16 thoughts on “Headline Du Jour”

  1. He is marrying a stunner. Good for him. Royal families today are mostly there for PR purposes. It can’t hurt the marriage when you wake up everyday next to a beautiful woman either.

    He was lucky enough to be born with a silver spoon in his mouth. So yeah he does not need to actually ‘work’.

  2. My wife and I were en route to the U.K. when word of Diana’s car accident reached us. Upon landing at Heathrow, we learned from the pilot that Diana had died. He didn’t want to announce it during the flight, but didn’t want us to be the last to know upon our arrival.

    We stayed at a hotel near Picadilly Circus in the week following, and visited Buckingham Palace frequently at and after midnight.

    The two things I took away from that experience were: The working class Brits loved Diana; and the Brits in general are afraid to speak against “the Royals.”

    I guess 500 centuries of drawing and quartering for treason leaves a mark, after all.

    In any event, having a Royal wedding media event of any sort no longer surprises me. As Frank Drebin would say, “No matter how silly the idea of having a queen might be to us, as Americans, we must be gracious and considerate hosts.”

  3. the Brits in general are afraid to speak against “the Royals.”

    That doesn’t sound like any contemporary “Brit” I’ve ever known or heard of. And as a matter of fact there’s quite an industry in royal-mockery over there. The British press probably would go under without it.

    As for the poor dead Di, you bet the “working class” loved her; she wallowed in her soap opera life just like a character on Eastenders. The British working class isn’t what it used to be: the dreadful emotional scenes around her funeral cortège and the horrid piles of teddy bears, and the shrieking at the Queen for not bawling incontinently like a commoner (so much for being afraid to “speak against the Royals”), proved that.

    Never mind me. I lived through the whole thing vicariously through Diana-obsessed friends, who did things like obsessively collect magazine articles about her, talk about her incessantly, build shrines to her in their homes (I’ll never forget going to a party and being confronted by the hostess’ Wall of Di, with the proud centerpiece a gigantic photo of Her in that damn tiara), and let’s not forget how every blond woman in the Western hemisphere had their hair done in a “Princess Di” do. This has brought back bad memories. {{shudder}}

  4. I gave up on Tom Clancy novels after his kiss up to Charlie and Diana in Patriot Games. Frankly, I was rooting for the IRA in that book, but I have not been a fan of the royal family since the queen forbade WWII hero Peter Townsend from marrying a princess in the 1950s.

  5. So yeah he does not need to actually ‘work’.

    True, but he does in fact work as a search and rescue pilot.

  6. When I was a kid I rode a bus cross country getting a chance to meet two other kids on holiday. One was an Australian, the other English lawyer by whatever name. Both fresh out of college. Watching the two of them go at it was hilarious. The funny thing was it was the Australian that seemed to have some kind of reverence for the royals. The English kid was totally irreverent and kept getting under the others skin. I never had more fun watching any two characters.

  7. “The British working class isn’t what it used to be: the dreadful emotional scenes around her funeral cortège and the horrid piles of teddy bears, and the shrieking at the Queen for not bawling incontinently like a commoner (so much for being afraid to “speak against the Royals”).”

    My statement about “afraid to speak against the Royals” was correct, but I shouldn’t have added the “in general.” We saw scads of very young, working class people at Buckingham. They were there at 2:00 in the morning, with babies wrapped in blankets, in the light rain. They were the ones who loved Diana.

    The people afraid to speak against the Royals were professional, very upper class people — friends of mine, actually, who were highly placed in the British defense (or “defence”) world. They spoke in whispers, expressing their horrified amazement at how the working class was getting uppity (my word for it). But they clearly did not share the willingness of the working class to speak out against the Queen…

  8. Jay,

    We are neighbors, it appears…I am fairly close to the intersection of 97th and State Line….

    Care to hook up for lunch sometime?

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