Happy (early) St. Patty's Day!

While I've always been vaguely aware of all the Irish pubs that you are guaranteed to find in any larger city in the United States, I never thought about the fact that a company had to sell those pub designs to people. Then today I read this article in Slate.

There exist such businesses and one of the biggest is called, of course, The Irish Pub Company. They design, manufacture, and install "authentic" Irish Pubs worldwide. If this merchandising of a culture is too disturbing, take comfort in the fact that they are based out of Dublin and not somewhere like Los Angeles.

The strangest thing for me was seeing how many pubs they built in Italy. More than in the U.S. or anywhere else.