“Crispin Glover saved my life”
That was the subject of an email I received today. Unfortunately, it was spam (accidentally empty spam, as it contained a malformatted tag to insert body text.) C’est dommage. I would have liked to see a story that could be summed up as “Crispin Glover saved my life”.
Anyone want to try? Just write a paragraph. The sentence “Crispin Glover saved my life” must appear. The more absurd, the better. Someone will decide a winner. Then I’ll send the winner a snail mail letter or a banana or something.
To make this post not entirely useless, SBC have you seen photos of Elizabethan gloves? I hadn’t until I read Will in the World. They are majestic. I thought William Shakespeare’s dad’s being a glover meant he (Will) had humble beginnings. I didn’t imagine that his dad was working with gold filigree, the finest fabrics, and jewels. He was actually rather wealthy.
Email subscription
November 28th, 2007 at 12:46 pm
I feel it is entirely insesitive of you to not only create spam but do so with the tag, “Crispin Glover saved my life”. Our mailboxes are already full of junk and what makes you think we need one more.
Plus, your weren’t there that night and you don’t know Crispin Glover. I’m proud to say that he is/was my cousin and Crispin Glover saved my life.
But, I suppose in your quest to create more junk mail you don’t care about the facts. And you don’t care how many people you hurt.
So, just stop this outrage and only wish that Crispin Glover could have saved your life too.
Ed, Crispin Glover’s cousin
November 28th, 2007 at 3:26 pm
Contest over. Ed wins.
November 28th, 2007 at 3:47 pm
As I’ve already stated “Closeminded and Disrespectful”.
November 28th, 2007 at 4:20 pm
Dad getting snarky! I like it!
Also, Petra, I think you mean “Disrespectable.” Please try to be more respectable in the future.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:15 pm
OK, so your position is that Crispin Glover did not save my life, and actually saved your life? OK. That’s certainly possible. It’s also possibly libel. I will check whether or not he saved each of our lives, and if you’re right, I owe you an apology.
But the spam? You still deserved it.
November 28th, 2007 at 5:29 pm
And you do realize that just because you read the subject line on one email doesn’t mean you have any clue as to what took place. Because don’t think for 1 minute that what you read is even remotely close. It’s the media for christ sake. The same mother fuckers who camped out just trying to get video footage of the family members with the knowledge that Crispen is known to save lives, but wonder if he saved mine?
You can’t pretend to know what its like to not only have your life saved, but receive countless spam articles about it, asshole! Maybe I google his name because I want to confront those that are ignorant. The original poster made the comment about a Crispen Glover and a life being saved. That same ‘Crispen Glover’ spent the past 5 years saving lives so you wouldn’t have to do it! He would have given you the shirt off of his back if you needed it, without question, yet you wouldn’t know that.
It was a dumb idea, because of the situation at hand. He knew what had taken place, and the only reason he posted it was because of it. He wanted to get a response, and he did.
You are all entitled to you’re own opinion, but be a decent person about it. If you can’t do that, then I hope that you one day have to deal with just half the pain that my family is going thru, because you don’t have a fucking clue.
November 28th, 2007 at 6:02 pm
Make the connection, asshole!
November 28th, 2007 at 6:54 pm
Bravo for the photos, Crispin’s Uncle. Yea, Crispin is also my son, with whom I am well pleased.
(For the record, I use Firefox on Linux. You would not believe the transfer rates I get!)
November 28th, 2007 at 6:57 pm
Wow! There are some serious heavy-hitters among mcgees.org readers!
November 28th, 2007 at 7:09 pm
This is all very funny. Perhaps when the dust settles we may have to spend time on the historical person of Crispin, who became a saint.
Not just any saint, but, together with his twin brother, Crispinian, patron saint of cobblers, tanners and leather workers.
Even the Bard knew of Crispin and his feast day:
King Henry V:
What’s he that wishes so?
My cousin Westmorland. No, my fair cousin:
If we are marked to die, we are enow
To do our country loss; and if to live,
The fewer men, the greater share of honour.
God’s will, I pray thee, wish not one man more.
By Jove, I am not covetous for gold,
Nor care I who doth feed upon my cost;
It ernes me not if men my garments wear;
Such outward things dwell not in my desires:
But if it be a sin to covet honour,
I am the most offending soul alive.
No, faith, my coz, wish not a man from England:
God’s peace, I would not lose so great an honour
As one man more, methinks, would share from me
For the best hope I have. O, do not wish one more.
Rather proclaim it presently through my host,
That he which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart. His passport shall be made
And crowns for convoy put into his purse:
We would not die in that man’s company
That fears his fellowship to die with us.
This day is called the Feast of Crispian:
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a-tiptoe when the day is named,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall see this day and live t’old age,
Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
And say “To-morrow is Saint Crispian”:
Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars
And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.”
Old men forget: yet all shall be forgot,
But he’ll remember with advantages
What feats he did that day. Then shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester,
Be in their flowing cups freshly remembered.
