Isn't that from the fugitive?

I've seen apartment complexes that have little fake ponds and rivers flowing throughout the grounds that are dyed blue. It doesn't look good. It looks like the water with that cheap toilet bowl cleaner in it.

Italian beef - wet

Ahh yes! The only correct way to eat ur Italian beef.

Yes, Italian beef for St. Patricks day. Hahaha.

In all honesty I wouldn’t blame you or Chicago, they are super delish. (Edit grammar)

IKR, I'm starting to see more and more of this kind of questions here. I wish mods do something about it

I'm asking you why they do this when it looks like crap? People actually like seeing a neon green river? What is wrong with those people? See, 3 valid questions.

Americans look for any reason to get shitfaced. Ask anyone what Cinco de Mayo is about about. Most wont have any clue.

St. Patrick's Day in America has always been more of a celebration of Irish-American immigrant culture than it is of Ireland itself.

I mean.. Other than them dying that shit green none of that sounds that different from what goes on over here in general

We have a lot of people who live far from their country of origin, so they get really excited when they get to celebrate their heritage and get a special national holiday. Then of course the rest of us Americans love a good time and excuse to party, so we love celebrating alongside them. It's all in good fun. When I was younger, there was a whole neighborhood that went off the hook for stuff like St. Patrick's Day, Mardi Gras, and stuff like that. My friends and I would always be so excited to go down there and party it up. It's a really good time for everyone involved.

Here in the states St. Patrick's day is more about Mad Sweeney from American Gods or The Lucky Charms mascot than it is about the guy who invented the Shamrock as a Catholic mnemonic. Go to your local department store like Target or Walmart and look for St. Patrick's Day seasonals and you'll find four-leaf clovers where shamrocks should be.

We can't tell the difference and don't really care. We'll just take our kids to McDonalds to get a minty milkshake.

In Liverpool, which prides itself on its Liverpool roots, Paddy's Day is one of the days to avoid town and most of the pubs for me. Absolute carnage. The other ones to avoid are Grand National weekend, particularly Ladies Day, and Mother's Day.

I don't mean to sound all new agey, but I feel like we're disrespecting the planet by dyeing a freakin river.

I just think that color green is ugly and looks like industrial waste

Pretty sure you can eat Fluorescein with no ill effects other than turning your piss dayglo. It's very widely used as a 'non-toxic' tracer dye so I'd imagine studies have been done.

Well I live near an actual toxic river that has been cleaning up lately. I just think dying it green makes it look gross, maybe it's time to projection map it green or give everyone green tinted glasses so then everything is green and you don't have to make the river an oooz color.

It'd be bad. Real bad. An algae bloom of massive proportions. It has one huge issue.

Enough algae to make the rivers run green will use up enough oxygen at night to kill off fish and oxygen hungry invertebrates, starting a chain reaction of death.

Now you have a river full of dead organisms, so they start decomposing thanks to microbes. You know what many types of bacteria love? Oxygen. So they start using up oxygen, multiplying all the while. Night hits and the algae need to use oxygen, but a bunch die because there's not enough. Now the river is full of literally hundreds, maybe thousands of tons of decomposing matter. The river largely goes anoxic (meaning there's no oxygen) so things start dying left and right. A bunch of those bacteria can live with and without oxygen, so they use up what they can and keep on chugging without.

Now we've moved from aerobic respiration to anaerobic. You know what the primary byproducts of anaerobic respiration are? Organic acids and alcohols, which smell. The river begins to smell like an infected wound. It's no longer green but deep, murky brown from the suspension of decomposing organisms. This continues until the river flushes everything out, but it kills what's downstream as it continues until it hits the ocean, where it likely continues to kill everything in the vicinity until it becomes dilute enough.

I'm a microbiologist and worked with algae and cyanobacteria as an undergrad. Never underestimate the impact of uncountable billions of trillions of living organisms.