The prince is giving a ball

Today is the day Prince Philip turns 90! We at the Leonard Pennario Web log, with our love of dapper and witty and politically incorrect older gentlemen, wish His Highness many happy returns.

This one site listed Prince Philip's "top 10 gaffes."

But as one Australian reader says:

"What gaffes? They're bloody hilarious. The man's a legend."

Someone from Brisbane writes:

"This is one guy I'm going to miss. Funniest Royal ever."

I guess this is an Australian site. Being a people with a good sense of humor the Australians seem to be in Prince Philip's corner.

The stories generally mention that Philip was born a Greek prince. No one ever mentions that he is, uh, German. I cannot recite his exact blood line but, I mean, just look at him.

People who are German, we run our mouths. I just looked up Prince Philip's birth name and it is, ahem, Prince Philip Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Gluckberg. There, who knew that? We do, as of now.

I do not agree with him on everything, I will say that. But I have to agree with these Australians and say I like him. He cracks me up.

You can read a ponderous but interesting essay about Prince Philip here.

You know you want them, so here are the Prince's top 10 ... let us call them one-liners. It is cribbed from the site up above, though similar lists are springing up all over the Internet. By the way about the first one, I read that he said it in Oban, Scotland. That is an important detail because Oban is known for its Scotch.

1. "How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to get them through the test?"
To a driving instructor in Scotland.

2. "If you stay here much longer, you'll all be slitty-eyed."
To a group of British students in China in 1986.

3. "Do you still throw spears at each other?"
To indigenous leader William Brin during a visit to the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland, 2002.

4. "You look like you're ready for bed!"
To the President of Nigeria, who was wearing traditional robes.

5. "If it has four legs and is not a chair, has wings and is not an aeroplane, or swims and is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."
To a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

6. "You managed not to get eaten then?"
To a British student trekking in Papua New Guinea in 1998.

7. "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?"
To an inhabitant of the Cayman Islands.

8. "You are a woman, aren't you?"
To a Kenyan woman in 1984 after she gave him a present

9. "Do you know they're now producing eating dogs for the anorexics?"
To a blind, wheelchair-bound woman who was with her guide dog.

10. "It looks as though it was put in by an Indian."
Prince's verdict on a fuse box he noticed during a tour of a Scottish factory in 1999.