Wedding infrastructure

Alright, I’ll add one more bit of trivia to the whole Royal Wedding hooha today, one I imagine you won’t get from Katie or Barbara or Meredith: the Royal Router.

                               

Well—after all, it takes a powerful lot of telecommunications kit to broadcast not only the ceremony but all the moron-in-the-Mall humanoid-interest interviews. And every other commercial venture is trying to cash in on a connection to the doings. Why not Cisco?

Kingly matters

It may have reached your notice that there’s going to be a Rather Big Event in London on Friday. If it has escaped your notice then you won’t be reading this post in your monastery in the Urals.

Prince William, third in line to the throne of Great Britain, is getting married, ya great wally. To a commoner. But a really good looking one.

But the RBE has apparently stirred some discussion amongst Brits about whether Wills should succeed his grandmother directly, with his father, Prince Charles, either left out altogether or abdicating in favor of his son.

After all, Wills is much better looking, and taller (although he’s obviously inherited dear old dad’s thinning hair, and he not yet 30). And so far he hasn’t espoused any fringe causes like promoting organic farming and opposing modern British architecture. (Everyone’s ignoring those incidents of William taking out the RAF helos for joy rides, since that can be marked down to youthful exuberance and the RAF is practically the Windsors’ anyhow.)

Naturally the media are all over this like a bad British haircut, taking polls and getting professional Royals Watchers (I’m not making this up—they exist) to pontificate on why the son is just way more popular than the old man. The idea is that William would be more, you know, kingly, and that would be Better for Britain.

Of course, it would take a constitutional upheaval; but since the Brits don’t have a written constitution, I don’t know how much of an impediment that would be.

But I find this skip-the-king thing fascinating because the whole point of a hereditary monarchy is that you take what comes up in the generational gene pool. The people do not get to say they don’t want Prince X because he doesn’t look as good as Prince Y—or even that Prince Y is more with-it than Prince X. (And the law of primogeniture means that it's most likely going to be the person with the royal Y-chromosome.) Lord knows, there have been weaklings, murderers, adulterers and raving lunatics on the British throne. One as recently as 101 years ago.

And that was in the day when the Monarch of Britain wielded some actual power.

The customary road to royal rule is genetic inheritance. Except for when someone whacks the monarch and seizes the throne. That's perfectly acceptable.

So it’s interesting to me that apparently some Brits want to enjoy the tradition of a dynastic monarchy, but still get to make the sitting king/queen a popularity contest.

Kind of an appearance-over-substance thing. But if they keep that up, they’ll end up with David Beckham and Posh Spice in Buckingham Palace. And, in the end, I’m not sure they would bring in the tourists and their money like the Windsors do. 

Exit the Dragon Lady

A woman who dominated my childhood perception of Asia, woman & politics is dead. Madame Nhu was 86. Or possibly 87. Like much what lay below the image she projected to the world, her date of birth is a bit murky.

Born Tran Le Xuan, to a family of privilege related to the last emperor of Vietnam, she married into a political family. In the 1960s her husband ran the secret police & her brother-in-law ran the country (South Vietnam, as it was then).

She was a Buddhist, but converted to Roman Catholicism when she married Ngo Dinh Nhu. As often happens with converts, she was exceptionally fervent & used her political connections to pass measures outlawing divorce, abortion & contraceptives. She also banned the Twist.

& yet her interference also improved the position of women in Vietnamese society. She closed brothels & outlawed polygamy & concubinage.

Madame Nhu had a mouth on her & she used it as both a club & a skinning knife. They didn’t call her the Dragon Lady for nothing. She enjoyed it, too—“Power is wonderful. Total power is totally wonderful,” was her watchword.

Actually, she was also known as “the Oriental Lucrezia Borgia”, but I don’t think that’s apt. Lucrezia was the pawn of the men in her family; Nhu definitely was no one’s pawn. She was the queen—the most powerful piece on the board.

She was petite & beautiful & had long fingernails. Somehow in my mind I linked her with Clare Boothe Luce, although she was much, much better looking.

She happened to be in LA as part of a US speaking tour in November 1963 when news broke that her husband & brother-in-law had been executed in the US-backed coup that shifted everything in Vietnam. After that she retreated to Paris & then Rome.

The obits don’t give a cause of death. I suppose at 86 you could just wear out. But I somehow don’t see the Dragon Lady wearing out. She decided to go.

Toothpick tour of SF

Okay, I’ve been in a bit of a puckish mood lately & I came across this… Well, what is it? Engineering endeavor? Performance art? Too much time on his hands?

I dunno, but it’s fascinating. Click on the start arrow & crank up the volume, because the artist explains what all the structures are as the balls roll through them. & make sure you watch all the way to the end—there are several paths for the balls.

Remembering the diggers

Today is ANZAC Day, marking 96 years since the Australian and New Zealand Army Corps landed at Gallipoli. The military action itself was a miserable failure (unless you’re looking at it from the Turkish perspective), but it marked the coming of age for the antipodean part of the British Empire.

I haven’t been to Gallipoli, but I have visited a lot of the WWI British cemeteries in Northern France. Some are very small, maybe a couple dozen graves; others are appallingly large. Each headstone is marked with the soldier’s name, rank, regimental crest, date of death and age. But there are many that bear only a cross and the legend “a soldier of the Great War…known unto God.”

And here’s what I felt after walking the avenues of the dead: it was a war fought entirely for the furtherance of empires, on both sides of the slaughter. And hundreds of thousands of men from the colonies paid the highest price to maintain imperial structures.

To no avail—by 1918 three of the empires lay in ruins and the foundations of a fourth had been weakened so that it tottered on for only a few decades. Tens of millions were dead from military action, disease and starvation. And hundreds of square miles of Europe was laid waste.

And since then…well, you know the story.

Across Australia and New Zealand today, people commemorated all of their countrymen lost to wars in the past 96 years. Gallipoli to Afghanistan. That’s a lot of loss in less than a century for countries with such small populations.