GREEN & WHITE: Today is St. Patrick’s...

GREEN & WHITE: Today is St. Patrick’s Day (OC Live!), and one of the county’s more distinguished sons of Ireland will spend it supping at the White House. The occasion is a state dinner for Ireland’s prime minister, but Thomas Keneally will probably spend some time chatting with the Clintons about “Schindler’s List,� the hit movie based on his Holocaust book. . . . Keneally is Australian, you say? Yes, but friends at UC Irvine, where he’s on the writing faculty, say he’s proud of his Irish heritage.

GREAT REFUND: Maybe you’d like to have the same tax person that handles the Placentia-Yorba Linda Unified School District. For five years it’s been trying to give to the Internal Revenue Service $117,543 it says it owes in taxes. But the IRS doesn’t want it. “We kept telling them we owed the money and the IRS insisted we didn’t,� says Assistant Supt. Kim Stallings. The district has decided to give up trying. . . . Strangely, nobody seems to remember now what the amount was for. “It was before my time,� Stallings says.

SAFE BETS: If discussions get too heated at Santa Ana Unified School Board meetings, president Sal Mendoza has a tension breaker: He somehow works the conversation around to his days on the Santa Ana High School track team, and how his record for running the mile--4 minutes, 15 seconds--still holds. It’s the 30th anniversary of Mendoza’s school record, and he says “I never dreamed� it would hold up this long. . . . Mendoza’s betting it won’t last another 30 years. He’s wrong: High schools no longer run the mile; they run 1,600 meters.

FOR RUSSIA WITH LOVE: Another step toward better relations between the United States and Russia: Maybe you haven’t heard of 20-year-old Tapiana Lebedeva, who stars on the Russian ski team. She missed the Winter Olympics with a bad right knee. But, while practicing in California, the Russian team brought her to the sports medicine division of Anaheim Memorial Hospital. Surgery, provided free as goodwill, is scheduled for this morning.