Remembering D-Day

This morning I watched some of the ceremonies commemorating the 65th anniversary of the D-Day invasion. A few random thoughts:

Given the choice between watching CNN's coverage on television or cnn.com's live stream on-line, on-line wins by a landslide. Not only does the TV coverage switch to commercials on an annoyingly frequent basis, even when they're showing actual coverage you still have to listen to the inane and never-ending narration from the anchors. Watching on-line, there are no commercials (other than 30 seconds at the beginning) and no voice-over narration. Bliss.

Apparently there was some kind of diplomatic kerfuffle about Queen Elizabeth. The British are insulted because they say she wasn't invited to the various events in France; the French are saying it's up to the British government to decide who to send. What really happened? Not sure, don't care, but Prince Charles was there, which is apparently the "save face all around" solution they came up with. I didn't see Camilla, which makes me think he was a last minute addition to the program. I was struck by how old Charles looks (he's now 60) and by comparison, how young Obama is, at least by head-of-state standards.

Actually, now that I'm writing about this, I do wonder what the real issue was with the Queen. Unlike the five key dignitaries who were there (Charles, Obama, Sarkozy, British PM Brown and Canadian PM Harper), she was actually alive in 1944. She has already smiled her way through a lifetime's worth of these ceremonies and she may well have been just as content to stay home and send Charles, but still. She's of the same generation as the aging veterans who were honored today and it would have been poignant to see her there.

The French band played and the French soldiers sang the anthems of all four countries and it was interesting to hear our anthem sung with a French accent. As I listened I realized that I was at least vaguely familiar with the anthems of Great Britain, France and even Canada. Comes from watching the Olympics, I guess.

Whenever I see Carla Bruni in her role as First Lady of France I'm struck by what an interesting second act it is for her. It's almost hard to remember that she used to be a super model/tabloid fixture, at one point being famous primarily as the "other woman" Mick Jagger was fooling around with while he was still married to Jerri Hall.

Because I was watching on-line I could hear some of the announcements and speeches in French and I'm proud to say that I actually understood most of them. The Rosetta Stone lessons are working!