Kate, the pregnancy, the prank. . . the disaster

I'm just like anybody.  I have no interest in the Royals at all and at best find Harry's exploits - dressing like a Nazi, getting drunk and flailing around like a veritable Prince Phillip - juvenile and boring. (At least we know now that he wasn't sired by Diana's "riding instructor": his eyes are too close together, like all the rest of them). And the things they wear on their heads, the women I mean, look like those weapons the Klingons throw on Star Trek.

So I'm not really a Royal watcher, but I honestly did like the Royal wedding, the excitement and magic of it, such a departure from the suffocating,  elephantine bumph of Charles and Diana and the train that went all the way to Bristol. I like Kate, like her self-assurance and her dimples and her way of wearing clothes: stylish, but with none of the narcissistic preening and fluttering of Diana at her worst. Kate seems like the real deal to me.

And then she's pregnant - more excitement - but things aren't going the way they are supposed to, she's throwing up all the time (and do I know what that is like). So the rather overly-slender Kate has to be hospitalized before she dehydrates completely.

Then it happens: the "punk" that "punk'd" the world.

These idiot Australian radio people, whoever they are, I can't even be bothered to look up their glutinous little names, decide to try to get through to the nursing staff at the hospital. And what they do is so patently ludicrous that I can barely describe it.

Putting on the worst phony accent since - since - I don't know! I can't remember ANYONE else with an accent that bad! - the she-part of this poisonous duo called the hospital assuming the identity of some drunken drag queen who likes to impersonate Her Majesty at gay biker orgies. In other words, she was trying to sound like the Queen.

She used the word "please" twice in one sentence, for one thing. She sounded more "Strayne" than anyone I've ever heard. And the poor nurse, the naive nurse, put her through! If she says she's the Queen, she must BE the Queen. The nurse who actually reported on Kate's bouts of retching must have been equally taken in - perhaps more so, to give out so many details we really needn't have heard about.

But no one could predict what happened next. I was in the car with my husband driving home from Staples or something, he had been away for a while, and I started recounting the stupid "punk'd" story in case he hadn't heard it.

He had.  "She died, you know."

"KATE??"

"No, the nurse. She was found dead."

"What - the Royals hired a hit man? That's insane!"

""No, they think it was suicide."

It was one of those odd the-world-slips-sideways moments. It just didn't add up. This woman didn't even give out those medical details that should have been kept confidential. She just handed the phone over. What happened?

Nobody is sure what happened. But someone died. So with its usual crystalline logic, the entire human race decided to MURDER those two Australian DJs for plotting to deliberately assassinate a poor innocent nurse. Looking at it backwards, the insane logic is: they punk'd her, she died, they killed her!

I have a few points to make. Maybe I've already made them, but I'm so sick of Twit, Tweet and Twat and the Gospel of Facebook screaming "those murderers should be hanged!" and stuff like that,  I'll make them again.

One. Those punksters NEVER thought they would get through. It was one of those sleepover gigglefest type-things where little girls call someone at random and say, "Is your refrigerator running?" The worst that could happen, they probably thought, was, "Get off the phone, you wretched impostor!", or perhaps (even better!) the threat of arrest.

Two. If there had been ANY level of security at all in that hospital, the "punk" never would have happened. It would've been shot down before any information could have been given out at all.

Three. It's only one small step from freely giving out confidential medical information on the phone to carelessly letting some drag queen dressed as Liz in the door for a nice little visit. The hospital administration made a grave, even horrific mistake, far worse than mere carelessness, in maintaining such a lax system.

What the fuck were they thinking? Did they have their heads shoved up their blowholes? But though there obviously was no special policy in place to protect Kate, meaning that anyone in the world could just phone and ask  for information and get it,  the whole shameful episode got shunted on to this poor nurse. Even though nothing really bad came of her actions, she must have had such agonizing pangs of conscience that she decided she should not exist any more.

The nurse no longer exists, but someone still has to be blamed. Someone's head has to be paraded around town impaled on a stick. The villagers with flaming torches are about to close in. So it has to be those two heartless, murderous, bloodthirsty, demonic Aussie DJs!

To be honest, I feel sorry for them. I think they're just idiotic assholes who were seeing how far they could push it. Pretty far, as it turns out. Whole Facebook pages are being set up even as we speak to bring them to justice, i. e. life imprisonment, if not the gallows.

This whole thing was completely bizarre, one of the strangest stories I've ever heard, but where does the blame ultimately lie? Isn't it obvious? If the Royals trusted this place enough to put one of the most admired and influential women in the world in it, shouldn't they have known a little something about their security system, if indeed they had one? (As it turned out, they didn't.)

This isn't B-list royalty: Prince Edward's dumpy wife Whatsername, or Sarah Ferguson and her horrific fanged daughters. THIS IS KATE MIDDLETON. She is far too valuable to be trusted to a place where they might allow an IRA member dressed as Prince Phillip in for a nice little visit.

(A very sad postscript: I just had the thought that a lot of good might have come from this asinine prank. Policies might have been changed, security tightened, awareness of danger increased.  Maybe Kate might have been a lot safer next time, i. e. when she gives birth. But instead, the whole thing tumbled down into disaster.)