Star Wars Vs. The Royal Wedding
Pretty funny mash-up of Star Wars and the royal wedding, also featuring Princess Diana.
Posts Tagged ‘Kate Middleton’
The Mind-Numbing Stupidity Of The Royal Wedding
I didn’t watch the marriage ceremony of Prince William and Kate Middleton today. Frankly, I’ve been baffled the last few days (when the subject intrusively pushed itself into the realm of my involuntary attention) about the whole fuss about it. This afternoon, when by chance I did get to watch a couple of minutes of the spectacle, I was most amused by William’s increasing and by now apparent baldness, which offers Schadenfreude to common people like your blogger truly (not to mention that other guy), who cope with similar cosmetic problems.
So I’m pretty pleased with this article by Matt Soller Seitz on Salon.com, who points out the mind-numbing stupidity of the whole affair, particularly the fact that it is apparently watched by two billion people worldwide. Wtf. Of course, ‘critical’ articles like Seitz’s are about as predictable as the royal ceremony itself, but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be said. Because the guy is right.
If you’ve been watching and drooling about this thing: please grow up.
I’m off, getting drunk in an orange lion-tailed jump suit on Queens Day.
The hours of breathless coverage about Britain’s monarchy played into our collective serf mentality.
So Prince William and Kate Middleton, now Duchess of Cambridge, are married. They exchanged vows before the Archbishop of Canterbury at Westminster Abbey on the morning of April 29, 2011, with planes roaring overhead and Union Jacks waving and hundreds of thousands of people in the London streets and millions upon millions upon millions of people watching on international television.
“It really is something special,” anchor Diane Sawyer said on ABC a few minutes after their first public kiss. Then she added a few minutes later, in a rundown of factoids, “He knows how to line dance!”
The moment capped four straight hours of continuous coverage on every major broadcast network and cable news channel. The news organizations never cut away except for commercials. And they managed to forgo those breaks when it seemed as if something exciting, or “exciting,” was about to happen – such as the newly-hitched royal couple’s first kiss, which was so brief that the TV organizations played it back in slow motion, and their second kiss, which presumably was an attempt to improve on the first one.
“I’m a hard-hearted old cynic, but I must admit I did shed a tear,” said ABC’s Buckingham Palace correspondent Nick Watt, who then stopped just short of taking credit for the chant in the crowd that pushed William and Kate to kiss a second time. “I’d like to think I played a small part in that,” Watt said, beaming.
I wish the royal couple the very best. They seem like nice people, truly. Fellow human beings, at the very least. And that’s why I hope that when in the unlikely event that they ever read this, that they won’t take it personally when I say that the coverage of this whole ceremony and its run-up was revoltingly obsequious and almost entirely devoid of news value, and so altogether bubble-brained that it makes me think that if there is such a thing as karmic payback for wrong priorities, we’re due for some major trauma.
As you read this, the big three morning shows — “Good Morning America,” “Today” and “The CBS Morning News” — are continuing to re-hash, analyze and replay the ceremony on tape while going live to various correspondents and experts in England and elsewhere. The morning shows usually run two hours — more if an affiliate takes their built-in spillover, but for the sake of argument let’s just say they did two hours’ worth, and add that to the overnight coverage, which ran four hours, bringing the total to six. And then let’s ask ourselves this question: When’s the last time the top guns of the American electronic media covered an event, any event, for six hours straight without any significant interruption, at any hour of the day or night?
