Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Steven Hawking's wedding photo

Stephen Hawking is a British theoretical physicist who has lived with ALS (also Lou Gehrig's Disease) for most of his life. You've probably heard some of the scandal about his personal life - marrying a nurse, living with an abusive wife, and being photographed with bikini girls. Ever wondered about his wedding day(s)? I hadn't until I saw this photo on Reddit.


Thanks, The Blog of Record

Does anyone else see what I see? Stephen Hawking, on top of being brilliant, is attractive. I love the shaggy haircut and the thick-framed nerd glasses! My geeky heart is swooning. He married Jane Wilde in July of 1965 and they had 3 children together. She looks really cute with her flip hair do and short, puffy veil. I love the trailing bouquet. I still can't get over how cute Stephen Hawking is.



He and Jane divorced in 1995, and later that year he married his nurse Elaine Mason. There were a lot of rumors about her mental and phyical abuse of Hawking throughout their marriage. In 2006 divorce papers were filed, but it hasn't been finalized yet.

No comment on her. Okay, maybe a three word comment - Camilla Parker Bowles.

-Kay

Wikipedia, you disappoint me! Why does IMDB have more information about Stephen Hawking's marriages than you do!?

Monday, September 27, 2010

The many weddings of Bela Lugosi

Bela Lugosi, the iconic actor best known as Dracula, was a serial monogamist. He was married 5 times in his life; the shortest marriage lasted four months, the longest spanned twenty years.

Please cut me some slack on this one because it is very difficult to find exact details and wedding pictures from 1922!

Bela’s first marriage was in 1917 to Ilona “Baby” Szmick. He was 34, she was 16 (ew), and part of a very wealthy family.


I don’t know if this is a wedding photo, but they are both dressed very nicely and I LOVE her dress. I love all the soft layers around the shoulders and the simple jewelry. It is thought that her family supported him as he struggled through his early years of acting. In 1920, after Bela moved to Germany to pursue better roles, Baby’s wealthy, upstanding father pushed the divorce through the courts. Bela did not protest

In 1921, Bela married his second Ilona – Ilona von Montagh de Nagybanyhegyes. The two met shortly after he moved to New York.



This is the only picture I could find of her – none of the couple. They were married for only two and a half years before she filed for divorce on the grounds of adultery.


After a five-year marriage hiatus, Bela married Beatrice Weeks on July 27, 1929. She was a wealthy widow, and like his first marriage, rumors of his gold-digging emerged.



The two lived together for just a few days before Beatrice left him, and four months after they were wed, she filed for divorce. Rumor alert! He was supposedly cheating on her with the infamously wild Clara Bow.

On January 31, 1933 Bela and Lillian Arch entered into his longest marriage. Lillian was Bela’s 19-year-old secretary. They married a year after they met.



The two were married for twenty years and had one child – Bela George. She was a patient woman, but eventually his strict work ethic began to wear on his family. She became unhappy. He quit his vices – alcohol and drugs – in an attempt to re-kindle the relationship, but she eventually left him and asked for nothing.



After twenty years, he was alone, and broken-hearted. [sniff]
Bela's final marriage was to Hope Lininger in 1955.


An actual wedding picture! Sadly, he looks high and she looks a little...crazy.

 
They really didn’t know much about each other – she was an admirer that had supposedly sent him numerous fan letters. The description from The Immortal Count makes her seem a bit like a fanatical Lugosi stan that flattered Bela into marriage. It was a rocky relationship, but the two stayed married until his death in 1956.

I only skimmed this book, but I definitely plan to go back and thoroughly read The Immortal Count. It has a ton of information about Bela Lugosi and his many, many wives.

Thank you very much to this site for all the photographs.
-Kay

Yep, this is a repost from last year. Life is busy, so I'm reposting my favorite weddings this week. Hopefully you haven't seen them or don't remember them.

Friday, September 24, 2010

Bizarre wedding product

If you're looking for a strange wedding gift, look no further.














It's a puzzle featuring a bride and groom riding a bespectacled brontosaurus*.

I don't get it either. In my search for a way to tie the new dinosaur discovery to a wedding, I found this weird puzzle. Voila! An enormously clever blog post.

-KB

*Hey, puzzle illustrator, bronotosauruses don't even exist.

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

Cake saw

It would be awesome to cut your wedding cake with this cake saw:



Good old Fred. He has everything I like.

-KB

Monday, September 20, 2010

Geek poetry

This isn't strictly related to weddings, but if you're looking for something romantic to sweep a geek girl off her feet, here you go


Roses are #FF0000
Violets are #0000FF
All my base
Are belong to you


I wish I could read what the top of the wall said, but I accidentally the whole thing.

If you read this to your girl/boyfriend and then propose, she/he will never:

-Give you up
-Let you down
-Run around
-Desert you

-KB

Thanks to friends J & T for sharing this!

Friday, September 17, 2010

More wedding cakes that I'll never eat

Finishing the week of cakes, here are more cakes that I long to eat. There's no theme, these are just cakes that I thought were especially beautiful.

