Sofia Coppola and her purple wedding dress

Don't get too excited, because it's not Prince purple, but dusty Eeyore purple. Still, it's a very pretty dress.

Sofia Coppola got married in Italy last weekend. Blahblah celebrity blah. Let's just look at the dress. Here's the article if you want to read all the details. I don't really care, I just like the pictures.

Here's Sofia Coppola with her new husband. The dress is a silvery-purple with a light, fluffy texture. I love it!

In this shot you can see the full, short skirt and more of the pattern.

But then in this photo, I question the dress. I love the simple sleeve with the belted top, but the skirt looks a little like a kid's dress.

And then she changed into a coral-colored strapless dress with chunky, brightly-colored heels.

Cute, right? I like seeing pictures of alternative wedding style. And I hope you do too because this has zero substance. Yay, substance-free!

-KB

Wedding crasher was a total wiener

Last week my favorite fist-wavers The Consumerist posted a story about an unusual wedding crasher.

From a Consumerist reader:
My sister got married this weekend at a church in Dewitt, NY and while we were all getting our photos taken, we saw the Oscar Meyer Wiener-mobile nearby. We waved to it and, to our surprise, it pulled into the church parking lot!



They pulled up to us, handed out wiener whistles and allowed us to take pictures in front of it. Such awesome behavior will certainly ensure that I'll be picking up a few of their products on my next trip to the store!

Yay! I strangely LOVE the Wiener-mobile. I've seen it twice. The first time was during high school summer break; I saw it rolling down the street at the beach. The second time was at the Henry Ford Museum in Detroit where I purchased several wiener whistles for...reasons.

Have a day!

-KB

Entire planet swarmed with axe-wielding brides-to-be

Okay, the title is misleading...a LOT misleading, but I like sciencey stuff, and I find this article interesting.

Astronomers have spotted an exotic planet that seems to be made of diamond racing around a tiny star in our galactic backyard. The new planet is far denser than any other known so far and consists largely of carbon. Because it is so dense, scientists calculate the carbon must be crystalline, so a large part of this strange world will effectively be diamond.


See? I tied it into wedding stuff with my amazing image manipulation skills. Where are you going?

"The evolutionary history and amazing density of the planet all suggest it is comprised of carbon -- i.e. a massive diamond orbiting a neutron star every two hours in an orbit so tight it would fit inside our own Sun," said Matthew Bailes of Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne.

Lying 4,000 light years away, or around an eighth of the way toward the center of the Milky Way from the Earth, the planet is probably the remnant of a once-massive star that has lost its outer layers to the so-called pulsar star it orbits.

Pulsars are tiny, dead neutron stars that are only around 20 kilometers (12.4 miles) in diameter and spin hundreds of times a second, emitting beams of radiation. In the case of pulsar J1719-1438, the beams regularly sweep the Earth and have been monitored by telescopes in Australia, Britain and Hawaii, allowing astronomers to detect modulations due to the gravitational pull of its unseen companion planet.

The measurements suggest the planet, which orbits its star every two hours and 10 minutes, has slightly more mass than Jupiter but is 20 times as dense, Bailes and colleagues reported in the journal Science on Thursday.

In addition to carbon, the new planet is also likely to contain oxygen, which may be more prevalent at the surface and is probably increasingly rare toward the carbon-rich center.

Its high density suggests the lighter elements of hydrogen and helium, which are the main constituents of gas giants like Jupiter, are not present.

Just what this weird diamond world is actually like close up, however, is a mystery.

"In terms of what it would look like, I don't know I could even speculate," said Ben Stappers of the University of Manchester. "I don't imagine that a picture of a very shiny object is what we're looking at here."

Yay, science!

-KB

Earthquake interrupts wedding

Oh, poor East Coast people. You have shitty weather, and now you have earthquakes too? This cute couple had their wedding interrupted by yesterday's earthquake. Steve and Amy Mutton were getting ready to officially marry at the City Hall Chapel in New York when the earthquake started.

"We were in the chapel waiting," said Mutton, a 40-year-old IT consultant from London. "All of a sudden, they started evacuating the building." The rumbling, stemming from a quake that measured 5.8 on the Richter Scale and centered in Virginia, was over in just seconds.

