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from the celebrate-with-sangria-not-beer dept.
Irish culture will soon be celebrated across the globe with parades, pub crawls and seas of green. But newly uncovered documents prove unlike previous belief, St. Patrick's Day celebrations did not start in Boston, rather at least 100 years earlier in St. Augustine, Florida.
The curious discovery comes from a rather unlikely source: gunpowder expenditures lists from St. Augustine for the years 1600-1601.While cannons and other artillery were often fired to help guide ships safely across St. Augustine's protective sandbar, they were also shot off during times of public celebrations and religious festivities.
A single entry from March 1600 states St. Augustine's residents gathered together and processed through the streets in honor of the feast day of San Patricio, or St. Patrick. As they made their way through the town, cannons fired from the wooden fort in celebration of the Irish saint.
"It was certainly a surprise," said historian J. Michael Francis, PhD, University of South Florida-St. Petersburg, who uncovered the document. "It did not register the first time I saw the name "San Patricio," the Spanish name for St. Patrick. After a few seconds it actually hit me that there was a St. Patrick's Day parade/procession in St. Augustine in 1601. Even more surprising was that the document identified St. Patrick as the patron saint of the city's maize fields."
https://phys.org/news/2018-03-truth-st-patrick-day-celebrations.html
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Sunday March 18 2018, @11:46AM (1 child)
Just needed to insert this into this conversation, but I assume you are aware that loads of people are seriously injured or even killed every year by people shooting guns into the air [wikipedia.org] in celebration?
This may not be a reason to disallow ALL discharges of firearms within a city. But there is certainly a good reason to discourage people from randomly shooting bullets into the air. Those bullets come back down, frequently at a velocity that can seriously harm other people or damage property. Even a hardcore libertarian usually recognizes that individual rights generally do not extend to things that seriously injure others or their property.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by khallow on Sunday March 18 2018, @02:36PM
What does that have to do with regulation on firearms? There's fairly general regulations already on reckless activities that endanger other peoples' lives whether the activity used a firearm or something normally thought of as innocuous like a photocopier.
The problem here is that stupid people will find creative ways to do stupid things. If we then pass a new law every time that happens (or create regulation that allow stupid acts to be rewarded in court lawsuits), we end up with a massive amount of regulation that is only intended to deal with rare acts of stupidity while of course, not doing anything about the stupidity in the first place.