A steampunk wedding cake

To me, this steampunk obsession came out of left field, but I thoroughly embrace the trend. Everything about it is so beautiful and metal-y! This cake is no exception. I'm amazed at the metallic colors and precision of the gears.

A Scrabble cake with a cute backstory.

The bride and groom used to play together over the internet while the groom was stationed in Iraq. Aw! Even without the story, it's gorgeous! I love the colors, the wood-effect on the tiles, and the crazy Scrabble tiles bouncing off the edges.

No week-of-cakes from me would be complete without a Tim Burton wedding cake.

I wonder if Tim Burton has inspired more tattoos or weddings? Who cares, his work is always visually stunning. This is the same baker who made the Scrabble cake above. Normally, I think the uneven tiers are overused, but it's perfect here. I like the airbrushing mixed with the hard edges of fondant, and they've used the crazy-things-bouncing-off-the-cake effect here too with blue butterflies and dragonflies. It's almost too pretty to eat. Almost.

And now I have a bad case of cake blue balls. I WANT CAKE SO MUCH. I know exactly how this cat feels:



Have a sugary weekend!

-Kay

Wednesday, September 15, 2010

Video game cakes

There are a few Nintendo cakes that are always popular around the 'tubes, but I've found a few video game cakes that you might not have seen.

An upside-down Tetris cake

This cake is a classic Nintendo cartridge. The tetronimoes around the edges are a nice touch, and a clever way to add some color to gray cake. It would be nice to see the other side. Are there metal contacts?

A cutesy wedding cake themed on Zelda's The Wind Wakers

I remember playing this game - it was the first Zelda game for the GameCube. How I loved the GameCube. The cake is set up as an island with the bottom tier representing the sea. It's beautiful!

A Katamari cake

There's no clue given as to how you would cut into this cake, but it's happy and pretty anyway. It's so funny how Katamari has been incorporated into so many weddings.

I've saved the best for last. This Mario wedding cake is just amazing.

The photo's angle really adds to the Super Mario Galaxy aspect of the cake, and all the little details of the cake show how geeky the couple is. There's a castle, a rainbow road, chomps, stars, turtle shells...!!! This is a beautiful cake. The part that really gets me is the cake topper. Did you notice that little Mario is standing on a question mark block to reach Peach for their first kiss. Aw!

Hungrily,
Kay

Monday, September 13, 2010

Week of cakes

It's not that I'm bitter or holding on to terrible disappointment*, but last month I went to a wedding that didn't serve cake. No cake at all. I was so let down, especially since I'd travelled a long way to watch two people get married and to eat cake. Friends, serve cake at your wedding. Even if you think you're being different, you're not. Different is not getting married. If you get married, you are officially just like everyone else, and therefore should serve cake. My logic is flawless.

That logical bit of advice brings us to the first installment of cakes - Star Trek cakes. I don't know why I love Star Trek nerds so much. I think it's because I see them as the underdogs. To dress up like a Klingon in public is to say Fuck the world! I'm the biggest dork ever, and I don't care if dorks think I'm a dork. I heartily respect that.

This is a three-tiered Star Trek insignia cake. It doesn't look very appetizing because gray is not the best color for cakes, but I still think it's cool. It's kind of traditional while not being very traditional at all.



This is a classic cake with a geeky cake topper

I don't understand what the groom is supposed to be, but the bride is obviously Klingon. I think Klingon women are desirable to geeks because geeks picture these sexually aggressive she-beasts with an insatiable desire for nerd blood. I have an insatiable desire for cake, and this pretty mocha-colored cake looks delicious. It looks like buttercream, so I'll bet it smells good too.

This is my favorite because it hits all the Star Trek geek points.

On the left are tribble cupcakes, the cake on the right has the Starfleet logo with photos of the couples' geeky adventures around the edge, and the cake at the top has the Enterprise (?) bridge with two characters in classic costume and the words "Make it so". I can't help but giggle. Oh, nerds, I love you so.

Stay tuned for more delicious cake this week!

-KB

Friday, September 10, 2010

Snarking on wedding photos

These are the photos that leave me undecided.

You know I'm a fan of all things spooky wedding, so I'm torn over this cake. Part of me loves the gorey cake with the romantic-macabre message, but the other part thinks that the execution is too gross.




I'm also a fan of doing as you please, showing off what you have, and generally not giving a fig what anyone thinks, but this bride is doing it distastefully. If I had giant boobs, I'd probably show them off too, but not in a way that would constantly have my dad and uncles hiding their faces. Her boobs look precariously perched on those little triangles of fabric, and not in a sexy way.




Finally, I think it's silly to wear unbearable uncomfortable shoes, but not to this end. TheLovelyBride.com sells "comfortable wedding shoes" for the low, low price of $159.95. There are other models that are equally ugly, but I noticed that they only sell one color, and the sizes don't run true. For $160, I want cute and comfortable shoes.


-KB

Wednesday, September 8, 2010

More wedding photo snark

This bride is clearly not the kind of girl who dreamed about every detail of her wedding day. She didn't even care enough to take the bluetooth headset out of her ear*

*Or maybe it's one of these hilarious hearing aids that just looks like a bluetooth headset? Either way, it looks silly.



