Coffee through the nostrils!

Posted May 21, 2004 3:46 PM by Dan R.

((dies of mingled admiration, envy, and sheer happiness))

Posted May 21, 2004 4:10 PM by Moira Russell

I'm SOOOO glad I keep my Making LIght reading at home! I don't think I'd have coped reading that at work!

Posted May 21, 2004 4:50 PM by Paula Helm Murray

Damn. Now I'm gonna be singing Katherine's Lament from "A Little Scene to Monarchize..." all day. :-) Thanks indeed, Mike!!

Posted May 21, 2004 4:57 PM by Kathy Li

Briliant; simply fucking briliant.

Way better than the Simpson's McBethI saw about half a year ago.

Posted May 21, 2004 5:13 PM by Tim Kyger

Wonderfully done: changing the metaphors appropriately and everything.

Printed out and stuck on my wall (the first blog post ever to get that particular accolade, although my lack of a printer until last week may have something to do with that as well).

Posted May 21, 2004 7:58 PM by Nix

I've always thought Damon Runyon would've written a kick-ass "Oedipus Rex". Only he would've called it something like "The Case of the Sorefoot Shamus".

Posted May 21, 2004 10:29 PM by Steven desJardins

Mike Ford is not human. That's the only explanation.

Has anyone else noticed what the first line of the French Chicks passage scans to and roughly means?

Posted May 22, 2004 1:19 AM by Chris Quinones

That's absolutely magnificent.

(And yeah, ChrisQ; I'll be singing it all night.)

-Catie

Posted May 22, 2004 2:25 AM by Catie Murphy

Good God, I laughed so hard I cried.

First "Troy in Fifteen Minutes" and now this...it's been a good day to laugh.

Posted May 22, 2004 2:27 AM by Sara

Un.Be.Lie.Va.Ble. I want the rest, dammit. And I'm especially glad I spent those years in Canada so that I can stumble through the French bits, even if I do have to not-so-subvocalize it.

Posted May 22, 2004 6:54 AM by cyclopatra

Chris, Mike Ford's perfectly human. He's just really really smart, and inventive, and funny, and has major knacks for language and storytelling, and several of the Muses like him a lot. Y'all are clear on the fact that he writes books, many of which are commercially availa ...

JMF: Mike, I was just about to say "If you liked what he did to Shakespeare, you should see what he did to the Star Trek novel," but I thought I should check first over at Amazon to see what's currently in print. (Answer: lots of stuff, the which it's nice to see.) However, the corrupt Amazon database just outdid itself.

I found one of your books and clicked on your name from there, which yields cleaner results than one gets from a search on an author name from the main page. And in fact it gave me a fairly clean list, though it's got your books mixed up with a cetaceologist named John K. B. Ford. However, smack in the middle of the list was the 1536 edition of John Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion. That's got to beat the time it told me that if I liked H. W. Fowler's A Dictionary of Modern English Usage, I'd surely like the boxed DVD set of Sex in the City.

Posted May 22, 2004 11:27 AM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Chris Q: up until the "I work for Katy" part, it should continue: "My friends all have Porsches, I must make amends," mais no?

Bravo, Mike. Hilarious, brilliant, superb.

Posted May 22, 2004 2:50 PM by Leslie

What did the Amazon database do, Teresa? I just went over there, picked “Books” from the drop-down menu, typed “john m ford” into the search field, hit return, and got back a list of ten John M Ford books, #1 being his most recent collection, #2 and 4 being his Star Trek books, and #3 being his most recent novel.

Posted May 22, 2004 3:21 PM by Avram

I'm getting very confused.

You see, I've recently watched the movies "The Gange of New York", "West Side Story", and "Guys and Dolls", and read "The Alienist".

My sense of historical sequence is now somewhere on a par with Mr. Shakespeare's, as Teddy Roosevelt and the Salvation Army fight the draft riots. And there are probably identical twins involved somewhere.

Posted May 22, 2004 5:10 PM by Dave Bell

Sara, IMHO, Mike Ford has also beaten "Troy in Fifteen Minutes" all hollow. Take a gander at Troy: The Movie

Posted May 22, 2004 6:19 PM by Kathy Li

Omigod. Swoon.

I really needed that today. Les natifs de Brooklyn indeed...

Posted May 22, 2004 6:52 PM by Madeleine Robins

Was pointed here by my friend Manny. That's AMAZING. And I love the French part too, and am very happy I still retain the ability to read it. :)

Posted May 23, 2004 10:28 PM by Rachel Silverman

How hard do we have to beg to get the St. Crispin's Day speech?

Posted May 26, 2004 10:43 AM by Castiron

Hats off! Huzzah! Brilliant.

And I speak from experience, as the author of the (subsequently republished in a textbook on Shakespeare):

RAYMOND CHANDLER'S HAMLET
by
Jonathan Vos Post
a short, short story;
winner of Honorable Mention in the
1995 International Imitation Raymond Chandler Competition;
approx. 500 words

"Something was rotten in Denmark, rank and gross, as rotten as a dame
named Gertrude in bed with her husband's killer while the caterer recycled the
funeral baked meats for the wedding reception, at which the bride did not wear
white."

"Hamlet was sharp for a prince, good with a knife, but not sharp enough to handle
his old man kicking the bucket with an earfull of murder."

"My name's Horatio, Hamlet's gumshoe buddy, trying to stay clean in a dirty castle.
A grizzled ghost pleaded the Fifth when I gave him the third degree, then split the scene
when the cock crew, like a guilty man before a marshall serving a summons."

...

I've been collection rejection letters for over a year for "Raymond Chandler's Lord of the Rings" -- which is uncomfortably novelette length, unless someone wants to pay me to expand it...

Mike Ford is consistently amazing.

Remember that Twlight Zone episode where a TV writer summons the ghost of Shakespeare to literally ghost-write sitcom episodes?

I heard from one of my Hollywood contact, btw, that there had been a special screening of "Troy" to studio executives. One rushed from the room and barked to his secretary: "get me the agent for this Homer guy. I want to buy an option on his next book."

Posted May 26, 2004 12:34 PM by Jonathan Vos Post

This is indeed brilliant, but it reminds me fully of the Boomer Bible, right down to the Messiah Harry and his foul-mouthed gospels of debauched egocentrism, not to mention the "Book of Frogs"

IMHO, The Boomer Bible is the best value on Amazon's used rack (starting at $3 bucks sometimes), and in case you aren't familiar with it, it's a full-length "parody" of the Bible, complete with working concordances, that is (believed to be) the apocryphal creation of Philadelphia's South Street Punks in the 80s. A sign of the times, to be sure.

It's certainly blasphemous and guaranteed to contain something to offend anyone and everyone, but then, Ezekial had some pretty raunchy stuff to say, too.

Posted June 8, 2004 2:21 PM by joe

Was that an advertisement?

Posted June 9, 2004 2:18 PM by Teresa Nielsen Hayden

Either that or it's remarkably clueless - a brief browse leads me to believe that the only things that the book and this post have in common is that they are both parodies and both have characters named "Harry."

Both the book's site and 104gb.net are located in Colorado, but it's a big state, and I don't see any other obvious connection between the two.

Posted June 9, 2004 2:39 PM by Dan Blum

Of the porn variety.

Posted August 1, 2004 11:25 PM by Dan Blum Now, that's definitely spam

What more can I say?

At least this time it's real links.

(Oh -- and joe's post of June 08, 2004, 02:21 PM was comment spam, but of the hand-made variety.)

Posted November 5, 2004 7:46 AM by JDM Finds Comment Spam