Stuffing the Passer - Where in the World

If you wandered the streets of turn-of-the-century Dublin, there's a fair chance you might have heard the menfolk singing a boisterous and cacophonous version of "Finnegan's Wake", a silly drinking song about an Irishman who dies, gets laid out for his Wake, has whiskey spilled on him and, naturally, springs back to life. There's nothing particularly uniquely Irish about defanging the existential dread of mortality with humor (that's pretty much a standard psychological adaptation that cultures have developed throughout time to cope with our frail and lonely existence). But reconstructing this small bit of absurdist frivolity into an impenetrable tome encapsulating the entirety of of life, death, and resurrection of the entire universe as James Joyce did is... well, pretty damn Irish.

I only bring this up because I think that's what David Feherty did on Saturday during the ND-Navy game. While a typical person might see throwing an Irish golfer into the sideline reporter role at a college football game in Dublin as sort of a degrading minstrel show for the sordid amusement of the American audience, Feherty donned his snappiest three-piece suit and turned the entire thing into a post-modern, art brut exegesis of life, the universe, and everything. It was magical, brilliant, and a good reminder about how we tend to take for granted the fact that a small backwater island in the North Atlantic has, culturally at least, saved Western Civilization on more than a few occasions.

And with that, puppets.

Fine cup of praise there. Well deserved for playing a single game of sissy rugby.