Want a boyfriend? Start a blog! It worked for Tamara Duricka, who had her own personal Year of Magical Thinking at age 30 when she suffered two breakups and the death of her dog. Wanting "a gimmick" to "pull herself out of a funk," she did what any early thirtysomething with creeping malaise and a career in media would.

She started a blog.

Called "31 Dates in 31 Days" (and hosted on Blogspot, natch) Duricka's project involved going on 31 dates in 31 days. Because this was not 'Nam, this was dating, there were rules:

Each date lasts at least 31 minutes.
Each date costs less than $31.
Dates will take place in a public setting.
No drugs.
No alcohol (Yes, seriously. None.)
No married men.
AND… date #31 (Valentine's Day) will be a second date!

Faced with these dealbreaking set of restrictions, it should come as no surprise to any of you that the man who ultimately wiggled his way into the Valentine's Day second date was … a Mormon. (Which reminds me, by the way: there was not nearly enough Sarah in last week's Big Love, and I hear she is not really going to be in the show much this season. Is this true? This is really upsetting. Also, how hot is Ben getting?)

And "about 70 dates later," Duricka found herself engaged. Julia Allison, there's hope for you yet! Time to revive that 24 dates in 24 hours thing that never happened!

But a word of warning: despite hoping to turn her blog into a book, Duricka has yet to find a publisher. Might I suggest HarperStudio?

Back in ancient history, before people wrote anonymous blogs, they were just dudes with pen names. Like this father of the bride, who landed a column in Esquire magazine under his pseudonym of Stanley Bing while climbing the corporate ladder at CBS in his day job under his real name, Gil Schwartz. ("Since then, he has also written for newspapers, a cigar magazine, Seventeen and, most recently Fortune, current home of Bing's monthly business column." Man, I miss Old Media sometimes!) Anyway, he climbed the corporate ladder pretty high: he's now the chief communications officer for CBS. Meanwhile, here I am blogging on Gawker—under the name of a Shelley Long character in a roundly-panned (but cult classic!) Lateighties movie—about Gil-Stanley Schwartz-Bing's daughter Nina getting married to a Google employee. This, folks, is progress.

The featured couple this week is really attractive and nice-seeming. I really like the bride's veil-hairnet thing, and they are one of those great opposites-attract pairs: she's a Quaker girl who used to pose so her parents could sculpt her, and is now a NBC anchor who wakes up at 2:30 every morning; he, a "wild-sounding cousin" of her friend who "wore earrings, listened to hip-hop, had lots of girlfriends, did flips on snowboards and persuaded his father, Eric S. Nathan, to put a trampoline in the living room."

Aren't they cute? When the groom wanted to ask her parents for permission to marry her, he fooled them at first by saying he needed a loan. And the dad opened his checkbook and everything! It's like that thing in A Bronx Tale about reaching over and opening the car door, kind of.

Maybe not. Here, read this paragraph and feel happy.

Once they started dating, Ms. Low and other friends began noticing some changes in Mr. Nathan. He invited people over for wine and cheese, for instance, instead of brownies from a box. "Erika was the first girl who made him nervous," Ms. Low said.

May we all find the one who makes us nervous. What's the Quaker equivalent of mazel tov? Oh, probably complete silence.

Elsewhere, some well-intentioned parents tried to set their friends' 24-year old aspiring comedienne daughter up with their 29-year old son, but the plans backfired when she ended up with his 38-year old brother instead; if I were this couple I would see how many structures at the Lapidus family summer camps I could christen (come on, the ceramics studio?); and if I may offer a bit of constructive criticism to Alexandra Johnson, Harvard graduate-cum-"store planning analyst in Manhattan for J. Crew": this is a photo I took of your SoHo store last year; as you can see, it is indistinguishable from a photo of my hall closet. Get your shit together, sister!

This week's matchup:

Margaret Ashton Bensfield, Edward Matthew Sullivan

• The wedding was officiated by an Episcopal priest: +1
• The bride graduated from Vanderbilt and received a master's degree in French from Middlebury College: +1
• The groom graduated from Duke and received an MBA from Harvard: +4
• The bride's mother is named "Llewellyn W. Bensfield" and she is "a trustee of the Protestant Episcopal Cathedral Foundation": +2
• Both fathers are partners in Washington law firms named "Miller & Chevalier" and "Williams and Connolly": +2

TOTAL: 10

Allison Kay Deutermann and Robert Thomas Dennis

• The bride is keeping her name: -1
• The bride graduated magna cum laude from Penn and the groom graduated magna cum laude from Harvard: +13
• The bride received a Ph.D. in English and comparative literature at Columbia: +1
• The groom received a master's degree in creative writing from Florida State: +0 [Ed. What, no love for Keith Gessen?]
• The groom works at Bridgewater but is "also a poet whose work has appeared in the Paris Review, Fence, and Tin House": +1
• The bride's mother taught elementary school: +1
• The groom's father "retired as a career counselor with the University of Phoenix" (isn't that school online? Please tell me his dad just posted job descriptions to chat rooms!): +1

TOTAL: 16

Why are you still reading this? You should be blogging.

I need to get something off my chest: today I stole a neighbor's New York Times. It's not a big deal, I've decided: I live in a giant apartment building and there's no way that each subscriber goes down to the lobby and rifles through until he finds his exact paper with his exact name, you know? I mean, and some of them must be out of town. So what I was doing was making the process less wasteful, really.

