Across the Sea to Ireland

[Smartboy]

Over on the "Gimme a Break!" page of this site, I recently started two threads dealing with the fact that we are living in the age of reboots. It is because of this that I have started to post messages about topics that I have already written about once upon a time. Well now I would like to do a reboot of a topic that I wrote about on this page a while back. This topic is in relation to an episode that is on the W.B. channel at midnight tonight. For those of you who do not know, this is the episode in which Rachel kisses Phoebe in public to show a third party that she is not a square and convince her that she did have a make-out session with a female back when she was in college. One side-issue that came up in this episode is that fact that Joey's parents (who are Italian in ethnicity and Catholic in religion) have a lot of prejudice against the postal service as well as the Irish. One of the reasons that this sticks out in my mind is that half of my family is Irish. I find it interesting that the topic of Joey's family's prejudice against the Irish was never mentioned before or since. Even though none of the main characters on the show were Irish, there were several one-time cast members with Irish sounding names. There was a time when Monica was dating an older man who answered to the name of Dr. Burke. They could have had Joey say something to the effect of "Dr. Burke? My folks would not like him." I believe that tonight's episode was from the seventh season. I wonder why they never build on this issue during the next three years. Also, Joey had his own show for the next two seasons. I do not believe that prejudice against the Irish ever came up there either. What do any of you guys think of any of this?