behold!

THE WEDDING OF PRINCESS MADELEINE OF SWEDEN TO AN AMERICAN BANKER

#americanjustice #minorroyals #princedaniel=dreamboat #theamericandream

the part of me that continues to feel really bad for consuelo vanderbilt LOVES this story, even though this story really has nothing to do with the early 20th century american heiress trade. still, women are always the commoners. in the interest of gender parity, it’s high time the gents take their turn.

so yeah, madeline and chris o’neill, who is- ok, i’ll admit it- british-born (but they met in america so this is totes an AMERICAN romance, ya’ll), got themselves hitched. it was pretty. plus, they seem to kind of like one another.

which, y’know, that’s nice. and not something you see every day, certainly not at royal weddings… AHEM.

NEVER FORGET!

anyway’s, what is there to say about this? they got married! they seem happy! some other people were there:

these dresses are very golden globes, non? not oscars, mind you, but golden globes. are you seeing it? hmm… how shall we do this? let’s do FEELings.

1. the green crepey accordion pleat gown: LOVE. though the slit seems gratuitous, she looks like matt lauer’s wife, and she needs a better bra.

2.  the thing coming behind it that seems a failed attempt to incorporate every fashion trend of 1995: LOATHE. (something nice: she looks comfy.)

3. the schizophrenic nude floral net shoulder padded crazy that comes next: DEEPLY intrigued. because, wtf?

4. the ostritchy-looking bolera business: appreciation and admiration because, well, BALLS. also i like how, in this shot of many people, she is the only person who seems to care the camera is there and to be playing to it. she is clearly the real housewife of this group. were i at this wedding, i would want to sit next to her. (or dreamboat daniel, but more on that in a sec…)

5. the half-obscured dress of which we can only see the peachy skirt that looks like the fabric that was popular for sofas in 1961 and which appears to have pockets: girl, no.

6. everybody else: meh.

fashion revue = done.

what else?

omg, YES. you know who else was here? my man dreamboat daniel. but i’ve gotta be honest. there may have been a transfer in my affections. i kinda just have the hots for his whole family now. i don’t think anyone would have the audacity to call me a kid person but DAYUM. check out the genetic awesome that has culminated in dreamboat daniel and CP victoria’s kid, princess estelle:

you’re probably not seeing it because you’re blinded by the henry cavillesque beauty of prince carl phillip, so let’s hurry him out of the way. here he is being beautiful with his mom:

and now, back to estelle. i offer this photograph from a festival on thursday as evidence:

is that not spectacularly fabulous?! do you not (a) want to be a part of this lovely, ridiculously dressed family and (b) be/have a child who is so obviously the greatest intellect of her time? i mean, i’ve likened her dad, dreamboat daniel, to deitrich bonhoffer and some of that clearly comes through here.

seriously. i want a set of commemorative dishes featuring this image:

(photos from the daily mail)

and the whole world heaved a collective hell no?

yeah. that happened. mind you, i love me some bad tv and i was prepared to love liz and dick in spite of its inevitable badness. what i was not prepared for was the abyss of unbearable awful that liz and dick is.

fun trick: watch liz and dick. watch it for as long as you can stand, until you think the absolute maximum possible amount of time has passed- the point at which you begin wondering if this is, in fact, a four-hour film- then pause it and check the time. since i began conducting this experiment on friends, the group average has been 16 minutes. for reals.

i say all of that to say this: the BBC is producing a film on taylor and burton. it stars helena bonham carter and dominic west. although HBC is striking me as a little too karen walker, solely on the basis of this publicity still, this film is already thousands of times more interesting than liz and dick.

i know, i know. that’s actually r.patz from LAST YEAR. but i would like to use this image to reflect on the fact that there is something about CFF that is very green screen, non?

i mean, right?

doesn’t it look like keanu is about to be KING OF THE WORLD on some beached titanic?  doesn’t it look like he totally isn’t there?

you know who else doesn’t look like he’s there? LEO.

why is he so waxen? is his makeup being done by madame tussaud’s? also, toby mac and amitabh bachchan seem to be reenacting select scenes from behind the candelabra. (HOW EXCITED ARE YOU FOR BEHIND THE CANDELABRA?)

so back to the green screen… you’ve seen the beach version. how about the ‘standing at a desk in front of a horde of paparazzi’ version? which, magically, makes incredibly distinguished people look like fools.

do these not look like middle school spring photos shots? remember? not the one’s from the fall for the yearbook, but the spring one where you’d get to express your personality by standing on a ladder or sitting at a desk in front of a back drop of light sabers? those ones.

