Screenshot by Chris Matyszczyk/CNET

For a nation that prides itself on its stoic nature, the Brits do love a royal frenzy.

Whether it's a pantless prince in Vegas or a jodhpur-clad princess at the Olympics, the royal family are a soap opera wrapped in a history book wrapped in a fairy tale.

Monday, the news was that Princess Kate Middleton -- or the Duchess of Cambridge, as her soap opera character is called -- had gone into labor. This made the national blood pressure rise beyond safe limits.

Not every Brit is, however, committed to the royal show. Some regard it as trivial, snobbish, or plain embarrassing.

So the highly erudite and slightly gauche-leaning Guardian newspaper decided to offer its readers an option to avoid the royal hype altogether.

Look carefully to the top right of the U.K. Guardian home page and you will see an option that says "Republican?"

Choose it and you don't get pin-up pictures of Dick Cheney, Ted Cruz, and Elizabeth Hasselbeck. Instead, you get the news, free of potential royal progeny.

It would surely be a referendum of sorts on the subject, should the Guardian choose to publish numbers for the two versions of the site.

The default, however, is the Royalist version of the site which, naturally, has large headlines about how the world is waiting for the royal baby.

Some might find it odd, that the on the day the British Prime Minister announced that the default for British Web browsing would soon be a non-porn version, the Guardian chose as its default an orgy of royal news.

Perhaps, though, this might be a presager for a wonderful idea.

Perhaps every news site could offer toggled options for the news that you do or don't want to read.

In the U.S., so-called progressives could waft to the New York Times and insist on no mention of the word "Bush."

So-called conservatives could wander to Fox News and decide that theirs will be a non-Pelosi day.

And, of course, Apple fanboys could come to CNET News and choose to hear nothing -- absolutely nothing -- about Samsung.

We all live to please, after all.