Tired of fumbling for excuses to ditch out on work so you can go pound some green beer at you favorite neighborhood bar on the sacred of sacred days that is March 17th? Well apparently Guinness has the answer. It’s a petition called Proposition 3-17 and it’s the latest in a national online campaign to make St. Patrick’s Day an official holiday.

All that’s needed is a measly 1,000,000 signatures by midnight March 16th and the petition will make it to congress (or so Guinness claims). As it it stands right now 899,180 signatures are still needed with 12 days to go so the odds are looking pretty slim. Nevertheless Guinness is pulling out all the stops, providing digital rally kits that include printable petitions, Guinness recipes and even rally posters.

Truthfully, this is probably just a shameless marketing ploy to push more Guinness on consumers in the coming weeks. Maybe a better choice of holiday would have been March 18th: St. Hangover Day.

EVEN MOAR

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MOAR:

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If you’re one of those lucky enough to get your employers (or parents) to foot the bill for sending you to Austin the second week of March for SXSW (or one of the even fewer lucky enough to be able to afford to pay for themselves) you may, at this point, being asking yourself “Well who IS playing this year?” Well lucky for you, we have the semi-complete list of bands playing sanctioned SXSW 2008 events right here. Read ‘em and weep after the jump (part 1 of 3…thats how many goddamn bands are playing):

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Our hommie Allen Chen over at The Austinist just shot me an email to clue me in about the launch of the SXSWist microsite which will be stacked with all of your forthcoming SXSW needs and questions regarding your upcoming Austin experience. Austin - for the record - is our favorite city (next to Chico - which isn’t really a city I guess - more a pre-city) and we’re looking forward to consuming a massive amount of Lone Stars while stacking massive amounts of content for you to enjoy.

Let’s just hope Texas votes Obama next Tuesday.