SONG CHALLENGE WINNER!

The Song Challenge:  Since jeffp has already submitted a wonderful Valentine's Day song for the Mudcat Songbook today, I was stuck for a good challenge. Then, I took my youngest ones to the grocery store and had to again refuse to buy them a certain sugary cereal.  But, and blame it on the Muzak brain-fry, I got an idea! Here 'tis -- write a song using the shapes from the Lucky Charms cereal:  pink hearts, crescent moons, yellow stars, beautiful rainbows, red balloons, green clovers, and fluffy marshmellows!


Paddy McGinty's Oats by derrymacash

derrymacash's Comments:  Áine -- They don't have Lucky Charms over the water (and I'm sure we're finer, strappin'er boys and girls as a result!).   Breakfast cereal in this neck of the woods means a handful of oats boiled in milk and served up with lashings of sugar.   Porridge in other words � or stirabout as my granny prefers to call it.   Therefore, I offer up the following as a Hibernicised response to your challenge.


Patrick McGinty, an Irishman of note
Fishes eels in Lough Neagh from a little rowing boat
Early in the morning he needs to be afloat
To sustain him through till lunchtime he has a bowl of oats

To quench the oul' drooth, there's nothing can bate stout
In bottles or on draught, it packs a fair oul' clout
But when it comes to eatin' there surely is no doubt
There's nothing holds a candle to the bowl of stirabout!

Pat would go to work each morning feeling quite replete
Having ate the finest breakfast that a fisherman could eat
Some milk and oats and sugar, to make the mixture sweet
(Now and then a nip of Bushmill's, as an extra special treat)

But there came a dreadful morning, you should have heard Pat swear
He reached into the oat sack and he found that it was bare
Leaping up and down and tearing out his hair
His screams of lamentation rent the morning air

Out came the neighbours to investigate the fuss
"With your howling and your screams, you put the fear of God in us
I thought it was a banshee, a devil from hell or worse
The golders of you, Paddy, I thought that you would burst"

He related the story of his breakfasting attempt
How he reached for the oat sack, but all the oats were spent
A long night behind him and a long day fornent
And so he felt the need his frustration for to vent

"Ah sure never worry Paddy, if oats is all you need
I've plenty in the cupboard � borrow some to make a feed
And until you reprovision, you and any of your breed
May help yourselves at will to grain, to pulses or to seed"

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