This story shall the good man teach his son;
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he today that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now abed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day. (IV, iii)
November 28th, 2007 at 9:06 pm
I’ve always loved Hal’s rousing speech, since I read it in college. Not only does it stand on its own, it shows what a lack of material Dylan Thomas, Mel Gibson, and J.R.R. Tolkien, let alone HBO, would have had without Shakespeare.
While we’re being serious — for those who haven’t figured it out — Ed’s my Dad. His first response on this thread I found hilarious. The second made me think, “Yikes.” It cut viciously close to the quick. I actually thought to myself that I couldn’t imagine flogging someone publicly to that degree unless he or she had attacked my son.
So, yeah.
It’s easy to forget, as an adult, that your Dad’s still ready to go to bat for you, especially if the bat is being taken to an attacker’s head. I remember clearly (I think I was 18) being boxed into an aisle of a Cairo dry-goods store by the shopkeeper and two of his relations. As far as they were concerned, I was not leaving that store without the jar of honey I had examined and then replaced on the shelf. The storekeeper had the honey in one hand and my upper arm in his other. My father strides up and physically removes the man’s hand from my arm. Still clutching the hand, he looks into the Arab’s eyes and intones “This is my eldest son.” Not that he wouldn’t have done this for my brother, but, as they say, “When in Rome or Cairo, attack with the biggest guns you have.” You have never seen men make a path so quickly.
So now for the serious part. My Dad’s a loyal mcgees.org reader. And I think what it would be like if, in 25 years, Niall was to have a website in which he decries Henry David Thoreau, Carl Sagan, Linus Torvalds, and Eddie Vedder as the “Unholy Trinity” and declares Jesus Christ his personal Lord and Savior in between bouts of typing in tongues (always wondered if Evangelicals do that last part.) I might get some satisfaction from the fact that I would have given Niall his domains when he was a teenager (as the fictionalized Mark Van Doren might say, “Your name is mine, at least as far as ICANN is concerned!”) but I’m not sure it would soften the blow much.
So, thanks, Dad. And thanks. And yikes. But thanks.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
Oh, and he totally should have named me Joshua and my younger brother Joshua Ian.
November 28th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
I am posting Instant Breakfast from October 25th, because I am a self-promoting jackass.
October 25, 2007
It’s St. Crispin’s Day, which always makes me think of apple pie. I assume this is universal.
It also makes me think of how on this date in 1415, Henry V (or, “Henry the Fift” to those of you (Olivier) who like to leave the last “h” off of words put a good old fashioned Middle Ages beatdown on the French at Agincourt, so lovingly captured in Shakespeare’s play of the same name (King John). Who can forget Henry’s majestic cry in Act 3, Scene 1:
Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more
Or close the wall up with our English dead.
And as long as I’m at it, once more unto the breeches, sirrah
For I’m not wearing any pants and Agincourt gets a bit drafty.
But pants once pants’d shall ne’er unpants again
And so I pull my trousers on, amen.
November 30th, 2007 at 1:00 am
Loved that IB. Except, it’s something like the fourth time in your poetry where I’ve seen you rhyme “again” with “en”.
I have some pretty self-aware (read: affected) pronunciations that I have so thoroughly incorporated into my parlance that it does not even take an effort to maintain any longer (I should be grilled coming out of anaesthesia or drunk or something to see how deeply it’s really taken hold.) And I admit, even I would sound to myself like a complete ass if I pronounced “again” to rhyme with “pain”.
But nonetheless, speaking the word aloud to myself several times, I see I’ve dipthonged the “ai” slightly; The “ain” of “again” is a quarter beat longer than “hen”.
What to do? The poem wouldn’t scan in much of the English speaking world. It wouldn’t scan to your American audiences if you ended it it “And so I pull my trousers on (a pain!)” It’s a trouble word that one maybe should best avoid, like a preposition, ending a sentence upon.
(That last sentence was an attempt at humor.)
You can frequently pick out the nationality, nay, even the generation in which a poet lived by his rhyme choices. Sometimes there is no vowel drift at all:
I expect that scans in every dialect of English, and will for some time. Compare to the WTF of the following:
How the hell would he have read that stanza? Anyone have a recording?
Street dialects seem to have a lot more compact distributions of phonemes. Or something. I’m really not a linguisticist. Rap lyrics leave me bewildered sometimes. My favorite:
Not ’cause I hate you,
‘Cause I’m naughty by nature
(Not cuz I haytcha
Cuz I’m notty by naytcha)
(Three guesses on the band behind that one, and your first seven words don’t count.)
Zach de la Rocha rhymes forces and crosses (as, roughly, frorces and crorces). Ra Digga rhymes far and tomorrow (as, roughly, fah and toomah).
Why am I picking on you? I’m not! I’m just, you know, posting it publicly rather than e-mailing you. I’m a dick like that sometimes.