It's Bloomsday, so grab a pint or three of Guinness and pick up your (unread?) copy of James Joyce's Ulysses. One of these years, I'm going to head out to Ireland and take the walking tour of Dublin.

What parallel courses did Bloom and Stephen follow returning?

Starting united both at normal walking pace from Beresford place they followed in the order named Lower and Middle Gardiner streets and Mountjoy square, west: then, at reduced pace, each bearing left, Gardiner's place by an inadvertance as far as the farther corner of Temple street, north: then at reduced pace with interruptions of halt, bearing right, Temple street, north, as far as Hardwicke place. Approaching, disparate, at relaxed walking pace they crossed both the circus before George's church diametrically, the chord in any circle being less than the arc which it subtends.

But that probably won't be for a few years, at least. In the meantime, I'll just read The Believer's report on the 2004 centennial of Bloomsday:

I'd probably be eating a lot more if it weren't for my strict adherence to the Guinness meal-replacement plan. In Mason & Dixon, Pynchon calls stout a treacly substitute for naval tar, but for my money, Joyce gets it exactly right when he speaks of that first drop hitting the pit of the stomach with a click. Joyce was a drinker of white wine, which he compared favourably with urine, as opposed to red wine, which tasted to him like blood. Guinness, thankfully, tastes like neither, and you can learn more about it than you ever wanted to know at the brewery at St. James Gate, but there is nothing on earth like that first pint of Guinness of the day, and on that score Joyce was 100 percent correct. This is what diverted me from St. Stephen's Green on Bloomsday. A pint here, a pint there. Everywhere a pint pint. Because if you keep moving you can have that first pint experience, that click in the pit, over and over again. In Ulysses, Bloom wonders if it's possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub. It's not. If you were to cross the city by ducking into every pub along the way a la the protagonist of Cheever's "The Swimmer," you'd never get there. The wet spots outnumber the dry, not to mention you'd get absolutely pole-axed. It would take you, as they say, a month of Sundays.

Speaking of drinking:

And the learning knight let pour for childe Leopold a draught and halp thereto the while all they that were there drank every each. And childe Leopold did up his beaver for to pleasure him and took apertly somewhat in amity for he never drank no manner of mead which he then put by and anon full privily he voided the more part in his neighbour wist not of his wile. And he sat down in that castle with them for to rest him there awhile. Thanked be Almighty God.

Bottoms up!