http://www.jewishworldreview.com/cols/pruden082010.php3
August 20, 2010
Al and the prince with royal advice
By Wesley Pruden
| The rich and famous are different from you and me, and a good thing, too.
You don't want to get downwind from a lot of their ideas, and sometimes even
from themselves.
Prince Charles, like his "progressive" counterparts here, would even deprive
a man of a good soak, unless we're talking about taxes. He wants British
families to "snub the tub" and take shorter showers to protect the
environment. "If everybody in a four-person family replaced one bath a week
with a five-minute shower you could save 5 to 15 pounds [sterling] per year
off your energy bill." That's $8 to $23 in real money.
Sheryl Crow, the environmentally enhanced pop singer, is jeered in the
pulpwood mills for her campaign to save toilet paper, with no applause for
her songs sung sadly. She famously proposed "a limitation be put on how many
squares of toilet paper can be used in any one sitting." She thinks one per
sitting will do it. Karl Rove was scolded for lack of gallantry when he
avoided shaking Miss Crow's hand as she walked up to berate him for being
Karl at a dinner of the White House Correspondents' Association. He didn't
want to be a boor but he knew where her hand might have been with that one
square of two-ply quilted.
Al Gore, who has lately been out of sight, probably in search of a good
massage, bobbed to the surface this week to scold Congress again for
something or other, no doubt about global warming. He's worried about people
using too much water in their ablutions, too, though if he has cut down on
his showering, and been taking Miss Crow's advice about proper toilet
training, nobody has noticed. Al's mansion in Nashville consumes electricity
at a rate of 12 times the average of the typical Nashville house, and a lot
of those kilowatts pump water, some of it to the bathrooms accompanying the
eight bedrooms.
Back in Old Blighty, the ever buff and bonny prince suggests 20 things
Englishmen should do to make life "greener" if not necessarily cleaner and
sweeter with a little less reliance on soap and water. The prince thinks
that if you can't get rid of the grit between your toes and the grime behind
your ears in a five-minute shower the most considerate thing you can do for
the planet (if not for your close neighbors) is to leave it be. "We must all
strive harder than ever before," he says, "to convince people that by living
sustainably we will improve our quality of life and our health and by
valuing nature's resources properly we will secure our futures."
This sounds like the sort of lecture we're accustomed to hearing from our
betters here in the colonies. He could start with his own relatives. His
father, Prince Phillip, 89, does not snub the tub. He fell in one a few
years ago and suffered a painful bruise when he landed with his thumb in his
eye. Sarah Ferguson, his randy-and-ready one-time sister-in-law, says she
lightens her "dark moods" every day with icy baths, though a cold shower
would be just as effective. But one of the perks of celebrity is that your
list of prescriptions to regulate the behavior of others never applies to
you. A spokesman for the prince sniffs that "the Prince of Wales does the
majority of things on his list." These include "loving your leftovers" (the
secret of fine English cooking), taking vacations close to home, and saving
your old paint buckets rather than throwing them away. You never know when
you'll need one to carry the night soil out of the chicken house.
The prince, in fact, keeps a flock of hard-working hens to supply the subtle
variety of eggs he requires for breakfast. The Light Sussex and Welsummer
hens live in a royal chicken house called Cluckingham Palace, designed to
recall a Saxon steeple. The London Daily Mail describes the hens as "the
creme de la creme" of chickenhood. Lately foxes have been sneaking into the
royal chicken house, and sampling the prince's flock of 190 hens. He
installed an electric fence to keep the foxes out and the hens get to roam
through a large, leafy orchard. These are clearly not Mr. Tyson's chickens.
"We keep moving the electric fence to give the hens new grass," says the
prince's spokesman, "but the foxes are very cunning."
Royal or not, you don't want to get downwind of the prince's chicken house.
Vice presidents and pop singers come and go, but there will always be an
England.
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