mean blond Nazi lady but I had to click on her name to find that out. One more thing.... If you really want to be famous and your last name is Doody.... change it. Do you really want people to go "Heh heh, you said doody", everytime someone says your name? I don't think so. An American would have known this.
Of the 93 famous Irish actors they listed, I recognized the following names without reading the notations:
Pierce Brosnan
Daniel Day-Lewis
Patrick Dempsey
Roma Downey
Colin Farrell
Richard Harris
Liam Neeson
Maureen O'Hara
Peter O'Toole
Spencer Tracy
I have two comments.... First, I only recognized 10.7% of the names they considered to be famous. Ahhhh.... I'm thinking that's a pretty sad list buddy. Now, I'm not a big movie goer and honestly, even when I do go to movies I don't really care that much who the actors are. If it's not George Clooney or someone else equally famous, I might not even recognize them. But really? If Roma Downey is one of only 10 names I recognize, it's a pretty pathetic list. My second comment is that I immediately recognized the name Richard Harris as the actor who portrayed King Arthur in Camelot. But next to his name to help you to recognize his fame, they listed that he was in the Harry Potter movies..... Hmmmm.... I did not know that and maybe this is the reason that I didn't recognize so many names on this list. Maybe they specialize in the sort of movies I would never go to see. He won the Golden Globe for his roll in Camelot but it is pushed aside for the Harry Potter person he played. Yeah, that makes sense.
Next up are the famous Irish comedians. There are 25 listed. I have heard of Denis Leary (although I never knew he was a comedian). I thought he was just an actor.... he doesn't seem funny to me. Maybe the Irish define comedian as loosely as they define "famous". The other name that I recognized was Conan O'Brien. I'll give 'em that one.
Moving on to musicians, I am not going to tell you how many are listed. But there are so many that they had to break it up into groups. I'm guessing there are about 500 names on the list..... of those, here are the names I recognize:
Bono (If they had listed him by his actual name, he would not have made my list of recognizable names)
The Edge (Ditto - I would never have known him by his actual name)
James Galway
Van Morrison
Sinead O'Connor
Bruce Springsteen (REALLY? I thought he was as American as me.)
There is a small group of dancers listed. I've never heard of any of them. One of them, Tristan MacManus has been on Dancing With the Stars, so my mom may have heard of him. But I quit watching that show when it got to the point that some of the dancers were more famous than the "stars" they were supposed to be dancing with. After the dancers, writers are listed.....
F. Scott Fitzgerald
James Joyce
Thomas Moore
George Bernard Shaw
Bram Stoker
Jonathan Swift
Oscar Wilde
William Butler Yeats
Those are the writers names I recognized. I think those are some pretty impressive names. There are almost as many famous writers listed as musicians. So, maybe the Irish claim to fame is that they are good at rhyming and prose and such.
After writers, they list famous people in business and then science. There were a lot of people listed. I didn't recognize any of their names. Following science, famous people in sports are listed. Of the 140 names listed, I recognized Padraig Harrington and John McEnroe. Most of the names listed were either soccer players of rugby players. So, you know... there was a reason I didn't recognize their names. I recognized Padraig Harrington's name because when I go to my parents house they always watch golf on TV and his name comes up sometimes. He dresses funny to play golf, so I remember him.
The final category of people that they list are simply called "Others". In this group they include people like, Steve Allen of The Tonight Show, Saint Patrick (along with other saints) and Ed Sullivan. Now, maybe I'm crazy, but if architects and scientists can get their own category, shouldn't saints get their own category??? I mean it seems strange to me that you would group saints in with television show hosts and mistresses of semi-famous men and pirate queens. Yes, you read that right, I said pirate queens. Grace O'Malley was apparently a famous Irish pirate queen and she ranks right along side of Saints' Aidan of Lindisfarne, Brigid of Kildare, Dymphna and Patrick. Oh! Here's some interesting information, Annie Moore was Irish and she was the first person to pass through Ellis Island.
I hope you have enjoyed this little list of Irish people whose names I recognize. Quite frankly, none of them are as famous to me as Eileen McCormick Meyers. :-) I would certainly bet that her family was more recently living in Ireland than Bruce Springsteen's was. Have a happy St. Patrick's Day and don't drink too much green beer.
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