Ah, to be married.

Married people, or people in long-term relationships, you'll know what I mean when I say that it's a LOT of fun to occasionally torment your partner. Like, a LOT of fun. The more upset Mr. Banks gets, the more I laugh until my sides hurt. The best is when I laugh so much that my husband calls me a jackass and storms off. Seriously, I'm giggling just thinking about it.

Anyway.

If you think that's funny, I think you'll appreciate this story about a husband who had the nerve to demand that his wife not buy towels. Visit the link for the whole story, but the bottom line is that if you tell your partner NOT to buy something, you might find this:



HAHAHA!

Engrish wedding goods

Engrish.com is one of the first sites I remember bookmarking way back in my dial-up days. It was probably my favorite site after my GeoCities page (Ha!).


Here's a wedding regret card reminiscent of that misplaced card I found at Target a while back. Is it Engrish, or a painfully-honest greeting card?


This is definitely Engrish - celebration banner for a weddiang. If guests were unsure of the type of event being celebrated, they had only to look at the flowers, the stage, and the big WEDDIANG banner.

-KB

Get (kind of) married at the AutoWed vending machine

This adorable Moroccan/'50s Barbie convertible/Catholic church mashup thing is the AutoWed vending machine. Insert $1 and out come two plastic wedding bands (encapsuled in those plastic bubbles from your childhood), and a personalized certificate.







You can select the type of union you want: straight, gay, lesbian, or BFF. It plays a tune similar to your first-ever computer game, and prompts you to enter your names.






It's only a concept, but I think it's cute. If I saw this eye-catching machine, it would be irresistable to me.

Check out the faux-wedding:

AutoWed Wedding Machine by Concept Shed from Conceptshed on Vimeo.

The machine says at the end that if you were happy with your AutoWed service, you get a discount for 10% off AutoDivorce. Haha!

Happy weekend!
Kay

Source via Engadget

John Krasinski and Jason Segel serenade a bachelorette party

I love J.Kras and Jason Segel more than I can say, so I find this adorable:




According to TMZ:
It all went down at a bar in Ann Arbor, Michigan -- we're told John and Jason were hanging out with Emily Blunt and "Community" actress Alison Brie ... when the girls at a nearby bachelorette party asked the guys to sing for them.

John and Jason happily obliged -- with a pretty awesome rendition of "Brown Eyed Girl" -- and we're told, the bride-to-be couldn't have been happier.

-Kay

Post-wedding don'ts

I'm adding to the list of things you shouldn't do when planning a wedding. This one is a post-wedding don't.

DON'T complain long and loud about every little thing that wasn't perfect about your wedding when someone says, "Congratulations! How was your wedding?". Because when I say that, I am not interested in actually hearing about the details. Here's how the conversation is supposed to take place:

Me: Congratulations! How was your wedding?
New husband/wife: Oh, you know, there were a few issues with [insert problem here], but other than that, it was a great day. It seemed like our guests had fun, we had fun, and I'm glad it's over!
Me: That's great. Well, congratulations again!

and then I back away slowly. Or, if I like you, I continue with:

Me: That's great! If you don't mind my asking, what were the issues?

and then you're free to let 'er rip.


"All these people flew to Hawaii for me, but the chairs are the wrong shade of green"

Unfortunately, here's the actual conversation I have when someone I barely know gets married:

Me: Congratulations! How was your wedding?
New husband/wife: OH MY GOD. The coordinator was SO STUPID. I mean, we really had to let him have it because he was just incompetent. The worst part was sending the invitations. I mean, I had to address each one by hand. It took forever! I was like, I'm just going to call people to invite them because I don't want to do this anymore". I should have gotten my friends to do it for me [laugh] because, well, I AM the BRIDE!.
Me: ...uh-huh. That's too bad. But, um, was the reception fun once all the drama was over?
NH/W: Yeah, it was fun.
Me: ...
NH/W: ...
Me: [backs away slowly]

See how that goes? When you have more negative than positive things to say about your wedding, you sound like a miserable asshole. Frankly, if you didn't have fun at your own wedding, you are an asshole*.

