"There’s breaking protocol and then there’s giving the Queen Mother an unwanted kiss on the lips, which is something President Jimmy Carter inexplicably did..."

"... during his May 1977 visit to Buckingham Palace.... [T]he Queen Mother later described the incident, which she found mortifying. 'Nobody has done that since my husband died,' she said. 'I took a sharp step backwards – not quite far enough.'"

From "Queen Elizabeth’s Awkward Visits With U.S. Presidents, Ranked" (NY Magazine).

The Carter visit is ranked #12 out of 13 ranked visits. The only thing worse was the Jackie-and-Jack visit that we saw dramatized on "The Crown." We're told that Jackie said the queen was "pretty heavy going," and when Gore Vidal related Jackie's complaint to Princess Margaret, she said, "But that’s what she’s there for."

You might guess that Obama would come out at #1, but he's only #3. #1 is Eisenhower, and #2 was Harry Truman, in October 1951 and when Elizabeth was still a Princess (4 months later she would be queen):

"For people without solid structures of existential certainty, the predictable nature of the interlocking cosmic clocks of astrology can provide a scaffold..."

"... upon which to build meaning, purpose, and focus.... For me, the astrologers I spoke with for this article, and a majority of those I consider to be colleagues, responsible astrological prediction has several key factors: it is either helpful, compassionate, or (preferably) both, and it repeatedly re-emphasizes the inherent and unavoidable uncertainty of any prediction. By deliberately trying to be helpful and humble, the harms and hubris that are possible within astrological prediction are immediately minimized. There’s responsibility here, sure, but there’s also relief—by making room for what can be considered chance, we leave the door open for what some call fate."

From "How Do You Practice Responsible Astrology?/For millennia, rulers and ordinary people alike have used the method to predict the future. Translating celestial movements requires great care—and compassion" by Diana Rose Harper (Wired).

Pick a structure, any structure. It's better than chaos. Any meaning is better than meaninglessness. Is that the idea? 

But I don't believe that what passes for astrology these days has gone on "for millennia." My understanding is that it was trumped up to write an amusing story about baby Princess Margaret!

"His first word was 'crocodile,' three syllables."

Said Prince Harry, quoted in "We didn’t step down, we stepped back, Prince Harry tells James Corden on The Late Late Show" (The London Times). Harry was talking about his son Archie. 

Am I the only one who recognizes this perfectly silly remark as a Princess Margaret joke? I've blogged this before, from the hilarious book "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret": 

The Princess liked to one-up. I have heard from a variety of people that she would engineer the conversation around to the subject of children’s first words, asking each of her fellow guests what their own child’s first words had been. Having listened to responses like ‘Mama’ and ‘doggy’, she would say, ‘My boy’s first word was “chandelier”.

Three syllables. Chandelier... crocodile... what's the difference? The difference is what the "spare" chose to do with her/his life. 

"Princess Margaret finally dropped [Peter] Sellers after... Sellers had already married and divorced a third wife, Miranda Quarry, and had become too volatile..."

"... to remain an acceptable royal escort; in the middle of a row with Quarry over the correct way to pass the port, he had let off steam by releasing all her pet birds from their cages and hitting them around the room with a tennis racquet."

From "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret" by Craig Brown. I'm enjoying this book but it's disturbing my comfortable appreciation of Peter Sellers.

"One of the stranger and more bookish rumours about the princess..."

"... is 'that Princess Margaret, having read Richard Holmes’s biography of Coleridge, craved to see Nether Stowey. Accordingly she instructed her pilot on the way back from an official chore to circle several times around the Somerset cottage.'... Did the princess actually get through 402 pages of Holmes and then order a pilot of the royal flight to buzz Coleridge’s cottage? It sounds more than improbable, but the percentage of truth, if any, in the story would be a question for the traditional foot-slogging biographer. Instead, Brown gives us a chortling 11-page riff, describing this unverified event in 31 styles."

Writes Julian Barnes in a review of the book that in the U.S. is titled "Ninety-Nine Glimpses of Princess Margaret."

I'm reading that book and just got through the chapter with 31 retellings of the plane circling over Nether Stowey. Each version has a heading — "Journalistic," "Comic," "Statistical," "Discreet," "Confrontational," "Oleaginous," "Limerick," "Psychedelic," "Spoonerism," "Tragic." I love it. You certainly don't need to care in the slightest about Princess Margaret to enjoy this book. In fact, it will help if you don't. I know I don't.

Here's a passage I highlighted:

The Princess liked to one-up. I have heard from a variety of people that she would engineer the conversation around to the subject of children’s first words, asking each of her fellow guests what their own child’s first words had been. Having listened to responses like ‘Mama’ and ‘doggy’, she would say, ‘My boy’s first word was “chandelier”.’

The author is Craig Brown, I should mention.