Stay strong, you few, you happy few. You band of brothers. We now have less than 50 days until the Razorbacks take the field. And he that day that sheds his blood with me shall be my brother.
No. You know what? I’m just going to cut and paste the whole goddamned speech right here into the text:
If we are mark'd 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 yearns 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, Westmoreland, 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 call'd the feast of Crispian.
He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
Will stand a tip-toe when this day is nam'd,
And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
He that shall live this day, and see 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 Crispian'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 rememb'red.
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 remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day 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-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day.
Just thinking about Henry V makes me want to mass on the Texas border and attack. That speech is the grounding element of the BEST Act 4, Scene 3 in the history of theater. But as preschool teachers continually tell us, some of you are visual (a convenient ploy for outing children too stupid to read). Well, the St. Crispin’s Day speech is by far the greatest football preparation speech of all time, and I would hate for you to miss it because of poor training. Here’s Lawrence Olivier’s version. CLICK. Here’s a better version (blasphemy!) by Kenneth Branagh. CLICK. Feel free to watch over and over and over again. We’d probably all do well to have it memorized in 49 days.
And welcome to any new readers who are checking us out in our new blog format! Struggling to understand just what 50-48 is? Try this:
50 – 48
or maybe this:
50 – 48
no, no, no. definitely this:
50 – 48
or maybe this:
50 – 48
no, no, no. definitely this:
50 – 48
Goddamnit, anyway. That never gets old. Click that last one again. I’ve clicked it four times and I’m going to keep clicking it all day. It’s like vitamins. Still feel as though the footage isn’t quite personal enough? That perhaps it doesn’t provide the visual cues that connect you specifically to your individual experience of the victory and its emotional/moral/ontological consequences? Well, here’s a vaguely homoerotic reaction to that victory, a living embodiment, perhaps, of 50-48 itself (please ignore the obvious grammar faux pas on the title card; perfect tense being what it is, the “have” of line two makes an “en” at the end of “beat” a requirement. Not that I would nitpick about such things.) CLICK.
WAIT! OH MY GOD! BREAKING NEWS! PICTURE FANCY CNNESQUE GRAPHIC HERE! In a major scoop of all the Arkansas media outlets, 50-48 has discovered footage of a certain former quarterback’s drug use! (Take that, Donna Bragg!) Of course, we speak of none other than Matty Ice, who was arrested this week on charges of criminal possession of a controlled substance. For more, see HERE. And HERE.
Like noted cokehead Judy Garland before him, Matty has gone over the rainbow. Tis sad. Tis true. But we would all do well to remember the words of Shirley Chisolm, the first black woman to serve in Congress and the first to make a substantial run for president of the United States in 1972. “It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict,” she noted. “It is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
Touche, Shirl. Besides, it isn’t like he stole the head of a wax Adolf Hitler statue.
And on the topic of excusing Matty’s actions, what self-respecting Fayetteville police officer would ARREST MATT JONES?!?!?!?!? He should be fired. He should be run out of town and left (ostensibly for dead) in the barren Arizona desert. For all that Matt has given us over the years, he deserves to have a little blow from time to time. Hell, that one long touchdown run against Ole Miss (“university”) a few years ago (ending in a hellacious goalpost dunk) was worth AT LEAST 3 eight-balls. And seven overtimes should go for seven sweet powdery bricks, encased as they surely would be in the coffee grounds of their native Colombia. BEING SUPERHUMAN IS HARD, FAYETTEVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT! EVER HEARD OF HANCOCK!?!?!? LIGHTEN UP!
Now, on with the preview. This week’s opponent is the University of Louisiana at Monroe (nee Northeast Louisiana University). NLU began in 1931 as Ouachita Parish Junior College, before becoming an extension of LSU later that decade. It became a full, degree-granting, four-year institution in 1950, and has been trucking along ever since. The campus is built on beautiful Bayou Desiard, which it uses as its grounding common. And so there is no quadrangle at NLU. Any Hog fan driving through campus would also notice new buildings everywhere, as the school has completely transformed itself over the last 10 years. Unfortunately, they have yet to purchase a new book for the library in that time.
In sports, NLU is known principally for a brutal mascot fight between their former Chief Brave Spirit and Vic, the Northwestern State University Demon in 1992. But since I couldn’t find footage of it on the internet, here’s a representation—a mediating text, perhaps—that provides the general gist of the thing. It’s a death match between Barney the Purple Dinosaur and Winnie the Pooh.
Anyway: Monroe, the glorious city on the Ouachita that houses NLU, is notable not only for being the original site of the French Fort Miro, not only for housing (at one point) the largest natural gas field in the world, but also for being the hometown of your gutless 50-48 author! His first job as a lad of 13 was hawking sodas up and down the steps of Malone Stadium. His high school graduation was in one of the university’s auditoriums. So there will always be a soft spot in his football heart for the Indians. (The University recently changed mascots in 2006 from the racist “Indians” to the more nebulous “Warhawks.” Well, I say nebulous. Claire Chennault’s World War II Air Force unit flew Warhawk planes, and Monroe worships Claire Chennault—see Chennault Park, for example. But “Warhawk” also sounds suspiciously like an Indian tribe, doesn’t it? Maybe I just see conspiracy where none exists. It wouldn’t be the first time.)