-Kay

*Unless something went horribly, horribly wrong. Disaster weddings are uncommon.
pic source

Dis-invited via Facebook

If you really want to get married AND keep your friends, don't do anything like this. Ever. At all:


Click the image for a larger version


Here are a few of my favorite excerpts

Eat a little first, cause we're still unsure about the food sitch...

...we would love you to bring us a bottle of champagne as a gift...

There will be chairs for most everyone...

I think this couple will have plenty of leftover everything because there's no way that any friends are going to put up with this shit. SOUNDS FUN.

-KB

Mrs. Hefner no more

Getting ditched at the altar probably really sucks. Just ask Hef.

Days before Hugh Hefner was supposed to marry 25-year-old Crystal Harris, she called it off. But not in time for her Playboy spread titled "Mrs. Crystal Hefner" to be pulled.


oops

It must be embarrassing and difficult to cancel a wedding, but at least normal people don't have thousands of magazines as a grim reminder.

-KB

Oops! Lucille Ball's wedding gown

I recently re-watched The Long, Long Trailer and realized that my previous post about Lucille Ball's wedding gown was ALL WRONG. People love to search my blog and correct things I've written, so I'm surprised that this hasn't been pointed out yet.

The photo that I previously thought was Lucille Ball's wedding portrait was actually her gown from the movie wedding of Tacy to Nicky in The Long, Long Trailer.


Her alleged wedding portrait

Another view of the same gown can be seen here.

If the disk hadn't already been sent back, I'd screencap to show you! To see proof, you'll just have to click the link.

The wedding scene in the movie was brief - most of the movie is obviously spent on the long, long trailer. The bridesmaids wore fluffy pink gowns, and Luc...excuse me TACY and Nicky look adorable.

Rejected marriage proposal at a club

There's no description, so it's not clear on where or when this took place, but basically a dude sings a romantic song to a VERY uncomfortable-looking woman, and then proposes. Skip to 1:50 to see him down on his knee.



The look on her face should be enough for anyone to re-think their proposal, but the guy just keeps going. There's a woman in the background yelling Don't embarrass him!, but the uncomfortable woman stands her ground. They have a conversation that I can't hear, but I see her saying: I can't, and You can't fix this.

Ouuuuch.

Found via.

-KB

How to get married and keep your friends

There seems to be a rush of weddings this summer, and I hear all the gripes because I don't know any of the couples. Engaged couples, I have a news flash for you: all of your friends are talking shit about you and your wedding. Right now. This goes double if your wedding details have been posted on your Facebook pages. It sucks, and it might shock you, but it's true.

Here's my handy-dandy guide to getting married and keeping your friends:

Rule 1: Shut up
Seriously, keep the details to yourself. Don't talk endlessly about the cost, bitch about the cake tasting-gone-wrong, or reference your wedding ALL THE TIME. "Sorry, can't make it to the party. We have to go meet caterers!" is a really annoying way to turn down a birthday party. People want to be invited to the wedding, and they want to drink your free booze, but they don't want to be involved in every step.

The solution is to choose a few friends who love you enough to keep the eye rolling to themselves, or at the very least, trash talk you to friends you don't know. There is no BFF alive who can process all the minutia of your wedding without hating you a little bit, so choose wisely. It's probably best to give the least of the burden to the friend you deem your maid of honor, or the person who will throw the showers/bachelor parties. My best suggestion would be to talk the most to your spouse-to-be. If that person can't handle all the boring details, don't marry them.


Yes, your table is beautiful. I knew it would be because I've been listening to you talk about it for SIX MONTHS.
Thanks Flickr user chellyc

Rule 2: Don't force your friends to help
If your bestie isn't jumping up and down to be a bridesmaid or throw your bachelor party, don't ask. Wait to see who offers. If nobody offers, don't have a wedding party. People who don't care about weddings don't care about weddings. You can't force it, and your friend will secretly hate you if you try to make them care about your wedding.

If you feel like you don't have enough support to plan such a large wedding, have a smaller wedding. Your wallet will thank you, and you'll still have friends.

