With this telecast spawning its own cottage industry and its own celebrity culture (complete with really sketchy MySpace friends), I’ve been thinking a lot about how unintentionally hilarious/kinda racist local news segments can be. But I’ve also been thinking a lot about leprechauns, our wee Irish friends who bring us, among other things, gold and artificially colored marshmallows in breakfast cereal. Did you know, for instance, that until the last 100 years, leprechauns were thought to wear red and not green? Blew my mind, too.

Anyway, it turns out that Mobile, Alabama, isn’t the only place to spot one: there’s a 24-hour webcam set up in a ‘fairy ring’ near the town of Thurles in Ireland. Recently, someone saw “a little leprechaun in the middle of the screen playing a flute!” (The exclamation point isn’t mine, although I share the anonymous poster’s enthusiasm.) The site claims that sightings come far more frequently in the springtime, so hop on now, while the getting’s good.