Also, I was really out of it, having just taken the redeye back from vacation. That thing messes you up!

Many special thanks to Lilit Marcus for filling in last week and introducing us to the wonder that is the Southern Wedding. I was thinking about her last night (this morning? I don't even know what day it is anymore) when I was at the airport seated next to a group of gals hailing from well below the Mason-Dixon line. They were all at rapt attention listening to one bride-to-be discuss her dress.

"I couldn't find a wedding dress that was me enough, so I've been tryin' on white formal gowns instead," she explained. "The dress that I think is the one is to die for is just sequins and sparkles all the way up. And it has a pouffy train…"

Here she stood up and motioned from herself to the wall, a distance that I estimated to be at least six feet.

Just as journalist Heidi Moore grasped last week for language we could use to identify hipsters in the collective, I think we need to come up with a word for that particular bride and her ladies. A rhinestone of southern women? A gossip of gals? A cackle? A platinum? A whoopdedoo?

Reached via Twitter, Lilit decreed: "The technical term is 'all y'all.' We will also accept "a pageant." Now we know!

Reading her stories last week, along with those in the comments, really piqued my interest in the unique monster that is the Southern Wedding. (I feel like I have to capitalize it!) So please, if anyone has any great blush and bashful-colored tales, please send them to us and we'll run the best ones.

Anyway, I'm apparently not the only one who is loopy this weekend: the hell, Times? On the first page alone we've already got a bride named Batsheva and three people wearing funny hats.

Emily Eerdmans, she of the—what is that, a fedora? Beret?—is a design historian and adjunct FIT instructor who has written real books, the kinds that are borne out of research and not blogs. Her mother owns a pottery store. I really want Emily to do something crazy or historically important so that Renee Zellweger can play her in a biopic someday.

And then we have Jennifer Pehr and Jon Ross. I don't know where to begin. Well, how about with the picture:

Pay attention to the hats, you'll be tested on it later. Jennifer Pehr and Jon Ross met in 2005 "while Mr. Ross was appearing in Walking In Memphis: The Life of a Southern Jew, his autobiographical one-man show in New York." Jennifer was intrigued, reviewing the show thusly:

There were such significant events. His mother's passing, when his barber taught him about sex. The funny thing is that he's now bald.

[Ed. OMG. I've actually seen his show before. Don't ask, it's a Jewish Summer Camp thing. But HOLY SHIT.]

The engagement, "inspired by a scene from the 1999 remake of 'The Thomas Crown Affair,' one of her favorite films" involved "having a dozen friends stationed around [the Met] galleries in bowlers, offering riddles and clues."

That's actually really freaking cool! I hate to say it but: hats off to Jon. She should be glad, though, he didn't try to model it around the topless beach scene, if you know what I'm saying. ("Mom?!")

Jennifer and Jon may have been married by "the spiritual leader of Storahtelling, a Jewish organization," but even they can't compete with groom Michael Altman, who as the son of two judges "grew up putting biblical figures on trial at the Sabbath table."

A widowered father of two, Altman was introduced to Batsheva From, a "vibrant single" who "frequented Russian bathhouses in the city!" Oh my GOD, again with the Russian bathhouses! That is the second time in less than two months!

Before their first date, to a kosher restaurant in midtown, From told Altman that she had a headache; he offered some Tylenol. Here is where you and I, jokingly or not jokingly, would request an upgrade to some Vicodin. Not so Ms. From: "she asked if he could pick up some Excedrin instead." Because her job is that she is a f'reals NARC!

The couple dated on and off and on and off for awhile, which seems kind of tough for his poor kids, but got back in touch last March:

Mr. Altman noticed that Ms. From, whom he had never defended on Facebook, had listed her status as "shaken and stirred." Concerned, he inquired whether she was O.K. (She had been in a six-car highway crash, but was unhurt.)"

Haha, it would have been funnier if she was just like "OMG I'm soooo hungoverrrr LOL" Also, good thing they didn't end up like these sad couples.

He proposed by giving her an iPod Touch (saucy!) that said "I love you. Will you marry me PLEASE?" And here I should note that Foster emailed me at like 3am with the burning question of whether it came preloaded with songs or not, concluding that "Eazy E's "Automobile" was left off the playlist."

Elsewhere this weekend, although one couple grew up near each other and their parents "haven known each other for more than 30 years and even attended the same Lamaze class together," the pair did not meet "until they found each other on JDate"; an Evil Investment Banker wedded a fifth grade teacher at a school for the deaf in the marriage equivalent of buying carbon offsets; and holy nostalgia, the former CEO of Girl Scouts of Eastern Pennsylvania married the president and CEO of the Franklin Institute museum.

THAT WEDDING IS MY ENTIRE CHILDHOOD!! I got from Daisies all the way to the freaking CADETTES. And the Franklin Institute! Love you, giant heart exhibit!!