Rule 3: Keep your cool
Wedding planning comes with at least one major blow up. Something will go wrong, a friend will back out of being a bridesmaid (unless you followed Rule 2) and you will feel like nobody cares about your special, special day. Remind yourself that it's true: friends don't care about your special day. They're really happy for you, and they're glad you found true love, but they don't care about the wedding details unless it's going to be a cash bar. Maintain patience and understanding for your friends or you won't have any left.

Rule 4: Repeat It's only one day
In line with keeping your cool, keep reminding yourself that the important part is every day after the wedding, but the wedding is ONE special day. Yes, it's a big deal and a lot of money, but it's only one day. There's a lot of build-up to the big day for YOU, but for everyone else it's that upcoming Saturday when they have to get dressed up and eat with people they don't know.


I spent $1200 in airfare for a cash bar? Friendship = damaged. Shit = talked.
Thanks T1GTV

Rule 5: Think about your guests
Yes, it's your special day, but your guests have all taken a day out of their lives to celebrate you in a very expensive way. They: saved the date, wore nice clothes, sent a gift, and talked shit behind your back instead of to your faces. (If your friends didn't do these things, then they're not holding up their end either. Solution: get better friends) Since your friends did a lot for you, try to plan for them. Give them the best food you can, or if you can't afford dinner, make the snacks really tasty and filling. Make sure there's delicious dessert. If it's all you can afford have an open bar. They don't care about taking home a framed picture of you, or those hideous inedible almonds.

Solution: Get them drunk! They will have fun. The non-drinkers will have fun watching others make asses of themselves. Don't insist that non-family travel to an island for your wedding. Don't put ridiculous deadlines on everyone. Don't harass people about RSVP dates. If they don't RSVP in time they don't care about your wedding. Count them out, and have my blessing to feel sorry for yourself. It sucks that your friends aren't into your wedding, but you should not let it ruin your friendship.

Think about this - you're spending 6 months to 1 year planning your dream wedding. Planning your wedding is supposed to be fun, exciting, and everything you've always wanted. What's the point if you're pissed at your friends for not living up to expectations? Pave the way for a fun and beautiful wedding, don't steamroll it.

That's my 5-step guide to getting married and keeping your friends. What do you say? Do you think I'm full of shit? Siding too much with the guests? I'm curious to hear your thoughts.

xo,
Kay

An Aussie Star Wars Wedding

From the Official Star Wars blog:

Star Wars fans Nadia and Dale from Queensland, Australia tied the knot in with Jedi, stormtroopers, droids and Jawas in attendance. There’s even a Jabba the Hutt cake!


Cute couple!

Says the bride, Nadia We had a full Star Wars-themed wedding. The 501st legion acted as a guard of honor and raised $1000 for the Starlight Children’s Foundation. I bought an R2-D2 projector that acted as ring bearer, we had a Jabba the Hutt wedding cake, I painted planets from the Star Wars Galaxy for all the tables, and all the guests dressed up in Star Wars attire.



What's more romantic/threatening than stormtroopers?

Every entrance was matched to John Williams’ score. The stormtroopers entered to Darth Vader’s theme, along with Dale’s dad as celebrant, then Dale entered to the Throne Room score at the end of Episode IV. The Princess Leia flower girls and my handmaiden of honor entered to the pretty “Across the Stars” love theme while I entered the chapel with my dad in a Jedi costume (and the beard he grew for the wedding) [awww!] at the musical climax of the love theme. It was all timed really well and just tons of fun.


This is ridiculously funny


YUM?

This is one of the better Star Wars-themed weddings, and it's especially great that they raised money for a charity.

Super cute, amirite?

xo,
Kay


Because I'm obsessive about donating to good causes, I noticed that Charity Navigator only gives the Starlight Children's Foundation two stars. Still, it's great that they used their wedding to raise money for others.

Bride Carnival in Stavropol

Just like the title says, here are photos of a bride carnival in Stavropol, Russia. There are a lot more photos at the source, but these were my favorite.

