The latest Guinness beer campaign asks consumers to "treat St. Patrick's Day like a real holiday." Many veterans of St. Patrick's Days past, recalling the pain caused by said Guinness and other Irish products (Jameson, Bushmill's, etc.), will argue they've been following that mantra all along.

The Guinness part is easy -- it's the aftermath that's so difficult. With St. Patrick's Day just a day away, and the hangover just two days away, now is the proper time for action.

After assembling a crack team of researchers, we discovered one thing about bartenders: They are good at doling out the drinks, but short on advice when it comes to coping with the repercussions. So, we turned to Al Gore's great invention, the Internet, along with a few books and random tips.

Here's what we've learned about hangovers:

Definition of a hangover: What makes for a nasty hangover? The good people at http://www.student-manual.com came up with an easy, four-part explanation for why a jackhammer is pounding your head from the inside:

1. Dehydration. Alcohol dehydrates vital parts of the body and brain.

2. Shock. A hangover is a withdrawal symptom of stopping use of a depressant drug, i.e. alcohol.

3. Malnutrition. Alcohol and liquids flush essential vitamins and minerals from your system.

4. Congeners. These are toxic chemicals created during the alcohol fermentation process, and they give color, smell and flavor to alcohol. Generally speaking, the darker the booze, the more congeners it has, and potentially the nastier the hangover for you. Similarly, the cheaper the booze you buy, the less filtering of congeners has occurred during distilling.

International Cures: The good folks at The Global Hangover Guide collect cures from around the world. Here are some of our favorites:

• The Iraqi Hangover Cure. Goat's head soup is considered a hangover cure among folks in the Middle East. In Baghdad, imbibers can reportedly buy the stuff in bottles, but if you have to make your own, here's the recipe:

  Take one peeled goat head, put it in a pot and cover with water. Add vegetables and spices that are personal favorites, and boil the mixture for several hours. To cure your hangover, drink the broth. In severe cases, crack the skull and eat the goat brain. (Of course, by then you'll be fighting nausea, too.)

• The Turkish Hangover Cure. It's soup made from tripe -- er, a steer's stomach.

  You will need one pound of tripe, one onion, one cup of flour, two eggs, four cups of water, one teaspoon of salt, one clove of garlic and one tablespoon of vinegar. Wash the tripe and boil in a pot with the the water and the onion for about 20 minutes. Then throw away the onion and set the cooked tripe aside. Next, beat the eggs with flour and pour the mix into a pot. Heat the mix, but don't let it boil. Dice the tripe and add it to the soup. Cook for five more minutes, then serve. For the garlic vinegar, mash the garlic clove with a fork or in a mortar and mix with vinegar. Pour this concoction into the soup to taste. Yummy!

• The Prairie Oyster Hangover Cure.

  Rinse a cocktail glass with olive oil, then add two spoonfuls of ketchup. Add one egg yolk and spice the mixture with salt and pepper, Tabasco, Worcestershire sauce and lemon juice. Drink it down and chase with water.

The Retro Cure: In the new "Starsky & Hutch" movie, Hutch (Owen Wilson) serves "Hutch's Hangover Cure" to a bleary-eyed Starsky (Ben Stiller). Its '70s-themed contents? Pepto-Bismol, Aunt Jemima pancake mix, Tang breakfast drink and flat Tab (diet soda), mixed with a raw egg. Bottoms up!

College Cures: Our friends at http://www.blurofinsanity.com, which calls itself the No. 1 college entertainment Web site, aren't much on healthy cures. But their suggestions sure are appealing:

• The Bloody Mary: "The only problem is you will become progressively more useless as you drink more and more of them, but then you weren't going to do anything anyway."

• The Greasy Burger and Milk Shake: "This one works like a charm for most people. It also tastes really good."

• New England Clam Chowder: "Eat it. Then fall back asleep. You will awake in an hour feeling better than you could [have] possibly imagined."

From Party Central: Pad Parties: The Guide to Ultra-Entertaining, by Matt Maranian, includes a list of 10 "surefire" hangover cures among its party-preparation tips. A few:

• Drink a glass of Pedialyte before bed. It's made for infants, but it will rehydrate the imbibing grown-up as well.

• Put one sliced banana, eight ounces of water and four teaspoons of Mylanta in a blender, puree and then drink, chased down with Ibuprofen. For maximum benefit, this is meant to be ingested before passing out.

• Take a maximum dosage of Vitamin B about 12 hours before drinking, then drink a mix of four ounces of aloe vera juice with four ounces of water in the morning and afternoon after a late night out.

• A cure called the "Pig Rinse" involves mixing a 12-ounce beer, the juice of half a lemon, a dash of sea salt and two Alka-Seltzers.

• Twelve raw oysters washed down with a light, cold, white wine is a popular hangover cure in some parts of France.

Top 10s: The most comprehensive site for hangover info is http://www.hungover.net. It even allows hungover visitors to darken the green tint in the background to make viewing more tolerable. The site includes readers' top 10 cures, a Healthy top 10 and a Freaky top 10. Or just click on the toilet for a random cure.

Here are a few highlights, some of them posted by site visitors:

• "As a lay MD, I prescribe for you head-holding sorry lot: 500-1,000 mgs aspirin, a rehydrating sports drink like Gatorade, and one 25 mg Dramamine (Dimenhydrinate) tablet, which will drive vertigo, nausea and Satan himself from yer Gulliver."

• "Before you go on the piss, take a cynara artichoke supplement to help alcohol absorption. Next day, a can or two of Coke [not diet] and a Mars Bar work wonders."

• "When I'm on the squirt, I take the top from every beer I drink and put it in my pocket. When I get home I count the caps and that's how many glasses of water I gotta get through. Works even better when you're seeing double."

Best of the Freaky Cures:

• Breast milk.

• Eating burnt toast.

• Puerto Rican cure: Rub half a lemon under drinking arm.

• Wild West cure: Rabbit-poo tea.

• Outer Mongolian cure: Pickled sheep eyes in tomato juice.

Pure and Simple: One Web site, http://www.getfavourites.net, awards a monthly hangover-cure winner. The current recipe champ, by someone named Annabelle, is entitled "Pure and Simple." Annabelle's five-step plan:

1. Drink one large glass of water (mineral water is best).

2. Spend five minutes vigorously exercising.

3. Drink one large glass of water (mineral).

4. Spend five minutes exercising (not so vigorously this time).

5. Drink one small glass of fruit juice (grapefruit is best).