Archive for the ‘Marriage’ Category
Monday, May 21st, 2007Using only the subtlest of references, Belle Waring points to a Pandagon post on the “wedding-industrial complex.” Therein we learn that the average wedding these days costs $27,000. I’m pretty sure that if you look up “freaking absurd” in Wikipedia, you’ll find a picture of that.
The best part is the story about the limousine company that charges an extra $150 if the bride and groom will be riding, and will drive off if they arrive to find a person in a bridal gown who has not booked the “wedding special.” Sounds absurd (and it is, kind of) until you get to
My ex’s stepmother was a caterer and she said she would not even do weddings unless they paid through the nose for it, because she was sick and tired of being the occasion for fights between brides and mothers-in-law or being screamed at for minor and often imagined imperfections.
Fair enough, then. I can’t tell you how glad I am that our whole affair is so much more low-key than that.
In other news, the funniest thing I’ve read this month. Before you go, note that Zoë is five years old.
I went to an entertaining talk by UCI theorist and computational geometer David Eppstein yesterday. He showed some proofs (the subject was far afield for me, but engaging), some of which employed the Happy Ending Theorem. (Dr. Eppstein also seems to have written much of that Wikipedia entry.) The statement of the theorem goes like this:
Theorem. Any set of five distinct points in the plane such that no three are in a line has a subset of four points that form the vertices of a convex quadrilateral.
The proof is due to Esther Klein, and shortly after she showed the proof to them, Paul Erdős and George Szekeres produced a generalization.
The obvious question is, “So what’s this got to do with happy endings?” It turns out that it was named the Happy Ending Theorem by Erdős, because it resulted in the marriage of his friends Klein and Szekeres.
How adorable is that? One-hundred percent adorable.