This week's matchup:

Emily Madison and Joseph Sumberg

• The bride's parents are "of Dobbs Ferry" and New York and the groom's parents from Miami: +2
• "Rabbi Judith Kempler officiated at Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden in Coral Gables, Fla.": +1
• The bride is pursuing an MFA in "dramaturgy" at Columbia (doesn't that sound like it should have something to do with curing rashes?): +4
• The groom is in the real estate group at Goldman Sachs: +1
• The bride's father is "the managing partner of the Miami law firm Bilzin Sumberg Baena Price and Axelrod": +2

TOTAL: 9

Suzanne Nam and John Brown

• "The couple exchanged vows under a provision of Pennsylvania law that allows couples to marry without an officiant, as in the Quaker tradition": +1
• The bride is keeping her name: -1
• The bride graduated from Northwestern and received a law degree from BC and a master's in journalism from Columbia: +5
• The groom graduated cum laude from Yale and earned an MBA from Wharton: +8
• "He has been an adviser to Wahidullah Shahrani, Afghanistan's minister of commerce and industry": +1
• The couple met "when they were at a hangout for expatriates and journalists in Bangkok, 'and we just started talking about books.'": +2

TOTAL: 16

Remember, send in your most darrrlin' stories of wacky weddings in the deep south and we'll go on a cultural excursion from here in Manhattan. It'll be no Girl Scout field trip to the Franklin Institute, but nothing really is.

[Pics: Getty]

I'm not sure exactly where Miss Nefler is from—or today! Yay, Phyllis! Bonds of Column-Slavery: broken!—but growing up in the South, I learned many important lessons about marriage, many of which were funny and sometimes useful regional customs! Like: Did you know you're supposed to say "best wishes" to the bride instead of "congratulations," lest you accidentally imply that the bride won her groom through trickery or deceit? Like she most likely did. But still.

Another one of which is a value we both—and all bridesmaids—clearly hold dear: don't ever-EVER-get married on a major holiday (Valentine's Day, Christmas, the Carolina/Duke game). There are reasons for this, many of which are obvious, some of which are not. Like, for example:

4. Your bridesmaids need to go out and get crunk and find single men on holidays like New Year's Eve and also Your Wedding. Don't deprive them of one.

However, the most important one, of course:

1. In the future, your anniversary might have to compete with something and thus less attention for you. Like the Carolina/Duke game.

So, like last week's Christmas couples, these Vows will now have to share their anniversary present with New Year's Eve, and while at first, that'll seem whimsical, the logical progression of this is that each anniversary will find itself exponentially less charming than the last. Either way, the whole New Year's Eve thing might explain the slim weddings section today: just two pages-two!-in print. If cotillion pays off for anybody, it's Vows editor Robert Woletz around the holidays. So he can go get shitface drunk in their honor. While at the office. Or home. In his BrideCave.

First up are Elizabeth Cronise and Joe McLaughlin, whose deep, life-affirming love story that'll echo through the ages–-it involves a Latin-inscribed Marc Jacobs leather bracelet she found the day they met-–earned them the top "Vows" column. The bride's a lawyer; the groom, an actor and bartender. She went into the chichi Cafe Cluny with a friend; he was behind the bar. Sparks, as they are known to do, flew. Ms. Cronise helpfully points out that what attracted her to Mr. McLaughlin was his cheerful attitude, because although he was a commonah he didn't have a chip on his shoulder about it: "'He has this sweet disposition you don't normally find in restaurant workers,' she said later, 'Or in actors.'" Emphasis ours. [Ed. She's not even wearing it in the photo. For fuck's sake!]

Did any of you watch the Paula Abdul reality show, Hey Paula? There was this one episode where she was drunk or on pills or something, and she had a date, and she started babbling about how men should treat her like the gift she is.

That really helped me to get through the last few sentences of the Cronise/McLaughlin wedding announcement, because everything sounds better in a Paula Abdul voice. You see, Ms. Cronise refers to the aforementioned leather bracelet with wonderful OMGdeepsignificance!!1! as "a gift to us from the universe" and her husband as "the gift that I was always waiting for." Gifts! You are a gift!

Speaking of gifts, the least Ms. Cronise could do in order to help continue the through-line of her bracelet-themed wedding story would be to hand out some Marc Jacobs trinkets to her erstwhile bridal attendants. They're the real gifts, darling bride, and don't you forget it!

Oh, so some other people got married, too. NEXT: Therese Kolata and Nathan Allison Jr. met as Penn undergrads. Her mom is a science reporter for the Times; his mom is an elementary school teacher in Trenton. They should not play Job Switch Day. Also, if you must get married close to New Year's, your bridesmaids will be very appreciative of the fact that you did so in Las Vegas. Points to the Allisons for providing the bridesmaids with plenty of venue choices for drunken karaoke and boozy table-dancing.

Aviva Yaffa Androphy and Evan Marlin wanted you to know that they are Jewish. In case the bride's name wasn't obvious enough, she went to undergrad at Brandeis and is working on a PhD at Yeshiva University. Oh, and her mom teaches at the East Meadow (NY) Jewish Center's religious school. Oh, and her dad is the leader of said East Meadow Jewish Center. As for the groom? He is wearing a kippah [Ed. "Yarm-ooh-l-eew-k?"] in their very cute photo.

I'm used to Southern wedding announcements, which tend to skip over colleges and professional accomplishments in favor of listing everyone involved in the bridal party and what the bride's dress looked like. Lacking that information, I will conclude that the bridesmaids wore blue and white dresses, perhaps made out of Israeli flags and sewn with the sweat and tears of Zion. You know, because they're all Jewish. WHATEVER.

