I Want To Be A Princess Now!

Maybe we can blame Disney for this one. But what little girl doesn't say she wants to be a princess?

Actually, not just little girls have that pipe dream.

And while I am the first person to tell you that you should absolutely always follow your dreams, approach adversity with tenacity, and strive to create your own opportunities, I question if the childhood dream of being a princess is really the one you should be going after. No matter how perfect Kate Middleton's wedding and life seems. (Seriously, can she just have one bad hair day to make me feel better?)
But the tale of the world's newest little princess isn't about a girl dreaming that someday her prince will come. It's more of a story about an over-indulgent father who literally searched the ends of the earth to get his daughter what she wants.
I thought Willy Wonka warned us about behavior like this?

Well, despite (hopefully) knowing that meeting the demands of children is really a bad idea, a father from Virginia made his daughter a princess of a patch of land in Africa he claimed by placing a flag on it for her seventh birthday. For my seventh birthday, I had a My Little Pony party. But whatever, I'm sure my dad loves me too.
As reported in The Washington Post,  Jeremiah Heaton, father of three, promised his daughter she could be a princess. So as to not be a liar, he took to google to find out how he could make this so. He began searching for "terra nullius," which is Latin for "land that belongs to no one," to find some unclaimed land. This led him to learn of Bir Tawil which is an area halfway between where the Nile crosses into Sudan and Egypt's coast along the Red Sea that has had an on-going border dispute between Sudan and Egypt leaving it to be unclaimed territory. So he headed over to Africa, with the flag that he and his kids designed, and planted it into the land to claim it. Yes, he "Columbused" it.

And in claiming the land, he is King, making his daughter, Princess, earning him a lifetime of hugs and kisses and high expectations to meet. I hope this loving fool realizes that his little princess is also going to want a pony, a Porsche, and Loubitans.
Now, in order to make this all legit, he is going to have to obtain legal recognition from the neighboring countries, the United Nations, or other groups to have actual political control of the land he is calling the "Kingdom of North Sudan." And just how will this average joe from Virginia deal in world politics? Well, don't worry, he is experienced in local politics as he ran for Congress in his state in 2012. Despite losing that election, I'm sure he'll do fine dealing with getting the Middle East on board with his Father of the Year plan. The politics in that area of the world have historically dealt with issues of land ownership so reasonably. 
This is all ridiculous. And yet, I'm now finding myself questioning why on earth it never occurred to me, in all my googling, to find some "terra nullius" to claim and declare myself royalty. There are a lot of balls I could have been attending.

Under the Knife-Fishy Little Mermaid Plastic Surgery Ad That Should Make You Crabby

If the idealized creation of a beautiful Disney princess needs plastic surgery, I should just start wearing a paper bag over my head.
Clinica Dempere, a plastic surgery center in Venezuela, has a new ad that features the likeness of Ariel the Little Mermaid emerging from under the sea to go under the knife. The ad shows her as a finished product with a sexy pair of gams, boobs that wouldn't fit in those clam shells anymore and a tiny, turned up nose that a Jackson would envy. Clearly she's no better off with this than with the deal from the Sea Witch because she also has a brow lift and lip job that would undoubtedly prevent her from speaking or making any sort of facial expressions while luring that prince. I'm surprised she didn't just finish this transformation off by shedding the ginger like Lindsey Lohan to go blond and getting a nice, leathery burnt sienna tan.
As if the visual image in this plastic surgery ad isn't upsetting enough, they dig the knife deeper with the tag line "We make fairy tales come true." Terrific. What a wonderful message for young women. In order to make your dreams come true, you have change everything about your appearance to be as perfect as possible. And breasts. Forget about getting that man if you don't have some of those. It's concerning because according to the American Society of Plastic Surgery, cosmetic surgery on teens make up 5 percent of procedures nationwide. From 2010 and 2011, the number of Botox treatments on teens rose 20%, the number of breast augmentation surgery climbed 4%, and “chinplants,” or chin augmentations rose 69% among teens.
This ad is horrible. I hope Disney sues them. Plastic surgery is not a fairy tale. Have you ever seen an episode of Nip/Tuck? It's absolutely choke-on-your-couch-snacking-food disgusting! Not to mention the many medical risks. And the fact that this business chose Ariel for this ad is not clever. Yes, she was desperate to change herself into a new species to get to be with the man that she loved, but that doesn't mean that she would have gone all Pam Anderson and done this to be part of his world. But then again, what kind of world are we living in?

If the shoe fits......you're still not a Princess

Christian Louboutin-the shoe designer whose shoes cost more than most women's rent for an entire season-has teamed with fantasy pusher Disney and created a version of Cinderella's glass slipper that debuted this week in Paris. It's not made of glass. In fact it's not even really transparent. It's lace, with Swarovski crystals, and butterflies. Now Cinderella talked to lots of animals in this movie-but I don't remember one butterfly. Then I thought maybe the butterfly was a metaphor for change. But no such luck that this designer thought that deep. Louboutin said that the butterflies were there because he imagined "Cinderella tending to her chores and the delicate creature landing on her." Did he even see this movie or ever read the story? The glass slippers were not her peasant work wear to do chores in. She didn't go to the ball to mop the bathroom. She went to meet a prince to get out of her miserable indentured servitude! Anyway, Louboutin's butterfly accents are not the only misguided delusion involved in this modern day fairytale he is forcing upon us. These shoes are not even for sale. You have to have a fairy godmother or crazy luck because only one girl in each country will be gifted one of the 20 limited pairs of these shoes. Why bother? It probably won't even be in your size.
The shoe I think is tacky. It looks like something a drag queen and a glue gun would create for a Halloween costume. The only part I'm interested in seeing is Louboutin in his acting debut in the 10 minute short film "The Magic of the Glass Slipper: A Cinderella Story" which will be a special feature on the Blue-ray release of Disney's Cinderella this fall. I'll obviously just wait til someone posts it on youtube to see Louboutin's undoubted Academy Award-winning turn playing a cobbler creating this masterpiece of foot wear.
In the meantime, I'll have to find other shoes to magically change my life.