According to this site, the point of the Bride Carnival is to "enhance the public value of family, marriage and motherhood. It might also reinvigorate every girl’s intention to become a bride, a wife and a mother; to be beautiful and beloved.".

Please insert your own snarky comment here.

-KB

Space wedding rings

Do you want over-hyped wedding rings that were IN SPACE?

50 sets of rings known as SWR-50th Anniversary Collection were inspired by the 50th anniversary of first human space flight which took place on April 12, 1961. The collection will be created in cooperation with jewelry designers from all over the world.



On May 20, 7:24 (MDT) the first set of space wedding rings were sent in space in a suborbital sounding rocket in New Mexico, USA. The flight went smoothly and the professionally secured package containing one set of wedding rings and some gold reached the space and came to Earth sound and safe.

The first 10 sets of rings available now will be made from the gold that was flown in space in the same capsule as the first Space Wedding Rings SWR-001.


This is not how I pictured space or spacesuits

Each set of Space Wedding Rings will be assigned a unique serial number and engraved with the SpaceWed logo. The rings will be sold in custom designed, space-themed packaging and will include a Certificate of Space Flight, as well as documentation of the rocket launch.



From the beginning of June you will be able to place an ORDER for the RINGS AVAILABLE NOW or PRE-ORDER the rings which will go in space in the next flight by the end of 2011.

In fairness, some of the rings are pretty cool, but the THIS METAL WAS IN SPACE angle is not impressive to me (or worth 12,000 Euros)


EKG ring


Fingerprint ring

Hipster wedding snark

HIPSTERS. Their style is as timeless as a Lisa Frank Trapper Keeper; their weddings as unique as the next trust fund kid masquerading as a starving student. This article Look at This Fucking Hipster Wedding had me ROFLing in my own smug satisfaction of not being a hipster. It details the biggest trends amongst the allegedly unique hipster weddings.



Hipsterism, the lifestyle choice of young, middle-class people attempting to refine the middle class, emerged roughly a decade ago. Now that hipsters have received their MFAs and reluctantly settled into careers, they're getting married. But the hipster aesthetic is defined by childish spontaneity and half-assism. Tackling a ritual associated with becoming a card-carrying adult can be a problem.

The solution? Infuse the ceremony itself with the trappings of hipsterdom. The wedding then becomes the hipster's last stand, his final opportunity to show friends and family what a fun and individualistic middle-class young person he is, before he becomes just another mortgage holder.

In the last few years, a hipster-wedding Bizarro World has come into being, one replete with conventions just as strict as those its creators longed to escape. The betrothed hipster must adhere to a fascistic regimen of self-expression, upcycled jam jars, and unparalleled, painstaking wedding-favor design. This world, though marked by forced whimsy, mirrors the mainstream in its object fetishism and pantomime. Instead of roses, it has bicycles; instead of heirloom silver, handmade crafts.

The new hipster-wedding regime subverts an adult ritual with signifiers of childhood, puts quotes around a serious commitment. As it denies adulthood, the hipster wedding so denies that it took just as long and cost just as much as its non-hipster equivalent. To follow are its key characteristics.



1. PUT A BIRD ON IT
Hipster crafts tend to involve a preponderance of woodland creatures — as when an LA couple, wed at the Natural History Museum, took their shots wearing animal masks in front of a menacing taxidermied bear.


2. MUSTACHE ON A STICK
Ah, the mustache party. How bleak our lives must have been before we first began to take photographs of one another wearing comically oversize mustaches on sticks for the sole purpose of spicing up our Facebook profiles.

3. INVITATION AS ART
Every hipster is friends with at least one graphic designer, which is handy when you need a new logo for your Tumblr. But when it comes to wedding invitations, how does the hipster couple differentiate their invitations from those of all their hipster friends, many of who are, yes, graphic designers?





4. OCD PAPERCRAFT
All weddings have labels — table numbers and place cards. But in their quest to make everything at their reception heart-stoppingly personalized and whimsical, the hipster's wedding is a veritable phantasmagoria of letterpress. (Note: a surplus of graphic-designer friends likely factors into this as well.)

