Two more strikes like this and I will cancel my online subscription to The New York Times unless the paper can prove that the “early stages of labor” of Kate Middleton are in a medical league of their own due to her blue blood. While I am at it, unless a royal can show their blood to be actually blue in color we need to stop this profound nonsense.
Is the Times going to tell me every detail about every cervical dilation leading up to the birth of a baby? If yes, I will not even wait for two more strikes to cancel my subscription unless the paper can prove that the royal cervix dilates in a particularly different way; such that horns are blown and satin red carpet is rolled out.
The Times story by Alan Cowell even quoted a message from Clarence House, the official residence of the Duchess of Cambridge, formerly Kate Middleton, to say that she had traveled by car to St. Mary’s Hospital in the Paddington district of London. This also constitutes infraction serious enough to lead my canceling the subscription unless the paper can prove that other female members of the royal family have either walked or jogged to hospital in the early stages of labor.
I may have been willing to forgive these idiocies but the one on display in these lines are forcing me to open my account settings and cancel the subscription right away. “There has been no official word on whether the duke and duchess are expecting a boy or a girl, and information about the birth is expected be closely restricted,” the story says. Unless the Times can prove that royal mothers-to-be have in the past expected and delivered something other than a boy or a girl, I think it is time for me to stop spending $20 a month on this mockery.
I am not even going to mention observations like ‘The expected birth has been depicted as offering a likely counterpoint to Britain’s economic austerity” or the fact that apart from Cowell, John F. Burns, Sarah Lyall, Julia Werdigier and Stephen Castle contributed to this story. It took the Times five journalists to report a story about a woman in the early stages of labor about whom it is not known whether the baby is a boy or a girl but is certain she was driven in a car.
The only reassuring detail in the story is that the kind of private obstetric unit that Kate is in for the delivery charges $7500 for normal deliveries and care for 24 hours and $9000 in consultation fees. The Buckingham Palace will not have to mortgage the Kohinoor to pay for the hospital expenses. It is so modest that even I could afford it if I were not a print journalist.