Alexandra Anneke Asjes (got to love that assonance) is the daughter of a retired UBS managing director "of Zurich" who has "a master's degree in text and performance studies from the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London," which she is putting to good use as a segment producer for an MTV show called "Pranked," which seems to be like "Punk'd" without Ashton Kutcher or an unnecessary apostrophe. It's got those College Humor guys in it. The groom, Jonathan Lynch Dudkowski, is a freelance film and TV editor. Their wedding was "Quaker-style." I'm dying to know what that means, because Quaker weddings are rad. Did they stand in the middle of a circle facing each other while people who felt moved by the spirit shared blessings and good wishes? I can only imagine the difficulty for the poor bridesmaids who, without a more traditional people-standing arrangement, probably had to figure out some sort of way to stand near the bride and groom without blocking anyone's line of sight. And your Bridesmaids are drunk and/or teary enough without having to do a round of PT just to get things moving.

Let's score this shit:

Erin Roeder and John Spader III

• The groom's name has a 'III' +3
• Also, he's from Scarsdale +2
• Her schools: Dartmouth and Yale Law. His schools: Georgetown and Penn Law. +7
• The bride will be keeping her name -3
• They didn't get a photo in the print or online editions -3 [Ed. Harsh!]

Total: 6.

Caroline Evans and Florent de Gantes [Ed. AKA BALLER STATUS FRENCH BRO. WATCH.]

• "Mrs. de Gantes, 29, is a second year MBA student at Harvard" +5
• "Mr. de Gantes, 28, is a first year MBA student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology." +2
• "Mr. de Gantes is a son of Countess Joselyne de Gantes of Grenoble, France, and Count Antoine de Gantes of La Seyne-sur-Mer, France." +10
• "The bridegroom is a descendant of Francois de Gantes, who was a military commander and adviser to King Louis XIV." +1,000

Total: 1,017.

By the way, the French word for bridesmaid is Demoiselle. If you don't know, now you know, blogga.

[One more time, Lilit Marcus everyone! Nice work subbing in for Phyllis Nefler, who will be back at her regularly "scheduled" time at 2:30 PM next Sunday. Lilit is the wonderful NJG (read: Nice Jewish Girl) behind Save the Assistants, which is a blog that deserved a book deal, and got it! Lilit's commenter handle is SusieDerkins, and she'll be around to chat it up soon. Thanks, Lilit! ]

Why would anyone get married this weekend? No, I'm serious. Someone please explain to me me why I am having to write this right now. I want answers and I want them this instant.

A lot of people got married on Sunday, which is today. Think about what you're doing at this moment and then think about how incredibly annoying it would be to be at some poorly ventilated "event space" eating sauce-covered chicken and watching, like, your random coworker and her dumpy groom swaying to "At Last".

Then there is this couple who got married on Wednesday night. That sounds like it was convenient for everyone involved! They're not even Jewish.

Guess what else is not convenient? Snowstorms. This is me pretending to care.

And THIS is Robin Lane and Arie Schinnar, the featured couple in the Vows column who actually got married last weekend and are thus spared my Christmas ire. The two met when Lane's apartment — oh, sorry, "Fifth Avenue co-op" — flooded and she hired Schinner, an "architectural consultant who create[s] digital animations for reconstruction" who is also an "environmental scientist and former Israeli combat officer."

Schinnar is some other things too, having worked as a political cartoonist in Israel. And: "While I am a 62-year-old grandfather," he wrote in a wooing email to Lane, "I am in many ways a 26-year-old hybrid of Peter Pan and Don Quixote."

I've been trying to come up with a joke about that for the last five minutes and I can't, largely because up until about three years ago I always thought people were talking about a magical donkey.

Anyway, as for Lane: she is a woman who finds out that her daughter is engaged and then buys a wedding dress online. Granted, she got a sick deal (Arie must be proud!) finding a $7,200 dress that via the magic of the Internet she was able to locate in England for $250. I kind of want to call bullshit on that one, but more so I have to say that the phrase "a few more clicks of the mouse" reminds me of this:

Of course her daughter was all "mo-oommmm-ah!" and found her own dress for her own self, so when Schinnar proposed to Lane, what do you know! She had a dress to wear. And as if her daughter hasn't suffered enough, we get this line:

And so — you knew this was coming — on Dec. 18, there was Ms. Lane, a size 0, in the altered size 8 Antibes gown in her apartment overlooking Central Park, holding yellow roses and standing under a wedding canopy next to Dr. Schinnar, who was wearing a tuxedo and burgundy bow tie.

Sorry that you don't have your mother's Madonna arms, daughter!

Then they took dance lessons and in the video on the Times website you can watch them tango a lot and it's kind of awkward.

Not much else going on this week.

A senior editor at Golf Magazine got married in Hong Kong, and so perhaps he would enjoy this series.

In a plot straight out of a chick flick, an American girl in Italy met a local leather goods dealer who took her on a ride on his motorcycle.

Their picture is lovely in print but then I looked at it online and he appears to be wearing an unfortunate necklace that looks to be either a) a shark tooth or b) his name written on a piece of rice and put in a tiny jar. I hope it's B.

This week's face-off pits two Harvard pairs against one another in a long race to the middle.

