Happy St. Patrick's Day! 🍀
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Season 2: Episode 86 Description
In today's episode: 🍀 Correspondent Ryan Nerz is ready to shamrock and roll and tell us all about St. Patrick's Day. 🌳 Speaking of green, it's almost time for the Spring Equinox and we're sharing what that means for skywatchers. ✔️ Fun Fact Check: these rocks were built to act as a calendar. And, test your Spring Equinox knowledge on today's Trivia on the Ten. ✅
Sources
First Day of Spring 2022: Celebrate the Spring Equinox | The Old Farmer's Almanac
Why the Ancients Remembered the Equinox | Canyon Journeys (canyon-journeys.com)
Stonehenge was a solar calendar, according to research - BBC News
MLB reaches agreement with players, ending months-long lockout (axios.com)
Endurance: Shackleton's lost ship is found in Antarctic - BBC News
Ryan Coogler speaks out after being mistakenly suspected of attempted robbery - CNN
Chichén Itzá serpent returns for spring equinox (yucatanmagazine.com)
Links
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TRANSCRIPT:
Tessa Flannery 0:01
Happy St. Patrick's Day, Bethany. I love your green shirt.
Bethany Van Delft 0:04
Thanks, Tessa. And I love your green skirt and shirt and hat, and you dyed your hair green. And are your teeth green too?
Tessa Flannery 0:16
I put food coloring in my mouth and it looks awesome. I feel so lucky.
Bethany Van Delft 0:21
Well then I think it's time to start celebrating St. Patrick's Day, but maybe without food coloring in your mouth, Ten'ers. I'm Bethany Van Delft it is Thursday, March 17th and this is the Ten News.
Sound Bit 0:37
10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.
Bethany Van Delft 0:44
Why in some places is everything suddenly green on St. Patrick's Day? Here to tell us more about the day is 10 News Correspondent Ryan Nerz.
Ryan Nerz 0:58
Okay, first things first, I got to just start by saying... What didn't catch that? Come on? You don't know what she said? Well, that's because it's Gaelic, which is the name for the Irish language in well, Gaelic, and what does it mean? You ask? Happy St. Patrick's Day! Yeah, I said it. Today, my friends is March 17th or St. Patrick's Day, a holiday named after the Patron Saint of Ireland. But the reality of Ireland's most famous holiday is that it represents a collision of many cultures, including America, England, the Roman Empire, and these days, pretty much the entire world. So let's reel back into history and figure out how we arrived at this day of shamrocks and leprechauns, and an almost overwhelming day luge of greenness. Now we're talking. How about we start with the man himself? St. Patrick, must have been an Irish guy, right? Nope. St. Patrick was born in England, and he had a totally different name may win circuit. And this was back when England was part of the Roman Empire. So our boy may win was technically kind of Roman as well. Oh, wow, man. Anyway, I got to just say straight up. This guy had a pretty rough childhood, May when socat was kidnapped and brought to Ireland at the age of 16. As a slave, Ah, man, well, lucky for him, things got better at some point may when either escaped or was released back to England. But he must have been really enchanted by the Emerald Isle because he returned to Ireland and became a priest. More importantly, he became a legend. May one change his name to patricius, which translates as Patrick Patrick, the priest had many talents, but he's best remembered for convincing the Irish people to convert to Christianity. As legend has it, part of his pitch was explaining the important Christian concept of the Holy Trinity, the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit by using the three leaf clover, also called a shamrock. He became such a legend that when Patrick died on March 17th 461, he became Ireland's patron saint and got his own holiday. The Irish have celebrated St. Patrick's Day as a religious holiday for over 1000 years. That's incredible. But it wasn't always the wild green, soap party it is today. St. Patrick's Day comes in the middle of the Catholic season of Lent. During Lent, Catholics are supposed to give up something that they love. Could be chocolate, shopping, even video games. So for many hundreds of years on St. Patty's Day, Catholics would go to church in the morning and celebrate in the evening. It was the one day you could loosen up and eat chocolate or do whatever you'd given up for lent. But it took hundreds of years for St. Patrick's Day to become the holiday we know and love today. And that's thanks to Americans, specifically, Irish Americans who longed so hard achingly for the mother country that they transformed the way we celebrate it. Some historians say the first American St. Patty's Day happened way back in 1601. before America was even America in a place you would never expect. St. Augustine Florida No way. About 100 years later in 1737. We know the party really got started with a big parade in the place you would most expect Moston, home to 1000s of proud Irish Americans. But what really Biggie sized everyone's favorite Irish holiday was a tragic turn of events back in the Motherland in 1845, the Irish potato famine hit the country hard. In the years that followed, over a million struggling Irish immigrants came to the United States. After this great migration, Irish patriotism flourished throughout the nation, leading to the establishment of Irish aid societies with names like the friendly sons of St. Patrick and the Hibernian society. The group started holding annual parades featuring bagpipes and drums. And in 1848, a bunch of these Irish aid societies decided to