The Prince & The Rotweiller

On the phone this morning, we chatted up a British business associate in London regarding the impending nuptials of Prince Charles and Camilla Parker Bowles, known as "the Rotweiller" to Charles' late first wife, Princess Diana, who knew of her husband's philandering.
"The people of England hate her because she made Diana's life miserable," said our friend, a woman. "She'll never be accepted as a member of the royal family by the people of England regardless of what Buckingham Palace says."

All-righteee, then.

But official Britian is putting its best foot forward.

Which isn't always easy to do when America's leading newspaper carries a couple paragraphs like these on the front page.

The romance between Prince Charles and Mrs. Parker Bowles evoked many parallels from 20th-century royal history, most notably with King Edward VIII, who abdicated in 1936 to marry American divorce Wallis Simpson. After Charles and Camilla met, she was reported to have alluded to a romance between Charles' great-great grandfather, Edward VII, and Alice Keppel, the great-great grandmother of Mrs. Parker Bowles.

"My great-great-grandmother was your great-great-grandfather's mistress, so how about it," she once told the prince, according to the Press Association, Britain's domestic news agency.

That's a hell of an ice-breaker. Gets all the foreplay niceties out of the way.
[NYT]