Rachel Lu and Jimmy Gao

The couple "met at Harvard, from which they received law degrees": +9
They are a power-lawyer pair in Hong Kong: +2
Their wedding was at an estate in Hawaii and officiated by "a Church of Eternal Light" minister: +1
The bride graduated from Yale: +1

TOTAL: 13

Elizabeth Kaplow and David Hammer

"The bride and the bridegroom graduated cum laude from Harvard, where they met": +9
The bride is at Mount Sinai med school: +1
The groom works for Google, which will one day own us all: +1
The groom's mother is named Phyllis: +∞

TOTAL: ∞.

Anyway, the REAL winners are the couple in this wedding story. May you all meet your future spouses while tossing plush cows from rafters!

If you get married over Christmas though, I will end you.

I don't know why, but the first thing my eye was drawn to in the Weddings and Celebrations section this weekend was the where-are-they-now "State of the Unions" piece on Susan Orlean and her husband John Gillespie. Having been exposed to Orlean's mildly batty Twitter ramblings, I guess I was looking forward to some gems.

But the article was boring and the only minor chuckle came from the juxtaposition of this line:

After the release, the real Ms. Orlean spent a lot of time explaining that, unlike her onscreen doppelganger [Meryl Streep], she was not a drug addict and didn't sleep with her sources.

With the immediately adjacent "It's Complicated" movie poster, with its chilling post-coital rendering of Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep. God, so much Meryl sexing in one morning! That saucy little minx. Who knew?

ANYWAY, this whole time I was vaguely aware that on the other of the article there was a wedding picture with three heads in it, one smaller than the rest. "That's nice," I thought. "Probably some whole story involving adopting or inheriting a kid. I'll get to that in a sec."

EXCEPT IT WAS THIS:

Jesus, New York Times. You win. You always do. Also, can I have your recipe for eggnog? Thanks in advance.

The two people in that picture who are not Buddy The Elf are Jessie Fuller and Peyton Brodnax DeWitt Rodgers, who goes by Buck. Her freelance company is called "Glass Half Fuller" and his dad started a math-puzzle writer fan club, and how can you argue with either of those things? Really, their story is so charming and their personalities in this video (which also gets bombed by Will Ferrell) so genuine that you can't even get annoyed at them for being "a descendent of Samuel Fuller, a founder of Plymouth Colony" and "a descendent of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States." Instead you're like God Bless America, land that I love you dad!

Jessie and Buck met as production assistants on a movie called When In Rome. Since then, they've worked on a Kevin Smith/Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan collaboration called "A Couple Of Dicks" — I know — and now Buck is the PA on a film called "The Other Guys" which appears to be a buddy cop movie starting Mark Wahlberg and … well, I think you can guess.

Because I love these two, here is some free publicity for the film that started it all. It stars the Gossip Girl voice alongside Josh Duhamel and Will Arnett and can anyone tell me what Danny DeVito is doing in this trailer besides just being present in random scenes? Not that I'm complaining.

The announcement notes that when Jessie mentioned offhand that she loved Nancy Meyers, Buck made some calls and soon she was working on the set of "It's Complicated". Which I mean, I'll forgive the suspicious marketing synergies — at least they didn't drop in a line about Meryl in the missionary — because my favorite thing on Twitter last weekend was the #NancyMeyersFilmTitle hashtag. Enjoy!

While those two only first met back in March, the union of Aretha Davis and Angelo Volandes was a much longer time coming. The pair met as Harvard freshmen in 1989 but did not begin dating until she lost the glasses and let down her hair, obviously. Shortly after graduation he dumped her, feeling that "it was prudent for them to stay focused on their studies, law for her and medicine for him." They didn't speak for six years. :(

But they ran into each other again and got back together, and because he's Greek this means that there are a lot of references in the article to odysseys, and when they finally got engaged last year they decided to hold their wedding in an orphanage in India and ask for donations in lieu of gifts, so we get a touching — if maybe somewhat emotionally manipulative? — and gorgeous slideshow filled with photos like this.

Those two marriages sort of suck all of the air out of the room this weekend, but I want to give a shootout to Heidi Howard and Brett Allen of the Bates College staff for being the quintessential New England Campus Couple.

If you've ever been to boarding school or a liberal arts college, you know the types: they are young and athletic; they look great in Patagonia; they are beloved faculty members and coaches who ultimately have adorable mopheaded children who run around the quad and are babysat by half of the adoring field hockey team. Their lives are so perfect that I'm surprised some women's magazine hasn't suggested moving to a small New Hampshire school as a Way To Meet Men.

Elsewhere this weekend: a bride helps mold young innocent kindergartners into sneering and spoiled Buckley Boys; these two are the median composite of how I imagine Palo Alto;

and a medical student weds a NASA contracted instructor who saved up all his money at age 14 to buy a telescope and who "always knows so much about space and dinosaurs."

And now, on to this week's face-off.

