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Irish people have a very strange understanding of "pizza"

I’ve been a fan of Blindboy Boatclub since I first discovered “Horse Outside,” his hit(?) song with the Rubberbandits (and later, by complete happenstance, ended up staying at the same hotel that’s featured in the video). His podcast consistently delivers a random, rambling ménage à trois of weird knowledge, cultural connections, empathy, and utter hilarity, and his delightful short story collections take the traditions of Samuel Beckett and Flann O’Brien and thrust them erotically into the social media sphere.

Or, if you want a perfect microcosmic metaphor for his career, there’s this Twitter thread, where Blindboy talks about his  misconceptions of pizza while growing up in Limerick, which goes from silly childhood observation to profoundly resonant insight about cross-cultural communications in a post-colonial edge. And Ninja Turtles.

Blindboy was not alone in this strange experience, as the replies swiftly reveal:

I grew up in Irish-American family in New Haven, the birthplace of American pizza, so I had genuinely never thought about the appropriative abomination that might happen to those delicious pies in other places in the latter half of the 20th century.

But then my friend Darach Ó Seaghdha, host of the Motherfoclóir podcast, took this even further, with some deep-dive research into historical Irish newsclippings on pizza:

SCONES.

CAKE.

I knew that pizza was a versatile thing. I just … never thought about the ways that other places might interpret it before the Internet. My mind is sufficiently blown.

(Also I’m … kind of morbidly curious about that scone pizza)

Image via Jackie/Flickr and deliberately chosen to piss off my Irish friends who hate the American trend of dying everything green and calling it “Oirish.”

 

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