And so, soft spot be damned, it’s time for the official 50-48 prediction: Hogs 7,000, Indians 0. The Indians are supposed to be good next year. I watched them demolish the Cajuns just a few short months ago, and they’re returning almost everyone. They aren’t the class of the Sunbelt (that honor going to Florida Atlantic and Troy), but they’re good. Still, building off the 427-point victory in the season’s first week, the Hogs are welcomed into Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium with such ferocity that seismographs measuring the potential rumblings of the various fault lines running throughout the state go absolutely haywire. In fact, the force of the screaming actually disrupts one of the faults, and the resulting quake adds two zeros on the scoreboard to our already impressive 10-touchdown performance. It is the first 7,000-point victory in the history of college football. The president gives Coach Petrino a plaque. But Coach Petrino rejects it, because he thinks that guy is a total fuck.
Oh, and in an entirely unrelated story, scientists have finally responded to public pressure and created a faucet for cats! Thanks, science! It’s amazing what feats we can accomplish when we lay off the coke.
And what feats we will accomplish in these coming days. Thus shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
(wait a second, those aren’t our names)
But we shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day 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 Arkansas now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day!
50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS
WAIT! OH MY GOD! BREAKING NEWS! PICTURE FANCY CNNESQUE GRAPHIC HERE! In a major scoop of all the Arkansas media outlets, 50-48 has discovered footage of a certain former quarterback’s drug use! (Take that, Donna Bragg!) Of course, we speak of none other than Matty Ice, who was arrested this week on charges of criminal possession of a controlled substance. For more, see HERE. And HERE.
Like noted cokehead Judy Garland before him, Matty has gone over the rainbow. Tis sad. Tis true. But we would all do well to remember the words of Shirley Chisolm, the first black woman to serve in Congress and the first to make a substantial run for president of the United States in 1972. “It is not heroin or cocaine that makes one an addict,” she noted. “It is the need to escape from a harsh reality. There are more television addicts, more baseball and football addicts, more movie addicts, and certainly more alcohol addicts in this country than there are narcotics addicts.”
Touche, Shirl. Besides, it isn’t like he stole the head of a wax Adolf Hitler statue.
And on the topic of excusing Matty’s actions, what self-respecting Fayetteville police officer would ARREST MATT JONES?!?!?!?!? He should be fired. He should be run out of town and left (ostensibly for dead) in the barren Arizona desert. For all that Matt has given us over the years, he deserves to have a little blow from time to time. Hell, that one long touchdown run against Ole Miss (“university”) a few years ago (ending in a hellacious goalpost dunk) was worth AT LEAST 3 eight-balls. And seven overtimes should go for seven sweet powdery bricks, encased as they surely would be in the coffee grounds of their native Colombia. BEING SUPERHUMAN IS HARD, FAYETTEVILLE POLICE DEPARTMENT! EVER HEARD OF HANCOCK!?!?!? LIGHTEN UP!
Now, on with the preview. This week’s opponent is the University of Louisiana at Monroe (nee Northeast Louisiana University). NLU began in 1931 as Ouachita Parish Junior College, before becoming an extension of LSU later that decade. It became a full, degree-granting, four-year institution in 1950, and has been trucking along ever since. The campus is built on beautiful Bayou Desiard, which it uses as its grounding common. And so there is no quadrangle at NLU. Any Hog fan driving through campus would also notice new buildings everywhere, as the school has completely transformed itself over the last 10 years. Unfortunately, they have yet to purchase a new book for the library in that time.
In sports, NLU is known principally for a brutal mascot fight between their former Chief Brave Spirit and Vic, the Northwestern State University Demon in 1992. But since I couldn’t find footage of it on the internet, here’s a representation—a mediating text, perhaps—that provides the general gist of the thing. It’s a death match between Barney the Purple Dinosaur and Winnie the Pooh.
Anyway: Monroe, the glorious city on the Ouachita that houses NLU, is notable not only for being the original site of the French Fort Miro, not only for housing (at one point) the largest natural gas field in the world, but also for being the hometown of your gutless 50-48 author! His first job as a lad of 13 was hawking sodas up and down the steps of Malone Stadium. His high school graduation was in one of the university’s auditoriums. So there will always be a soft spot in his football heart for the Indians. (The University recently changed mascots in 2006 from the racist “Indians” to the more nebulous “Warhawks.” Well, I say nebulous. Claire Chennault’s World War II Air Force unit flew Warhawk planes, and Monroe worships Claire Chennault—see Chennault Park, for example. But “Warhawk” also sounds suspiciously like an Indian tribe, doesn’t it? Maybe I just see conspiracy where none exists. It wouldn’t be the first time.)
And so, soft spot be damned, it’s time for the official 50-48 prediction: Hogs 7,000, Indians 0. The Indians are supposed to be good next year. I watched them demolish the Cajuns just a few short months ago, and they’re returning almost everyone. They aren’t the class of the Sunbelt (that honor going to Florida Atlantic and Troy), but they’re good. Still, building off the 427-point victory in the season’s first week, the Hogs are welcomed into Little Rock’s War Memorial Stadium with such ferocity that seismographs measuring the potential rumblings of the various fault lines running throughout the state go absolutely haywire. In fact, the force of the screaming actually disrupts one of the faults, and the resulting quake adds two zeros on the scoreboard to our already impressive 10-touchdown performance. It is the first 7,000-point victory in the history of college football. The president gives Coach Petrino a plaque. But Coach Petrino rejects it, because he thinks that guy is a total fuck.
Oh, and in an entirely unrelated story, scientists have finally responded to public pressure and created a faucet for cats! Thanks, science! It’s amazing what feats we can accomplish when we lay off the coke.
And what feats we will accomplish in these coming days. Thus shall our names,
Familiar in his mouth as household words-
Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,
Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester-
(wait a second, those aren’t our names)
But we shall be remembered-
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day 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 Arkansas now-a-bed
Shall think themselves accurs'd they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin's day!
50-48
Fuck Texas
WPS
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