Jessica Maier and Nick Camerlenghi

• The couple was married at the Memorial Church at Harvard University by a Harvard chaplain: +1
• The bride is keeping her name: -1
• The bride graduated from Brown and the groom from Yale: +7
• The bride has an art history PhD from Columbia while the groom has a master's in architectural studies from MIT and a PhD in art and archaeology from Princeton: +9
• Both bride and groom are professors, she at Tulane and he at Louisiana State: +1
• The brides parents are history professors at Harvard and MIT: +1
• The groom's father is an anesthesiologist: +1
• "The couple met in Rome in 2004 while researching their dissertations": +1

TOTAL: 21

Elizabeth Grenfell and Grant Quasha

• The couple are both Wall Street associates, she at Merrill Lynch and he at JP Morgan: +2
• The bride earned her MBA at Columbia: +4
• The groom "graduated cum laude from Harvard, from which he also received an MBA": +8
• The bride's mother owns a fashion accessory company callused "Empress Duchess & Tart": +1
• The bride's mother is the chairwoman of Lenox Hill Neighborhood House: +1
• The bride's father is the founder of investment firm Quadrant Management: +1
• "The bridegroom's maternal grandfather, William J. Ronan, was "the first chairman of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey": +3
• The couple got married in Jackson Hole the week before Christmas. Can we discuss this? Sure, she's from Denver, but he's from New York. It's hard to get to Jackson Hole from New York! There are no nonstop flights that I know of. So people had to take connecting flights, many of which were probably cancelled cause of the snow, but even if the weather had cooperated that's really asking a lot! Whatever, all the guests probably took their private jets anyway or just took the whole week off to launch themselves off of Corbet's Couloir (a metaphor for marriage?) and then hang out at the Mangy Moose. So: +1

TOTAL: 21

When will Will Ferrell make a skiing movie, anyway?

It Begins With a Whimper.

I got the following dispatch from Ms. Nefler earlier this morning.

From: Phyllis Nefler [redacted]
Date: December 13, 2009 [Redacted]:33 AM EST
To: Foster Kamer
Subject: Altarcations Vacations.

I think I'm going to pass on doing a full fledged Altarcations today. i got up early and everything, but the couples put me to sleep and i think i'd just rather deal with my raging hangover by laying by the pool instead. Just to show you that i actually tried to do this and failed, here are some thoughts for you to post. Also would be happy to do like, an IM exchange with you or something. Just call me if I'm not online.

Um, except: no. Nobody no-call no-shows these weekends, especially when I've been running around in the rain screaming for the ISP gods to restore my connection. So we did this over IM, and I had to deal with my first weddings analysis. We will never do this again, I promise.

The Altarcations Locker Room. No Robert Woletzs Allowed.

For the record, this is how it normally goes. Onward.

Too Many Rappers, Not Enough Rap. Too Many Dresses, Not Enough Brides.

Phyllis: This is the stupidest article I have ever read, and I say that as a person who spent the entirety of the JetBlue flight down here watching a Say Yes To The Dress marathon on the little TV.

FEK: Explain to me the concept of buying multiple wedding dresses. Big "what the fuck" there, yeah?

Phyllis: It's one thing to wear a crazy gown for the ceremony/photos and then change into a kicky little cocktail dress for the reception. I have plenty of friends who have done that. But who is buying like, multiple Monique Lhulliers? It makes me feel sad because I feel like they're compensating for something else, like they don't want to get married, or they want to get married waaaay too much, and it's manifesting itself in these weird compulsions. The people who are doing this are clearly the same people featured on My Super Sweet 16 who rotate three different outfits at one party but spend the whole time crying backstage because their limo pulled up to the clurrrrb ten minutes behind schedule. If you can't settle on one dress, how can you settle on one MAN? Warning sign, Foster. Just please don't date any of THOSE girls.

FEK: Why? Because their inability to commit to a dress automatically makes them promiscuous girls?

Phyllis: Not promiscuous per se, but like, do they really know what they WANT? I think I've mentioned this in Altarcations before but on Say Yes To The Dress they always counsel an indecisive bride: "If you like this dress, stop looking. When you found your man, you stopped looking, right?" Some women just maybe never stop looking : (

Bang on a Drum.

Phyllis: This announcement includes the sentence "It's a bronze gong with no membrane, so technically it's not a drum." I'll show YOU a bronze gong with no membrane but you'll have to buy me dinner first. Or something?

FEK: They're going to play music together. But, like, tribal music? DO NOT WANT. They're gonna be the first couple to have kids telling them to stop banging on shit.

Phyllis: Their kids will rebel by playing ... tennis.

Necessity's Mother (In-Law)

Phyllis: I didn't realize people still listed their occupations as "inventor" anymore. I kind of dig it.

FEK: "The bridegroom's father is the president of Martack Corporation, a heating and air-conditioning contractor in New Hyde Park, N.Y. The bridegroom's mother works there as an accountant." Come on. You know that's a front.

Phyllis: It's like those stores in Nolita that only sell newsboy caps - I don't trust them.

FEK: If I told a girl's parents I was an "inventor," they'd look at me like I had just lit up a bowl of East New York's finest crack rock in their living room. I'm better off telling them I'm a blogger.

Phyllis: This is 2009, there is nothing left to invent unless your name is Steve Jobs.

FEK: Wonder if he gives his In-Laws Apple prototypes just to get them off his ass.

Phyllis: He invented LoJack - do you think he has a beef with whatever dudes invented The Claw?

FEK: Do you mean The Club?

Phyllis: YES...Shut up, who even has cars in New York anyway?

FEK: : /

The Holocaust Giggles of Love

Phyllis: I need to start keeping track of Rosalie R. Radomsky's kickers, because this one is a perfect example of the genre: "After she said yes, they ate s'mores." Sorry, should have put a *SPOILER ALERT*. Also, on their first date they went to a reading of Holocaust victim names. They are so Jewish that they needed TWO rabbis to participate at their wedding.