This bride seems to be pleased with her well-planned, matchy-matchy curtain bridesmaids. If you look at the end bridesmaids, their faces seem to tell a different story.




This one strikes me as really funny - an entire wedding party is loaded into a decorated backhoe. Maybe one of the families is a rental company or a contractor. That's the only reason I can think of that you would be transported in a backhoe. Either way, it kind of looks like fun.

-KB

I don't know where I found the last photo. If you know more about it, hook me up.

Monday, September 6, 2010

Wedding snark in photos

This week I'm emptying the folder of funny wedding pictures that I've been collecting.

These pictures are from a cause I very much support - Anti Duckface. If you've ever visited Facebook or MySpace, you have seen Duckface. It's that really unattractive thing that people do in pictures when they want to resemble Miley Cyrus. Yikes. Here are some wedding Duckface photos:


I'm sure the bride is really pleased that her friends made this stupid face in every single picture.




Or maybe not. Can you imagine allowing someone to photograph you in a wedding dress on the toilet? Kids today.



This bride is so humiliated by her duckface photo that she's hiding her face rhythmically in her husband's groin area...oh. I see :\

-Kay

Friday, September 3, 2010

Geeky wedding invitations

There are lots more geeky wedding pictures at the source, but here are some of my favorite geeky wedding invitations:

Ouija board invitations


The card is the ouija board, and the envelope flap is the planchette (I Googled something for you, and now you learned something today). Love the execution - very nice!



This is a mish-mash of internet memes all rolled up into one wedding invitation. Yo dawg, I heard you liked weddings and internet memes so I put internet memes in your wedding invitations so that you can meme while you wed.



I don't really understand why they're a cupcake and a beaker, but it's cute, so who cares. We'll (the royal we) guess that she was heftily involved in the cupcake trend and that he likes sciency stuff.



I saved my favorite for last. I lovelove the little skeleton in his hand-drawn coffin and the rustic heart on the back flap of the envelope. I wish I could go back in time and crash this wedding!

There's lots of other geeky wedding stationery floating around the internet, but my eye twitches a little when I see Verdana wedding invitations or bizarre widows and orphans on the name lines, so I can't post those.

For great justice!

Kay Banks

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Chilean miner proposes from below ground

This guy had to get trapped in a hot mine before deciding to shell out the money for a big wedding.

Esteban Rojas asked for his sweetheart Jessica Ganiez’s hand in matrimony from a half mile underground. And even though she said yes, it might be Christmas Day before he gets a chance to kiss the bride.

Rojas, 44, one of 33 workers trapped in a gold and copper mine in Chile for the past 25 days, used the grapefruit-sized portal miners have to receive supplies and communicate with the outside world to send a message to his lady love. “When I get out, let’s buy the dress and we’ll get married,” Rojas wrote Ganiez on scrap paper.



Ganiez, 43, gave romantic Rojas an enthusiastic “yes.”

Rojas and Ganiez have been have been together for 25 years, raised three children and are now grandparents twice over. Yet although they were legally hitched in a civil ceremony years ago, Ganiez never got a big church wedding, as is customary in Chile.

But apparently being trapped in a hot, sweaty mine shaft helped warm up Rojas’ long-term case of cold feet. “I have tried to hint at it many times, but it never happened,” Ganiez told London’s Daily Mirror newspaper. “He always said getting married is a once-in-a-lifetime thing, and he would ask me when the time was best. Obviously, what has happened made him do it.”

Rojas, a maintenance mechanic who has worked at the San Jose mine for the past six months, found himself trapped 2,300 feet underground when the mine caved in August 5. Chilean officials insist Rojas and his 32 fellow miners are not in danger, but it still may take four months to rescue them as an escape shaft is drilled.

Supplies ranging from bedding and clean underwear to diversions such as iPods and gaming consoles have been lowered down a duct to the trapped miners. Notes from loved ones — many of whom who have set up a family camp in the unforgiving Atacama Desert, where the mine is — are also being passed back and forth.

‘Our love is deep’
Ganiez’s joy was unbridled when her wedding proposal emerged from the duct. “I thought he was never going to ask me,” Ganiez told The Mirror. “We have talked about it before, but he never asked me. I think it’s a good idea.”

Still, Ganiez said she had a bit of trepidation when, on Sunday, she finally got the chance to speak with Rojas through a line rigged down into the mine. Each miner only had 20 seconds to converse, and even with a wedding proposal in hand, Ganiez feared the “W” word might not actually come out of Rojas’ mouth.

“I was worried he might not mention it again,” Ganiez told CNN. “But he said we should get married in church. He’d asked me if I’ve already chosen the dress.” Ganiez managed to use her fleeting seconds to tell Rojas the answer was yes.

Now Ganiez is setting up a bridal registry — a new refrigerator and a food cooker are on her list. But she confided she misses her intended terribly, and will wait as long as it takes to hold him in her arms once again.

“We know the rescue will take a long time, but we won’t lose hope,” Ganiez told CNN. “He always said he planned to grow old with me, and I plan to grow old with him. Our love is very deep.”