(i don’t know who this guy is but bless him for illustrating that allusion.)

speaking of awkward: waves.

and i am loathe to include him because he is king of my hate bucket, but yeah, he was there and he was awkward…

like, super awkward. garrett hedlund agrees.

he’s like, ‘dude, why are you laughing so hard? this is not the time for snaps.’

blech.

palette cleanser:

blurgh. my 16 year old self loves his 24 year old self with all of her heart. my 31 year old self and his 39 year old self? hmmm… in this photo, it is as though he has gathered all of my favorite things (macarons! strawberry cake! flowers! tiered trays!) and dressed up as truman capote just to spite me. why, leo, why?!

other totally inexplicable things? homegirl’s hair:

RIGHT?! i mean, impressive, but wtf? it looks like a wicker umbrella holder. on her head.   her dress also immediately made me think of ursula from the little mermaid, who is really the female disney character you least want your clothing to evoke.

what else?

cindy crawford’s dress was from the vanna white collection and she needs to stop messing with her face:

this photo looks like the cover of a celine dion album.

the young people look bored.

it isn’t cannes without paris hilton:

solange is my fashion icon but awkward = this:

nicole kidman is kind of queen of cannes this year because she’s on the jury, so let’s end with her. my friend lindear perfectly captured the essence of this photograph when she said, ‘for a second i was like, “who is that 14 year old boy kissing nicole kidman?”‘

seriously. have you noticed this? i didn’t until a recent HIMYM marathon. only then did it hit me that the word is used in nearly every episode by someone in the gang. it’s almost as inevitable as the throwing of a party in an episode of gossip girl. to the extent that lily’s catch phrase is, in fact, now ‘you son of  a bitch.’

to be clear, i point this out not because the word is profane, but because it isn’t funny. and i think that not because i’m a total sourpuss with no sense of humor, but because i think the writers could do better than a running joke based on the use of pejorative that has been historically used to demean women. it’s lazy comedy, people. shape up.

you could make the case that it’s a woman whose saying it so it’s totally ok. except no.

were there a male equivalent in constant use on the show, i might be a bit more forgiving.  but there isn’t. largely because there isn’t a male equivalent in our culture. and in the hierarchy of language, bro does not equal bitch.

you could also maybe make the argument that feminism has reclaimed the word bitch. that it’s totally ok now! girl power! yeah bitches!

except i don’t think that works either. it’s one thing to say that women have reclaimed words that have, historically, been considered profane when those words apply to their bodies. (i’ll assume we’re all adults here and we know what those words are.) yes, emphatically YES, the language used to describe female bodies shouldn’t be inherently wicked. we should own that. hurrah! but bitch is different.

bitch isn’t a pejorative applied to women’s bodies. a bitch is a female dog. the word is profane because it is dehumanizing and feminizing. it lowers an individual to the status of both a dog AND a woman. which isn’t particularly funny in the end.

so queen bea abdicated, ya’ll. a solemn occasion that begs the question: what did everyone wear? 

i think we americans tend to think of royalty in terms of the british monarchy and queen noor and that’s it. when, in reality, there’s loads of royal peeps. the daily mail provides a helpful guide:

see? royalty’s not extinct! there’s 48 of ‘em. and those are just the major leagues. never mind the ‘minors’- aka. the non-ruling, non-next-in-line people like william and kate (ie. the young, hip, cool royals we care about) and, carrying this baseball metaphor to its inevitable conclusion, the single A teams like princess michael of kent. nope, these are the big guns. the people who either are ruling or about to. all gathered here for the transfer of power from queen bea…

who is beloved by the people of the netherlands and whose helmet hair is EPIC, to her son willhem…

who looks kind of like charles grodin and wears a morning coat well.

bea and chuck grodin here are a part of the orange-nassau dynasty, the descendants of william and mary of orange, who you may or may not remember from an american high school european history class as those people who came over to england and did something.

tedious ‘here’s what’s happening’ contextualizing over. on to THE FASHIONS.

here is the new queen maxima:

which, well, (a) GORGEOUS color, (b) GORGEOUS dress, and (c) nice crown. but you know what wins this? THE CAPE. it is not unlike gwyneth’s greatest fashion moment of all time. remember that?

while i’m obviously ALWAYS rooting for the replication of liz taylor’s greatest fashion moment:

i guess gwynnie’s will do. cause if you’re going to pull your coronation outfit from a pop culture moment and you’re not going to go with liz’s headdress of doom, gwynnie’s cape is a pretty kick-ass moment to go with. screw you, ermine. sapphire awesome is in the house.

so, yeah, maxima FTW. though her daughters with their grandmother come in a close second.

is this not totally how we all looked at family events at the age of under 12? right?!

question: did you know florence welch was a princess of morocco?