His bride, Amy Mutton, 36, a project manager from Park Ridge, N.J., insisted it was a good omen and they went ahead and got hitched after the earth stopped moving. "It's not something we could have planned on. So you've got to go with it and get on with it, don't you?" she said.

Still, she was a little rattled. "I'm gonna go home and have some champagne now," she said.

The couple met in 2007 when she went to London for business. She will move to London to be with him. They planned the wedding five weeks ago.

-KB

Discounted diamond ring

I love Costco. It's hard not to feel like a queen when I leave with my enormous cart of 700-calorie muffins and steaks as big as my head.

If you're looking to save some money on your engagement ring and you REALLY want to feel like a queen then Costco is the place for you. This ring will save you roughly $500,000!



It's a 6.20ct diamond ring set in platinum for (pinky to mouth) one. MILLION. dollars.

The site says there's only one available. I'm sure there's someone out there rich enough to buy it. I'm curious of the back story. Does Costco have extravagant items like this all the time, or does the buyer just...randomly find 6 carat diamonds? Mystery.

-KB

Surprise wedding - for the bride

A guy named Shawn wanted to propose to his girlfriend Colleen in the most insane way possible - at their wedding.

He explains that over the course of several months, he asked her seemingly-innocent questions about her dream wedding while he was secretly planning their ACTUAL wedding. When he proposes, she doesn't seem that shocked about it (IMO proposals should never be a total surprise), but she is completely shocked that her bridesmaids are present, dressed, and ready to take her to get her dressed too.




Even my heart of stone is weakened by this couple. She's elated, and he is so sweet. He even went to all the trouble of bringing her entire bedroom to the ceremony site so that she would have everything necessary to get ready. That's so thoughtful.

-KB

Bert and Ernie won't marry

This article contains an hi-larious description of puppet sexual preference.

[Producers of the] 40 year-old TV series [Sesame Street] dismissed the idea of a made-for-TV, same-sex puppet wedding in response to an online campaign and petition to have the two "Sesame Street" characters get married as a way to beat homophobia and encourage tolerance of gay people.



In recent days, almost 9,000 people have signed a petition encouraging the wedding at http://www.change.org and/or become friends of a special "Bert and Ernie Get Married" Facebook page, sparking a lively debate on Twitter and other social media.

Bert, who is fascinated by pigeons and gets easily upset, and oval-headed, free spirit Ernie, have lived together at 123 Sesame Street since 1969. They share a bedroom, but sleep in single beds. Sesame Workshop noted on Thursday that as puppets, Bert and Ernie don't have sexual preferences.

"Bert and Ernie are best friends. They were created to teach preschoolers that people can be good friends with those who are very different from themselves. Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics, they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation," Sesame Workshop said in a statement posted on its official Facebook page.

The change.org petition had argued that their marriage would help to put an end to bullying and suicides of gay, lesbian, transgender and bisexual young people. "We are not asking that 'Sesame Street' do anything crude or disrespectful by allowing Bert & Ernie to marry. It can be done in a tasteful way," the petition read.

I think it's really funny that they had to release an Official Statement RE: The sexual preference of puppets. Can't we just leave Bert and Ernie alone? If they are indeed gay, and IF they want to come out, then I will support them. I refuse to speculate about the private busines of two guys who have always been my supportive friends.




-KB

Oh, hi Mark! Why are you at my wedding?

Fans of THE ROOM, you might enjoy this country music video featuring Greg Sestero.




If you're like me then most modern country music is shrill ear-torture, but this video has a twist that you might appreciate.

Did you miss my last post about THE ROOM? I treat you like a princess...and you stab me in the back. Here it is.

-KB

Awkward live proposal

A local TV news crew was filming some fluff piece at an airport when they unwittingly caught a proposal in the background. The shot was live, and it was really sweet until the news reporter caught wind of it and used her quick-thinking to railroad a special moment.



Oh, local newscasters...is there anything you can get right?









-KB

Scariest wedding crasher ever

Bears: godless killing machines. And terrible wedding crashers.

It was a wedding party at an exclusive Taos resort but the two bears were not invited. A 300 pound mother bear and her cub crashed a wedding at the El Monte Sagrado Resort here on Sunday afternoon as they romped across lawns and climbed trees as wedding guests grabbed their cameras.



