Unfortunately the dark side of consuming a lot of news is that for every well written, researched and properly considered piece that gets filed, you have to sift through an enormous amount of inconsequential or poorly written or unprofessionally produced garbage to get at it.

And then every so often, a weekend comes around that just sets the whole online media community on fire.

It started out with me being all scandalised and indignant about the ABC being forced to cut the Chaser’s commentary of the royal wedding on account of the Monarchy changing the conditions of the broadcast rights with under a week to go before the wedding to disallow the use of the footage for humour or satire.

I’m still pretty annoyed about that. Not so much for the Chaser, as for the fact that apparently England are allowed to tell Australian media what they can and can’t do with footage of a public event like the wedding. Sure, obviously no-one wants to go around ruining the big day for the couple. But honestly, if England thinks it can’t handle people poking fun of the monarchy, if it really thinks that people having a joke at it’s expense is something that warrants a global ban, then in my opinion there’s really only one word for that:

Coward.

Okay, there are others. I’m not going to print them here because K.Kim gets upset with me when I use mildly offensive language.

But then when Friday night Aussie time finally rolled around, I found I was compelled to turn the footage on. Prior to that, I had been planning to boycott, based largely on my antagonism for all things English and my distaste for the sort of frivolous and vacuous nonsense that goes along with the build up to this sort of thing. I was legitimately concerned about the possibility of damaging my TV by getting frustrated and throwing things at it.

Unfortunately there really wasn’t anything else to do, because every other person I knew was either working or watching the wedding. In despair I eventually caved in and switched on the ABC’s coverage, minus the Chaser.

I’m glad I did. I timed it to perfection, and managed to skip all the pre-service nonsense and fashion commentary and arrived just in time to hear the priest say “Dearly beloved”. The service itself was pretty good, and most of the music was really nice. Except of course “Jerusalem”, which by common law has to be sung at every English wedding, and must be sung in a different time signature by every person in attendance.

I really hate that ‘hymn’.

After all the festivity I was faced with brain splitting decision of whether to blog about it or not. I felt like I should add my voice to the other billion or so, but then, I also didn’t feel like I had anything really consequential to add to mountain of other inconsequential bits of royal gunk getting around. Of course that hasn’t inhibited me from writing a page and a half about it so far without any signs of slowing up, but that’s exactly the point. An event like this seems to generate idiotic ramblings like this one by its sheer weight of existence.

And that really pisses me off (Sorry Kim)

Garry with 2 Rs

P.S. You know what else pisses me off? Waiting just one day to post and then…