Let’s be clear here: Nicole Kidman is a perfectly decent human being. Rather massively botoxed, yes, but she doesn’t smoke crack, engage in drunken public fistfights, or use her genitals like some STD-based weapon of biological warfare. In other words, for the purposes of this site she’s essentially useless, and we rarely have occasion to mention her. But Nicole is less than three weeks away from giving birth, and some of her preparations for the event are at least mildly interesting. Nicole is making a compilation CD, sort of a soundtrack for the miracle of birth, including songs by her husband Keith Urban and a great deal of music by flautist James Galway:

“Nicole has been putting together CDs of music to listen to during labour. She has always loved James Galway, particularly his classical albums. Whenever you go to her house, she has Galway on. There is one Prokofiev sonata that is her favourite.”

This is Nicole’s first delivery, a twelve-hour nightmare of agonizing, frenzied muscle spasms while your body attempts to perform a feat closely akin to forcing a canteloupe through a garden hose. One would think that the only thing more annoying—hell, cruelly mocking–than listening to your husband sing cheery country ditties would be accompanying the process with the soothing strains of classical flute music. Granted, I don’t have the woman’s perspective on the miracle of birth, so I could be all wrong here. But I did go through the process from the canteloupe’s perspective, and while I don’t remember much I’m pretty sure it was no picnic.