FEK: These two. I'm a little verklempt, here. Questions: 1. Was Rosalie "The R. is for Random" Radomsky stoned?

Phyllis: Dude, let's hope so. I would pay ANY AMOUNT OF MONEY to get high with the Rose. You know she can obviously blow a mean smoke ring. "After she said yes, they ripped the bong."

FEK: Yeah, I was kind of waiting for that shoe to drop, too. Jewish kids love getting high, especially around the high holidays, dumb unintended pun aside. Also: can we just go over the whole Yom HaShoah date again? First of all, using Holocaust victims to seal the deal: nice. Second: marshmallows are not at all Kosher. Upper West Side Yids are such Culture Jews. I love 'em: wear it when it looks good.

Phyllis: I liked how as they walked home from their romantic genocide retrospective the first thing they discussed was raising a family. She's going to make a great Jewish mother someday. I felt guilty just READING it.

FEK: I'm impressed. I love them. Kinda wanna be them.

Victory by TKO? Matt Taibbi's Dental Work.

Phyllis: This couple wins hands down.

FEK: Nope. I want points. Essplain.

Phyllis: The couples for scoring suck this week. These are all the most budget couples ever! Okay, this one:

Lindsey Cobbett, Timothy Madden.

I mean, who cares about the Federal Power Commission or being a descendant of some "English polemicist" — what is that, like Matt Taibbi with bad teeth? — what gets me is this line: "She is a daughter of Elizabeth N. Lowery and William E. Cobbett (Jesus!), both of Wallingford, Conn. She is a stepdaughter of Watson Lowery Jr. All three are on the faculty at Choate Rosemary Hall, the preparatory school in Wallingford." AWKWARD FACULTY MEETINGS MUCH? Also, I just realized I went to Yale with the bride's sister. Sigh.

FEK: So,
+10 For a Yale familymember friend of yours and then
+5 for being a descendant of some "English polemicst." That's how it works, yeah?

Phyllis: I don't think the bride went to Yale. Just the sister. Ali Cobbett.

FEK: You ever get high with her?

Phyllis: No, she was a senior when I was an underclassman and my friend was on the soccer team with her. She was the captain.

FEK: Fine, only +7, which means
Total: 12.

Phyllis: Sure.

FEK: Next!

Unfortunately, as you can tell, there was no next, though we tried our hardest to get to these guys. Congratulations to all the happy couples and all that shit. We're never doing this again. Ever.

In any good Nancy Meyers romantic comedy or Michael Bay explosion disaster there comes a point when two characters who have circled each other suspiciously throughout the film have an unexpected moment of alignment that with any luck allows them to fall in love or fight the aliens.

Today this happened between me and Vows. The spotlighted love story between Stephen Davis and Jeffrey Busch is as elegant a fuck you to the New York State Senate as the impeccably-mannered Weddings section is capable of issuing. Let's hope the point is taken.

The two men, now 58 and 46, met twenty years ago when Busch was in town from Boston and eyed (literally: "His gaze was so steady, and his eyes were warm. They looked at me like they knew me") Davis at a restaurant bar.

After dating long distance for two years the pair ultimately realized that "the glow" was "never, never passing" and in 1991 Busch moved into Davis's apartment and "did all the cooking and brought home all kinds of homeless things, like 60 abandoned potted trees from a nearby office that had closed." Wacky cohabitation stories need not be heteronormative, let the record show!

Seven years ago, the pair had a son, Elijah, after selecting an egg donor that described herself as a "personal trainer and prom queen" (around the same time, as far as I can tell, Busch also served as a the "donor dad" to his best friend Monica Pearl's daughter) and in 2004 the couple were among a group who sued Connecticut for the right to marry.

Just over a year ago, their lawsuit ended in victory. And so:

I would be doing you, and this couple, and so many of my own beloved friends a great disservice to simply reproduce in this space the two lines near the end of the article that absolutely destroyed me, so please, go read the full thing for yourself.

It's been a week that's made me worry. The way we paw with frenzy at new people and their stories makes us run the risk of turning things like Diane Savino's searing candor on the State Senate floor into instant memes ("Do you go out and drink margaritas and do karaoke with your gay friends?") rather than resonating challenges. But we mean well, most of us, and I hope this week my native state can give me some of that old Jersey pride.

***

A bunch of Ephmen got married this weekend. This sounds like maybe it has to do with gays too but actually it's just the unfortunate team name for teensy liberal arts powerhouse Williams College, a fact you did not know because you are a vulgar state school oaf. In addition to Ralph Lauren bedding designer and Blackstone M&A associate Caitlin McGauley and Christopher Yamamoto, two notable couples feature grooms who graduated from the hallowed halls of the "Potted Ivy".

The first is seventy-something pair Anne Oliver (love the Lesley Stahl-esque lipstick!) and Robert Schumacher, the groom a great-grandson of the man whose oat-flaking innovation led to the formation of the Quaker Oats company. Oliver and Schumacher first met in 1956 when she attended his wedding to her Vassar classmate Mary Montgomery; they reconnected twenty years later when their children were all students at New York prep school Trinity. For decades, the two couples remained dinner party friends.

