No, said Aziraphale, it's ineffable.

regencyduchess

Whilst in Sydney in 1994, a man apparently tries to assassinate Prince Charles. And not a single fuck was given by His Royal Highness.

deutschemark

(x)

wolf-peaches

I’m dead at his face in the last one like “Did you even try?”

aletolover

And then when he gets pushed he’s like “Wait no let him try!”

morepopcornplease

his composure is just everything I aspire to be

thosedarnwindsors

OMG IT’S BACK!

minimiddletons

CHARLES IS THE BEST OMG

realityofroyals

Like how he stands there as if, “Okay, I’ll be perfectly still and we’ll see if you can hit me this time. Come on, it is like I’m giving you a head start.” He’s more annoyed with his cuff link than the wanna be assassin.

duchess-of-aquitaine

FOREVER REBLOGGING THIS.

atomictiki

THIS is how you deal with terrorists

Even if you go down you did it with dignity.

jasoncanty01

You all do know who his mother is right? You know the woman who stayed home during the bombing of London and drove Jeeps in WW2. They are trained to be final boss overlord level composed at age 2.

atomictiki

U don’t fuck with the Queen

qbnaith

His sister, Princess Anne, was the victim of an attempted kidnapping. The guy pointed a gun at her and told her to get out her car. She replied: “Not bloody likely.” And tried to kick him.

edwardspoonhands

I just the wikipedia article about this and…wow. David Kang, the student who fired the shots, turns out to have been firing blanks from a starting pistol, not actual bullets. He was sentenced to community service, went on to get his MBA and is now a barrister. So…I guess that turned out pretty well for everybody.

alternativepuppy asked:

Why do wizards call each other cousin?

dduane answered:

The tl:dr; reason: Shakespeare.

No, really. The usage “cousin” for someone who’s (a) a close relative, (b) a distant relative, © someone you feel personal connection to/affection toward regardless of any blood relationship or lack of it, starts turning up in the Bard’s plays in the late 1500s, if I’ve got the timing right. I’m not sure where the scholarship stands on this, but I have a feeling Shakespeare wouldn’t have used this formation if it wasn’t already turning up at least occasionally in everyday usage.

Our English-language usage of the word has narrowed right down to almost always indicate the children of brothers and sisters. But if you look over here at ShakespearesWords.com you’ll see some examples of how the term is used in the plays, and cousinhood in the strict familial sense isn’t usually what’s being invoked. It’s the sense of relationship. No one uses this term (or its short-form variant “coz/cuz”) on anyone they don’t like or feel close to.

Anyway: since Shakespeare is someone / something I’ve been interested in since I was about eight, one day I found myself thinking about how he was using the term, and promptly borrowed the usage.

In the Young Wizards books the use of the term “cousin” expresses the concept that wizards are closely connected by a common value-set that parses similarly to a familial relationship, whether or not the mere chance of shared genetics is involved. “Brother from another mother” is one colloquial English-language phrase that comes close to expressing what’s going on: the sense that wizards are by virtue of the Oath and their calling ethically or spiritually related, with the attached implication that the connection means they properly help sustain and look after one another, in an (ideally) familial way.

Naturally there are lots of shades and degrees of the term in the Speech, hrasht, that most closely corresponds to “cousin” in the broad sense, some of them more intimate and some less so, and with varying states of emotion built in. I.e., my dingbat cousin, my cousin who has got himself in trouble again, the cousin who has a brain the size of a planet and isn’t it wonderful, my cousin who just brought me all these tomatoes, the cousin who really needs a good shaking and when I get my hands/fins/tentacles on her I’m going to see that she gets it, etc etc etc. But they all have varying degrees of affection hooked into them, the understanding being that you and they are fighting the same fight, the good fight, together – even though right now you may possibly want at the moment to punch them in the nose (once you figure out where their nose is). (And yes, there are also numerous hrasht-based-or-related versions of “my cousin about whom I find myself thinking thoughts about a physical relationship of some kind, how would we even make that work, who puts what where? Hmm, may take a while for us to sort this out, let me ask and we’ll see how it goes…”)

But anyway, relationship is understandably going to be important to wizards, who despite their relatively direct connection to and sponsorship by the Powers that Be, will sometimes feel as they pass through the world as if they’re fighting a losing battle. The “cousin” terms are therefore some of the oldest ones in the Speech, according to those expert at tracing its etymologies.

But then maybe this would be no surprise when one considers (from our small limited viewpoint) that scripturally speaking, right after they make the world, or themselves, or both, pretty much the first thing Gods do is make somebody else to hang out with. (And then “It’s not good for this guy to be alone, I’ll make him a help meet for him…” occurs pretty quickly thereafter, in one cosmology. I would bet you money there are close cognates to this in the Koran and the Upanishads and all over the place elsewhere. But investigation of that is a project for another day, as my eyes are bugging me and I’m supposed to be working.)

Way deeper philosophers than I’ll ever be have spent a lot of time writing about the eternal yearning of the Divine for the Other (in the Jungian / Campbellian / Eliadean sense, not as the pejorative noun/verb construction presently coming into use); the deep desire for there to be an Other, someone to be with, communicate with and be understood by, to relate to… someone in whose presence (and postulating whose existence) you’re not alone. The “cousin” concept is another variation of that.

Hope this helps!

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

1960 Nestlé’s Ideal Milk