Royal Wedding - Great but, so What?

Kate Middleton’s pretty cute, for a British chick. She’d be about an 8 I reckon. What’s-his-face has done pretty well for himself to get to nuptial point with her. Good on them. I could go for a pub lunch right now.

Beyond this thought, I fail to see why I or any other young Australians should actually care about this wedding. It would be good to see a case put forth for why our media is so enraptured by a union which for myself at least, quite frankly, probably ranks a couple of rungs below Geoffrey Edelsten’s wedding to that well proportioned 25 yr old. At least Edelsten is a taxpayer, a citizen, a philanthropist, self-made man who’s done some work and then had some work done (but that’s a different story). As for the royals, well just because your family has a Facebook page does not make them relevant.

Sure the Prince can’t be blamed for the privilege he was born into, and from most accounts he seems like a nice bloke. But surely, there is something so wrong with the way our media pines over a royal who:

a) Has not spent more than 3 months collectively in Australia, despite being a future head of state.

b) Is not influential to Australian politics or society in any way other than the surge of subscriptions to No Idea and the like.

c) Unlike his predecessors, has not had to conquer or colonise foreign lands. Or maybe he’s done that by marrying non-royal bloodlines – technicality?

So what exactly is the effort they have made to earn the gushing wide-eyed praise of us proletariat, their ever loyal subjects? At least in blighty they seem to have lifted the mood of a society ailing economically and in national confidence, and they would undoubtedly bring in some much-needed cash from tourists and exports of commemorative teacups and assorted china. However for Australia it is perplexing in the least that, as a democracy which largely operates independently of the Crown, we place any of our national value on a family living off the best welfare deal in history. Even Katie Price, another doyenne of the tabloid trade, had to pose topless, write a few children’s books and at least married an Aussie – as much as most of us were happy to see Peter Andre leave our shores. So how do we justify the immense attention this wedding is receiving in Australia?

Some might say ‘But we’re a Commonwealth, we’re such amicable brethren!’ Oh I forgot about that, what with U.K reporters taking pot shots at our cricket teams, the hopelessly irrelevant circus tent that is the Commonwealth Games, and England bidding against us for the FIFA World Cup. We voted against a republic? Oh you mean when we voted against the model for the republic, and then had a royalist PM speak for the majority in declaring we didn’t want the republic. Howard was enacting a political version of Paul Newman in ‘The Hustler’, and admittedly voters got played. Even still, karma had its way when bushy brows Johnny didn’t get the top job at the International Cricket Council (ICC), in what was essentially a colony vs. ex-colony standoff. If it’s any consolation I think he’ll probably get a wedding invite though.

This reminds me, I have a small request for our tabloid mag editors. I have a couple of close friends getting married in a couple of weeks, both of them vote, work honest jobs, have a small mortgage and I think they’re pretty photogenic. There’s relevance, geographic proximity, an event, a very romantic ‘how they met’ story and some glamour...all the pieces are there. Would you mind putting them on the cover and doing a 5-page feature?

Tweep Tweep, Who got the keys to the jeep?

'Is Madonna an early adopter?' My tweets are lame (search harpt). However, even I don't tweet out stuff like this - "i iz tired" - thanks for that brit. I'm not sure of the reason you're following me, but I know why I'm not following you. In the last 2 months, I've found slowly but surely many friends and acquaintances are using Twitter as a primary source of information, from CNN feeds, NYTimes feeds to your more sublime and poetic fare such as "u remind me of my jeep...I want 2 ride it", or the prophetic "Ow this bleach hurts, rofl" - this could be interesting if it involved another person pouring the stuff on APGirlie3 - then it would also be interesting as to why she would be 'rofl' - too vindictive?. Google take note, if you want to buy Twitter, you're also buying into banal tweets (ban-weets), same goes for Facebook who, let's face it, may see their numbers dwindle by this time next year in the face of a(nother) significant tipping point in the history of social networking. Personally, I also like the word 'tweet' because it's like the commonly applied sounbyte used to censor swearing on brilliant broadcast TV like Jerry Springer and the like (I don't think HBO has this sound in their database - thankfully). In honouring this, for the remainder of this entry I feel it's only right...nay, necessary, to use the word 'tweet' place of profanity.

When you can break news of an American Airlines flight qualifying for Olympic Diving in the Hudson River, or a swine flu epidemic, or insider updates during the Mumbai Terrorist attacks (11/9 as its being cemented in the public consciousness) faster than the big boys of breaking news - you are onto something. When you figure out how to profit from feeding tweet inquiry into business enquiry - you are onto something. Likewise if a profitable model for news and reliable journalistic practice can be created from this technology (I am indebted to UNSW lecturer Kate Crawford for thinking in this direction). Invariably, in times of revolutions be they industrial, artistic, musical or technological (informational), the old system always breaks before a solution appears.

By the late 1800's, Horse Carriages, or more specifically the horses themselves, were producing such significant amounts of tweet that they placed an almost unbearable liability on the streets (infrastructure) and citizenry of New York City (amongst others), that a solution seemed nigh impossible till Henry Ford waltzed in with those wheels of his, and the internal combustion engine came of age (for those factussies - fact fussy people). Indeed, the tweeting horse tweet problem was such a threat that it dominated discussion at the first International Urban Planning Conference in 1898 - the issues were pollution, environmental by-products and infections where swelling human populations were in proximity with horses and their tweet, and the rise of carriage related accidents. Till Ford, citizens were left with more pedestrian solutions including development of NYC's professionalised street-sweeping service and developments of road rules to reduce carriage-related accidents and deaths (which happened more frequently than us of the 21st Century may expect). For a while there was a system in complete chaos, the dominant thinking being how to preserve the system rather than finding a completely new and innovative solution out of left field. We know the rest of the story, the horse-carriage arrived at it's not so glorious finish line, and a new race started with the Ford Model-A (1903). To begin a sentence with a classic line from 30 Rock's Dennis Duffy, 'In this analogy..', the horse tweet is the old way of doing things - newspapers, online newspapers, facebook (oops), and the internal combustion engine is what we're waiting for, Twitter is just the wheels - and someone's developing the idea for a new Ford Model-A.

Till then the metaphorical chaos in the virtual world gets reflected in the physical world. Illness, Flu. Swine? Is Medieval English on the comeback trail? Well the Urban Dictionary entry is particularly informative in this endeavour, and brings up such gems of definition as "Swine: probably one of the best words ever, swine can be used in any situation to degrade another person... ". The following are U.D's suggestions for potential uses around the watercooler and in everyday banter/duel with your arch nemesis from the middle-ages:

- Leave me alone you swine!
- Look at that tweeting swine.
- That man is a filthy swineish animal.
- You are the swine of all swine.

So it goes, and these may prove more effective in the event of the swine flu epidemic (or is it pandemic? - WHO's Margaret Chan is confusing us all). If it's pandemic, believe I’m taking a break from my beloved Vietnamese Pork rolls at Phuong’s Bakery. However, the possible severity of a pandemic should not be underestimated, particularly in light of the first swine-flu related death in Mexico. That there is any general sympathy about those most likely to be affected is questionable in light of...what else other than a tweet. Here's an incredibly touching, humanistic tweet from NYTimes columnist Charles M. Blow: "Pandemic, Smandemic, I want to invest in that surgical mask company". Lovely. We have the wheels, we need the engine, but what we really need is for these guys to stay in the passenger seats, preferably up the back with the naughty kids. Another browser window is chirping away with news, recommendations, and ban-weets about gardening and recessionary stock-tips. I would love to chuck my 140 characters of gold in with the rest of this horse tweet...but I iz tired.

Finally...a message from Jon Stewart.

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