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Summit Up 2-25-11: More tips on lifeboat Champagne dedications

by Summit Up
Britain's Prince William applauds after his fiance Kate Middleton poured champagne over the 'Hereford Endeavour' a new RNLI lifeboat, during a Naming ceremony and Service dedication, at Trearddur Bay Lifeboat Station in Anglesey, Wales, Thursday Feb. 24, 2011. The visit had been highly anticipated because the couple have kept such a low profile since announcing their engagement in November, making only one other prior appearance at a charity event. They plan to marry April 29 at Westminster Abbey with just under 2,000 guests attending. (AP Photo/Phil Noble, Pool)
AP | POOL REUTERS

Good morning and welcome to Summit Up, the world’s only daily column that’s happy to consider one simple fact: We’ll probably never have to worry about whether the bottle of champagne will break against the bow of the ship we’re dedicating. We doubt we’ll be asked.

But, as we all know from movies, whenever you go to smash a champagne bottle on a ship, it almost never works. For one thing, those bottles are very thick, and the smasher really doesn’t want to wind up and go for it completely because, hey, expensive ship – you don’t want to scratch it, right? (Or, in the case of Judge Smails’ wife in Caddyshack, break part of the boat off in the process.)

Looking at this photo here of the royal affianced, though, we see Kate Middelton, who’s engaged to Prince William, solved this age-old problem by simply uncorking the bottle and – rather unceremoniously, we might opine – pouring it on the ship in question.



Of course, you might notice the “ship” is actually just a lifeboat and, as such, is presumably made of rubbery life-boat material and, as such, probably wouldn’t cause any smashing to occur. We might also note this is a statement about the decline of the royal family: Once they were out there christening things like the Titanic (OK, that one didn’t work out so well) and the Queen Mary – and now they reduced to lifeboats.

Oh well …



We out.


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