Assistant Quote of the Day

"This, apparently, is what it takes to get the media's undivided attention: the marriage between two people who are politically powerless, and who spend their waking lives as designated fetish objects for the United Kingdom's interested citizenry, for Anglophiles the world over, and for the celebrity-fixated media. Our collective Ken and Barbie dolls."

-- Matt Zoller Seitz in a brilliantly dead-on piece currently posted at Salon

Where It Counts

Obviously, what's going across the southern United States right now is so overwhelmingly tragic that it's really beyond the scope of appropriate description.

With that in mind, it's good to see that NBC Nightly News's Brian Williams -- along with NBC News President Steve Capus, whom I've beat up on more than once here and at the Huffington Post -- made the right decision and didn't allow the network's main anchor to languish overseas covering what's basically fluff at the expense of one of the most important and genuinely affecting stories of the year for this country.

I hate to reference Chris Rock twice in 24 hours, but it could easily be argued that heaping praise on Williams and Capus for the mutual decision that brought Williams back home from the Royal Wedding after having already landed in London is a case of people getting credit for what they're supposed to do.

But I guess these days that's as good as you're gonna get.

NBC made the right choice.

Time: Brian Williams Explains Why He Ditched the Royal Wedding/4.29.11

To help the victims of these storms, by the way, please go here.

The King and Ire

I'll make this really quick.

I obviously don't have much to say about today's silly spectacle across the pond; aside from the fact that Kate Middleton is just disturbingly hot (see left), it's not something that affects my life or would keep me sufficiently entertained one way or the other.

But there have been a couple of humorous royal-related comments that Votar and I tossed around this morning.

First of all, William and Kate are now going to be known as the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. What's interesting about this is that the titles apparently have no real meaning; they're just something Queen Elizabeth gets to pull out of thin air at her discretion.

Which got us thinking how great it would be if the Queen finally succumbed to senility or just decided to fuck with everybody and dubbed these two, "Lord Baron Von Jizzington Shitsack and Her Supreme Bad-Ass, Princess White Cleopatra Jones," or maybe just "Lord Humongous and Lady Die."

And that of course reminded us of this:



Also, remember when it looked like William was gonna be the "cool" prince and Harry would turn out to be the weenie. Man were those preconceptions backward. William is, to use the appropriate lingo, barely above a poof while Harry behaves like a kid who knows he's a fucking prince but who also knows he'll never be king. He's gone to raves, banged girls two at a time, he dressed like Hitler for Christ's sake (if that doesn't scream, "Go ahead, get pissed, I dare you," nothing does), and when he decided, "You know what? I want to kill people," he joined the Royal Military. What has he got to lose?

If he did just go off one night and shoot a hooker in the face or something, just because he could, what would happen? Does the Royal Family have somebody on speed dial who's the equivalent of the Wolf from Pulp Fiction?

"Okay, you've got a commoner, minus a head in the boot of an Aston Martin -- take me to it."

As you can tell, we're showing the monarchy the respect it deserves.