New Mexico Game and Fish officer Matt Pengelly hit the bear with a well-aimed dart from his tranquilizer gun after 10 p.m. as it sat perched in a tree about 30 feet off the ground. The bears “messed up a wedding,” said Pengelly, as he readied his rifle for action. His Doberman named Mala, Taos police officers and resort security kept an eye on the bear as Pengelly got ready.

“This is the first time I have seen a bear here but we have had several bear complaints in the area and I think it’s probably the same bear,” said Pengelly.

Pengelly asked every one present to remain quiet so that the tranquilizer would take effect more quietly. Several minutes later the bear crashed to the ground and Pengelly checked to make sure no bones were broken.

“I heard it over the (in-house) radio calling all departments,” said front desk office manager Christy Newton. “That there was a bear on the property.”

Resort security guards said they had to keep guests back from the bears as they went from one tree right next to where the wedding was taking place inside to another tree further away. “The cub was climbing the tree and the mom was watching it and it fell,” said Newton. “It was cute.” The cub ran off while it’s mother stayed in the tree.

Taos police officers Ron Montez and Lloyd Garcia stood by before Pengelly’s arrival to “make sure guests didn’t wander out there,” said Garcia. Pengelly carted the bear away in his truck to contain it overnight before he was to release it into the wild. The late rains have not done enough to provide natural food for bears and there have been numerous recent bear incidents, Pengelly said recently.

Here's my theory: the bear spied her dream wedding and wanted to be the center of attention.

TELL ME I LOOK PRETTY

-kb

Hobo-themed wedding: assholes or awwww?

Is this a cute, vintage theme wedding with a can-do attitude, or assholery that mocks the impoverished?

Regretsy and Etsy both tell the tale of a couple who had a hobo-themed wedding. The bride's write-up says that her limited budget and personal interest in depression-era culture put the pieces together for a hobo wedding. Regretsy says they're dickheads who mercilessly mock the poor unfortunate souls who struggled through the real depression.


the hobo couple



hobo campfire


hobo...invitations?

I'm not sure why the couple insisted on calling it a HOBO wedding. It seems to me that it's a pretty flippant attitude toward the actual poverty that exists in the world. A depression-themed wedding could still have this same "come together" feel without mocking the thousands of people who survived (and didn't survive) a terrible time in American history. Starvation, illness, and homelessness are not romantic.

It is a cute wedding, but the hobo theme definitely leaves a sour taste in my mouth.

-KB

Computer conducts couple's wedding

Miguel Hanson and Diana Wesley couldn't decide on a human to officiate their wedding, so they programmed a computer to do it. They got married this Saturday, and here's their story:

Hanson, a Houston web developer and IT consultant, created the minister software program when the couple couldn't get a friend to serve as the minister at their wedding. "I was like, you know I'm going to write my own minister," Hanson said.



Wesley, a high school sign language teacher, said she's aware of the nerd jokes that might come the couple's way once more people hear about the wedding. But the couple says being married by a computer fits who they are. They met through a website called "Sweet on Geeks" and love science fiction and fantasy.

"That's kind of our thing," Wesley said. "In fact, my maid of honor, she's making my cake and she's making it with Nerds (candy) as the topping and not icing. That's kind of the theme, the geeked out wedding."

[Oh ma ga! I love this idea! But NO frosting? Hmm...]

The ceremony will take place in Hanson's parents' backyard in Houston. Wesley, 30, said she wanted a small wedding, and the couple started planning it after Hanson, 33, proposed in May.
The computer will greet the couple's 30 or so guests in a mechanical, robotic voice, give a little history about how they met and then go through the ceremony. The virtual minister, nicknamed "Rev. Bit," also will crack a joke or two.

"If anyone here has anything to say that might change their minds or has any objections, they do not want to hear it and I will not recognize your objections since Miguel has programmed me to only recognize his commands," said the program during a preview that Hanson played on his home computer. It's HAL 9000 meets "Here Comes the Bride."

While Hanson wrote the software program, the couple collaborated on the text the computer will recite during the ceremony. They said their friends instantly like the idea. But some family members took a little longer to warm up to it. "A couple members of the family were like, `Really? A computer?' I think once they see it. ... It's novel and so it's something they haven't seen," Wesley said.

There's a video of the ceremony here, though the audio only worked about half the time for me.

-KB