Find closest previous element jQuery
<p>I am wanting something similar to this <a href="http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1775541/closest-previous-element-with-certain-id-with-prev">person</a>, except the element I want to match might not be a direct sibling.</p>

<p>If I had this HTML, for example,</p>

<pre><code>&lt;h3&gt;
    &lt;span&gt;
        &lt;b&gt;Whaddup?&lt;/b&gt;
    &lt;/span&gt;
&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;
    &lt;span&gt;
        &lt;b&gt;Hello&lt;/b&gt;
    &lt;/span&gt;
&lt;/h3&gt;
&lt;div&gt;
    &lt;div&gt;
        &lt;img /&gt;
    &lt;/div&gt;
     &lt;span id="me"&gt;&lt;/span&gt;
&lt;/div&gt;
&lt;h3&gt;
    &lt;span&gt;
        &lt;b&gt;Goodbye&lt;/b&gt;
    &lt;/span&gt;
&lt;/h3&gt;
</code></pre>

<p>I would want to be able to do something like this:</p>

<pre><code>var link = $("#me").closestPreviousElement("h3 span b");
console.log(link.text()); //"Hello"
</code></pre>

<p>Is there an easy way to do this in jQuery?</p>

<p><strong>EDIT</strong>: I should have made my specification a little bit clearer. <code>$("#me")</code> may or may not have a parent div. The code should not assume that it does. I don't necessarily know anything about the surrounding elements.</p>