unite their parades into one big mobile party, the New York City St. Patrick's Day parade. Today, that parade is the world's oldest civilian parade, and the largest in the United States, with over 150,000 participants. Wow. Each year, nearly 3 million green wearing people lined the parade booth to watch the procession. Our rollicking ruckus that lasts more than five hours. And it sounds kind of like this. As Americans, we're used to blending cultures. And that's exactly what we have done with our St. Patrick's Day traditions. Case in point. Corned beef and cabbage, that has become the traditional St. Patty's Day dish, and it's darn tasty. But guess what? Not Irish. Pork was more their thing. But when Irish immigrants came to America, they didn't have much money. And pork was more expensive than beef. So they bought corned beef from Jewish delis and created their own St. Patrick's Day dish. Ireland didn't even get its own St. Patty's Day Parade until 1903, a full 300 years after the first American one. But these days, the parades have gone global. The parade in Boston is the second biggest with over a million people. And while there are over 100 In America alone, St. Patrick's days parades also take place in distant lands like Singapore, Japan, and Russia. Cool. No matter where you're celebrating St. Patrick's Day, you'll not only see shamrocks, but also people dressing up as little elves with beards, Green coats, buckled hats and pointy ears. That's right, leprechauns. Or, as they say in Gaelic, low Bear King, which means small bodied fellow. The St. Patty's Day icon comes from Irish folklore. The low berrykin Were basically tiny, Angry Men who have the really bad job of mending the smelly shoes of all the other fairies. They also love to play pranks, presumably, because they're so sick of all the smelly shoes. Ah, the most legendary leprechaun II prank that's become associated with St. Patrick's Day involves those little angry bearded elves, rainbows and gold. The origins of this story are said to date back to 795 ad, when Vikings invaded Ireland. The Vikings were known for looting the gold of conquered lands and then hiding it. And the legend arose that leprechauns who distrusted humans would find the abandoned Viking gold and bury it at the end of rainbows. Who knew that St. Patrick's Day would have such a global backstory? Well, now you know just about all you would possibly need to know. And maybe more, to have a fantastic time on this magical day. So go put on something green. Eat some corned beef and cabbage and ask a leprechaun where they buried their gold stash. Happy St. Patrick's Day, my friends.
Bethany Van Delft 8:42
And now here to give us the news rundown is our head writer Ryan Willard.
Ryan Willard 8:54
Thank you, Bethany. Baseball is back. Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have reached an agreement and ended the longest lockout in the history of Major League Baseball. The players union was fighting for better wages, among other things. An opening day was originally scheduled for March 31, but will now begin on April 7, and we will get a full season of Major League Baseball, let's go. Scientists have discovered one of the greatest shipwrecks over 100 years after it sank. The ship is called The Endurance and was used by the Antarctic explorer Sir Ernest Shackleton. The Endurance was crushed by sea ice in 1915. And for Shackleton and his crew to make a death-defying escape in small boats. The Endurance was discovered in the Weddell Sea at a depth of 3008 meters and is said to be an astonishingly good condition. The director of Black Panther Ryan Coogler was detained by police after a Bank of America employee believed he was trying to rob the bank. Kugler was attempting to withdraw money from his own account and wrote a note asking the teller to count the money discreetly. The teller notified her boss that she believed Kugler was trying to rob the bank and 911 was called Kugler and two of his colleagues were detained by police but when the police investigated they quickly found that he had done nothing wrong. Bank of America has apologized to Kugler and they have resolved the situation to Kugler satisfaction. Kugler was in Georgia filming the sequel, Black Panther Wakanda forever come on back to you Bethany.
Bethany Van Delft 10:32
Okay, it's time for...
Sound Bit 10:34
What, what, what's the big idea?
Bethany Van Delft 10:37
Trivia on the Ten. Recycling what common item will save enough energy to power a TV? Is it a) a milk jug, b) an aluminum can, or c) a newspaper? Did you guess it? The answer is b. An aluminum can. Recycling one aluminum can uses less than 5% of the energy it took to make the can in the first place. Saving enough energy to power a TV for two full hours. Wow. So remember, next time your grownup asks you to take out the recycling. You've earned yourself a few extra episodes of City of ghosts afterward. That's my ghost friend. That's all we've got for today. But before we go, here's a quick note for the grownups. Thanks for listening to the Ten News. Look out for our new episodes on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and extras on Saturdays. The Ten News is a coproduction of Small But Mighty Media and Next Chapter Podcasts and is distributed by iHeartRadio. The Ten News creative team is eating Irish soda bread and includes Tracey Crooks, Pete Musto, Ryan Willard, Adam Barnard, and Tessa Flannery. Ryan Nerz contributed to this episode. Our production director is Jeremiah Tittle and our executive producers are Donald Albright and show creator Tracy Leeds Kaplan. I'm Bethany Van Delft and thanks for listening to the Ten News.
