Celtophilia

Welcome back, we're glad you're here!

Okay, by a show of hands, how many people knew that May 12th was National Limerick Day? None? Really? Yeah, me either. It’s a shame, too, because it would have been the perfect day to announce the 1st Annual Celtophilia Limerick Contest. Oh well, maybe next year. For now, we’re going to go ahead and have it in June. Maybe next year we’ll move it up.

The Contest

Here’s how it’s going to work. You’re going to write a really awesome, funny limerick, then email it to limericks@celtophilia.com. In point of fact, you might write more than one. We’ll accept as many as you’re willing to write, and we will be accepting submissions from June 1st - 21st, so you should have plenty of time to come up with a few! When sending your submission, please include a name to identify you by, and please send them from an email address that you check regularly.

Then, sometime soon after June 21st, we will compile all of the submissions and post them. Then, of course, you will tell ALL your friends to come by and vote for your lyrical masterpiece. This step is critical, because there will be a grand total of FOUR winners for the Celtophilia Limerick Contest, a 1st and 2nd place winner selected by the readers, and a 1st and 2nd place winner selected by Bonnie and I.

The Payoff

So, why should you try to win this thing, anyway? For one, because it’s going to be a LOT of fun writing, reading, and voting on all these submissions, and two, because there are prizes, of course!

The two 1st place winners will receive 1 of these awesome, EXTREMELY limited edition, hand-dyed and hand-printed Celtophilia Tye-dyed T-Shirts, plus 1 copy each of the 2007 Victims of Irish Music AND Live: Nex Monoceroti, Per Risibus by the Brobdingnagian Bards. These are two fantastic CDs for any Celtic music lover, and since the Celtophilia Tye-dyed T-shirts are being created right here in Celtophilia studios, there’s a good chance we’ll NEVER work up the motivation to make more! You’ll have something that almost no one else in the Celtic world will ever get a chance to own. Wouldn’t that make you feel special?

The two 2nd place winners will also receive one of these amazing Celtophilia Tye-dyed T-shirts, plus 1 copy of the 2008 release Renaissance Festival Podcast Compilation CD, another fantastic disc full of great music.

Guidelines

Of course, there are some basic guidelines to consider while taking part in this contest.

1 ~ While limericks generally tend toward the bawdy side, try to limit yourself somewhere around PG-13. Clever innuendo is far better than explicit obsenity, in our book. We have the sole right to decide whether a submission has gone too far.

2 ~ While it’s not a requirement, we will be looking for Celtic music and band tie-ins in your verses. Sending us a limerick about your favorite Celtic artist will give you a good start toward making the winners list. It might just get some other people to check out your favorite band, too, and thus earn you their undying thanks as well as ours.

3 ~ This is a limerick contest. Please try to stay within the style, unless you’re intentionally breaking the style for humorous effect. What I’m saying is, don’t send us the 295 verse Epic Poem you wrote after you watched Beowulf with Angelina Jolie. We WILL publicly make fun of you. If you need to know exactly what constitutes a limerick, you can find a fair definition of the style on the wikipedia page.

4 ~ Perhaps most importantly, don’t rip off anyone else’s work. Limericks are easy and fun to write, so do us all a favor and write your own. Obviously, this will be grounds for disqualification.

Well, that’s about it. Have fun, tell your friends to come over and get in on the action, and let’s all get some good laughs out of the 1st Annual Celtophilia Limerick Contest. Huge thanks go out to Marc Gunn for donating the CDs that are being given away as prizes. Marc is a great friend of Celtophilia, and you can find him on the web at www.marcgunn.com

Examples to get you started

Lastly, just to get you started off in the right direction… our dear Leprechaun friend Mickey Seamus Colin, O’Flannery Thomas McDougal O’Kennedy James Jack Jimmy William O’Keefe MacGuinness Eamon Bombadil Yeats came by the other day and shared one of his favorite limericks with us.

Thar woonce twere a lass from West Cork
She feel in loove wi’ya lad who looved pork
Bu’ tha’ jest wouldn’ya do
for tha lass twere a Jew
An’ her brothers threatened to beat his Gentile, pork-loovin’ arse if he din’ya leave their sister aloon.

Sometimes I think there’s something wrong with that Leprechaun. Thankfully, Bonnie agreed to set all aright with a proper limerick example.

There once was a lad in a kilt
he was tall, strong, handsome and built.
He played with his bagpipe
from morning til night
or whenever he started to wilt.

Good luck everybody, and have fun.

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 1st, 2008 at 8:42 am and is filed under Featured, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.