Hipsters never miss an opportunity to label. Why give the ringbearer a stupid pillow when there's something to label? Instead, try a wedding box with letterpress reading "Here Comes the Bride." Go ahead, hipsters, put letterpress placecards in front of the food. Put a big screenprinted sign over the table with the food on it. Label the bride's side, the groom's side, the flowers, the dance floor, the dog. Label your Internet-ordained friend performing the ceremony.


5. SHOES IN A BUCKET
Far more preferable: casual shoes. But since it's a wedding, they need to match. Think armies of groomsmen in black Chucks, bridesmaids in boat shoes or cowboy boots. The barefoot hipster wedding is not unheard-of, especially because it provides the opportunity to label something — in this case, a sign on a bucket telling you to put your shoes in it.


6. HERE COMES THE BRIDE
Choosing songs is among the most important wedding decisions a hipster couple can make. It presents the opportunity to be original and to express allegiance to hipster consensus at the same time. The best hipster wedding songs, while providing evidence of superior music tastes, coexist on opposing sides of the cultural spectrum: on one, songs that surprise those in attendance through their relative obscurity; on the other, songs familiar to all attending, even cousins from Florida, but unlikely to be used as a first dance or wedding march (i.e., the theme from Top Gun). Whether Grandpa's tapping his foot or sadly shaking his head, rest assured that he doesn't understand you.


7. VOWS
Justices of the Peace, Unitarians, friends ordained in the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster — these are acceptable officiates, ones that will not raise an eyebrow at your farm-stand turnip cake, or the sign hanging over it reading "farm-stand turnip cake," or maybe your rainbow cake — you know, for marriage equality!
Hipsters are similarly required to write their own vows. Some write from the heart. Some incorporate poetry from the New York school. Others appropriate lyrics from '70s arena-rock bands for whose songs they have an ironic appreciation.

8. CHOW
Food, like décor, should evince an obvious co-mingling of high and low tastes — hot-dog carts and farm stand turnips are equally at home at the hipster wedding buffet table. While cupcake towers can supply the event with the perfect dose of fastidious detail and childish whimsy, their current popularity with other, non-hipster brides has lately deprived them of their former glory.

9. SOCIAL MEDIA POSTERITY
The hipster would not exist without social media. The hipster couple repays this debt with a token offering. Many a hipster couple has set up a designated area so their photographer friend may take pictures that resemble those from a photo booth — in some cases, an actual photo booth — and plaster them on Facebook. The iPhone, too, has its place at the hipster wedding. There's no need to leave technology at home when there's minutiae to document.

Social media has generated much of the hipster wedding accoutrements. Would mustache on a stick exist without Facebook? Would labeled pies? It's doubtful. Thanks, Facebook.

10. FAUX-EDGY WEDDING SHOTS
O dentists' daughters, o tax attorneys' sons! Back home in the suburbs, nobody understood you. Driving to Costco in your parents' SUV, you'd stare out at the expanse of manicured lawns, thinking, I wasn't meant for this! Do these people feel? Are they even alive?

But you weren't trapped there — far from it. You're too smart for that. Right after college, you moved to a gentrifying neighborhood in the Big City and scared your parents half to death. Even though you'd sworn to yourself long ago that you didn't care what they thought, in your innermost heart, you were glad. Sure, the dirty sidewalks and overweight people in cheap, stained sweatpants were unpleasant at first, but you got used to it.

Now it's your wedding day. The gaping maw of legitimate adulthood yawns before you like all the soccer fields you played on as a child lined end to end. Dad slaps you on the back and makes a joke about law school. But you'll show him. You gather your friends — your real, urban family — and take your wedding photos in a filthy alleyway. Fuck you, Dad!

The comments on the article are a good read. There's a lengthy, thoughtful comment mentioning the meaning of making homemade jam but claiming not to be a hipster, followed by the rather succinct Takes one to know one. It's safe to say that people will defend their life-long love of woodland creatures to the death, even though they've long since forgotten about their victory gardens. That's so 2009.

-KB