Patt Morrison: After centuries of practice, Britain's royals figure out how to turn a wedding into a global watch party

The House of Windsor may be slow, but it's not dumb.

A dazzling royal wedding, watchable from just about anywhere in the connected world, served up one more example of how the British royal family has survived and even eked out triumphs through war, tabloids, television and Twitter.

And that's not cynicism speaking; it's admiration.

This weekend, that ol' Windsor magic cast its spell again. It transformed a pair of 30-somethings getting hitched into a global watch party. It transmuted simple "I dos" into gold - tens of millions for the British till.

And it conjured up a bonus bump in popularity for an institution that has been pronounced dead more times than Bela Lugosi.

Over its 1,200-year life span, the English monarchy has been repeatedly rescued, and sometimes rescued itself,