Overnight Briefing & General Reality Check - Mar 16, 2018

Some Irish stats:

The personal finance website WalletHub released its St. Patrick's Day By The Numbers report, which includes the following factoids:
--60 percent of Americans plan to celebrate St Patrick's Day --of those, 83 percent plan to wear green!
--45 pounds of vegetable-based dye is used to turn the Chicago River green... but it only lasts five hours.
--St Patrick's Day ranks fourth among the most popular drinking days of the year --right behind New Year's Eve, Christmas and the Fourth of July.
--13 million pints of Guinness... will be consumed worldwide on St Patrick's Day.
--$1.3 million... is the current market value of a leprechaun's pot of gold, which contains a thousand gold coins weighing one ounce each.
--St. Patrick's partiers will spend an average of $35.40 to celebrate on the big day this year.
--There's a 70 percent increase in cabbage shipments during St. Patrick's week
--33.1 million US residents claim Irish ancestry --or about seven times the current population of Ireland.
--Irish is the second most frequently reported European ancestry behind German.

Most popular drinking days:

With St Patrick's Day in the headlights, a survey of two-thousand U-S adults by Yahoo! revealed the five most popular drinking days:
5. Thanksgiving
4. St. Patrick's Day
3. Fourth of July
2. Christmas
1. New Year's Eve

Three famous Irishmen:

--ARTHUR GUINESS, who opened his brewery in Dublin in 1759.
--JOHN JAMESON, who opened his distillery in Dublin in 1780.
--Whoever invented Bailey's Irish Cream. Gilbeys of Ireland reportedly introduced the mixture in 1974 to prop up their international sales. Although legend has it the drink was created by ANDREW BAILEY of the R-A Bailey Company, PETER O'CONNOR of Bailey's says "There's no Mr or Mrs Bailey. We wanted a name that was Irish, but not 'show' Irish. The R-A Bailey was a way of putting a name behind the factory, a way of getting across that the product comes from Ireland."