here are some assorted others. the men are all quite dashing and regal in an early 19th century ‘i am the master of many boats’ kind of way, except middle guy there who looks severely under-decorated (he totes has no boats!), but the women… hmm…

if i’m being honest, this is how i always pictured the women of alderaan would dress. maybe minus the hats, but still. it is as though we are looking into the closet of leia’s mother…

which brings us to my man prince daniel, there on the far right.

so, william is balding and harry is a scamp, but daniel- who is, of course, in no way related to them- seems so sturdy. and because he looks like deitrich bonhoffer, i assume he is terribly wise.

his spectacles are disarming. they undo me.

i also love what happens to his hair whilst on a beach…

you guys, that totally happens to my hair! prince daniel, duke of västergötland: he’s JUST LIKE US.

and he looks super cute with his kid:

prince daniel. SIGH.

ok, where were we? right. the abdication/coronation. what a flurry of emotions for the dutch people to cycle through in such a short period.

the queen is abdicating

yay the king!

are the dutch emotionally sapped? i imagine it’s been a fraught few days what with all the royalty and seeing all that orange. do you wish we’d seen more younger royals? did prince daniel not do it for you? did you need some of this?

or some of this?

or, pray tell, some of this?

all this coronation business begs the question: what will charles’s coronation be like?

all i know is i want there to be an afterparty where they play ‘single ladies.’

(full amazing crazy video with incredibly overbearing music HERE)

srsly. did you know you needed to see nick cannon dressed as a bunny with queen butterflybunny sipping a bellini while lounging on his back? BUT YOU DID, right? RIGHT?!

dear lindsay lohan,

i’ve taken an accidental month-long blogging break in large part because there is just too much to take in. what with beiber’s meltdown in london, the DOC/mantel plastic bride/royal bodies smackdown, a piece i’ve been trying to write for months on celeb surgery, and then… THEN… [ominous drums] there is you. there is always you.

personally, i didn’t want to write about you, but then a friend’s mother told me i really needed to engage, so here goes.

li.lo, i can’t even look at you right now.

li.lo, WHAT ARE YOU DOING WITH YOUR LIFE??!!?!

really, that’s an unfair question. you’ve been doing this for awhile. it’s kinda like an annual bacchinalian now and i should think that, by this point, a very clear pattern has emerged. we, as a society, should maybe no longer be surprised. maybe it shouldn’t be at all shocking that you, mere days after your recent plea deal, would be (“allegedly”) seen guzzling vodka.

we should maybe, at this point in history, take for granted the fact that this is just how it’s going to be going forward. endless insanity, total stupid nonsense.

if we buy into that, then there are so many things we can just take for granted without having to question all of the injustice inherent in them.

like, for instance, how you are the california legal system’s kryptonite. (btw, thanks for getting this song stuck in my head for four freaking days.) li.lo, do you realize that you get away with everything? i mean, yeah, you’re in court all of the time, but that’s largely because, after getting away with one thing (drugs! theft! reckless driving!) you go out and do something else. and, like steve sanders, you always get caught.

(via perez hilton)

you’ve blatantly violated every probation you’ve ever had. and nobody even seems to care. not really. they’ll call you in to court. you’ll maybe show. they’ll charge you $150, you’ll laugh and, next night, you’ll be out drinking vodka.

you’ve violated your probation six times in six years. girl, HOW DO YOU STILL HAVE A DRIVER’S LICENSE?

also, your legal team is like the marx brothers. for reals. you fired shawn holley, who’s saved your butt time and time again, and took on mark heller. whycome?

oh, yes, it’s because your priorities are intolerably awful.

so you’ve been sentenced to something everybody’s calling ‘lockdown rehab’, which- as it turns out- isn’t even a real thing.

truth time: li.lo, are you seeing a lifetime move in all of this? because if you were to tell me that this was all a big case of franco and that, four years hence, we’ll be treated to an epic hour and a half of LINDSAY LOHAN STARS IN THE LIFETIME MOVIE LINDSAY LOHAN: THE LIFETIMES OF LIZ & DICK’S STAR, dude! WORTH IT.

otherwise, i’m totally over it.

btw, this outfit is an unqualified HORROR. unless you were hoping to artistically represent your driving record through clothes, in which case, well played.

love,

o.

‘It’s difficult being a woman. It’s so much pressure, and we need that support sometimes,’ Beyonce says. ‘We’re all going through our problems, but we all have the same insecurities and we all have the same abilities and we all need each other.

‘Women have to work much harder to make it in this world. It really pisses me off that women don’t get the same opportunities as men do, or money for that matter.

‘Because lets face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define our values and to define what’s sexy and what’s feminine and that’s bullshit. At the end of the day, it’s not about equal rights, it’s about how we think. We have to reshape our own perception of how we view ourselves.’

[via]