Both widowed over the past few years, Oliver and Schumacher began to accompany each other to concerts and plays and last summer found themselves missing each other fiercely as they sat apart in summer houses in the Hamptons and Cape Cod and began an "old fashioned courtship" except with email instead of letters.

Independent film producer Noah Harlan also went to Williams. He married Micol Ostow, author of YA novels like Emily Goldberg Learns to Salsa and So Punk Rock (and Other Ways to Disappoint Your Mother), both titles which sound so much better than anything I've read recently with the notable exception of Jonathan Tropper's This Is Where I Leave You, which you should all pick up immediately. But has anyone else noticed that YA books seem to be where all the action is these days? This generation of tweens, Miley Cyrus notwithstanding, is going to be way more chill and well-adjusted than those of us who grew up on steady diets of Sweet Valley High, that's for sure.

Harlan's mother is an author and his dad a money manager, and Ostow's grandfather was a "psychiatrist and neuroscientist who studied the psychological sources of anti-Semitism". This couple is my fave!

Other unions featured a former be-Afro'd groom;

Janet Jackson's former manager marrying a Juicy Couture marketer, which just makes such perfect sense; a couple whose announcement included a description (which made me slightly uncomfortable?) of their first kiss as employees at "Last Licks Ice Cream" while the bride "was sitting on top of the yogurt machine"; and one couple with something of a troubled track record.

There is one correction this week and in keeping with my newfound kinship with B-Wol, I'm fully sympathetic: "A headline last Sunday with a report about the Soltz-Longabardi wedding misstated the bride's gin name. It is Julie, not June." Try writing "Julie" in cursive and you'll understand yourself!

This week, our own proprietary version of the BCS:

Lara Suzanne Sullivan and Michael Damian Fontaine

• The bride graduated from Cornell and earned a joint medical degree and MBA at Penn: +8
• The groom graduated from Furman and earned an MBA from SMU: +1
• The bride is a consultant at McKinsey: +1
• The groom is a financeperson at Deutsche Bank: +1
• The brides parents are both doctors: +3
• The groom's father has a III at the end of his name: +1

TOTAL: +15

Caroline Barnet Cummings and Nicholas Kernan Rafferty

• The couple met at epicenter of privilege Trinity College: +1
• The bride is studying for an MFA in art history at NYU: +1
• The groom works at Morgan Stanley as an FX trader: +1
• The bride is "of Palm Beach" and the groom is "of New York": +2
• I thought the groom had a sweater over his shoulders but it turned out to just be a massive spread collar which was a total letdown: -1
• Let's see here. The bride is "on the boards of the Fresh Air Fund and the Lovelight Foundation in Detroit"; the father of the bride is "on the boards of the League of American Orechestras, the New York Philharmonic, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra"; the mother of the groom is "a member of the board of the National September 11 Memorial and Museum and the chairwoman of NYC & Company"; and the father of the groom is "on the board of the Visiting Nurses Service of New York": +8
• The groom's mom is the president of the Met: +2
• The bride's family has Speedway gasoline money: +1
• The couple got married at a swanky Jamaica hotel: +1

TOTAL: +16

Whatevs. You know what they say! <a href="http://fray.slate.com/discuss/forums/thread/3248426.aspx"Only boring people are [on the] board.

"The way to not end up divorced with four children is to not get married."

On this weekend in particular, this gem could have come from any number of mouths straight to your ear: the drawn, harried aunt with the sullen kids; a character played by Ray Romano on TV in the background; the gossiping blonde at your 20-year; your wisecracking grandfather, killing it.

And so to have it nestled in a Vows column is almost overkill, just one more nugget of depressing realist wisdom to top off a weekend containing many. Having spent several days discussing she and dissecting he, ducking in and out of bathrooms and judgmental conversations, and receiving advice and opinions both solicited and un, I am running low on the prying and meritophiliac stomach acids necessary to properly digest the back pages of the Sunday Styles.

So forgive me in advance. This will be quick. The NJ Transit is going to suck this afternoon. Too many Vera Bradley bags; two of them mine. [Ed. "Vera Bradley?" SHUT UP, CORNELL.]

Our preemptively single speaker, as it turns out, was film producer Kelly Macmanus, who for over 4 years periodically flaked on Jonathan Funke, a "debonair Harvard grad … who reads three daily newspapers, runs marathons and habitually quotes 'The West Wing'".

"Marla Hooch. What a hitter!"

Her excuses for stringing him along / staving off divorce involved, variously, Harrison Ford, political campaigns, Kevin Spacey, grandmother's funerals, and private planes. Maybe I need to diversify my portfolio beyond "have 2 go 2 dentist!" But at long last, after setting the mood by making jokes about urinary disorders, Funke converted in the soft glow of his office's Xerox machine.

Anyway, Macmanus's axiom is kind of the tone-setter for a weekend that features a number of folks whose previous marriages ended in divorce. Like power-divorcee yinzers Trish Ramirez and John Whitehill.

The bride comes from an ACLU lineage straight out of your high school history textbook: her father was the lead counsel in a 1962 landmark case that ended state-prescribed prayer in public schools, and her mother's father was involved in the Scopes Monkey trial. And the groom, who has been divorced twice, that old tomcat, has among many other things a masters degree in E-commerce, which reminds me: bid on the Most Important Literary Document of Our Time on eBay TODAY!

This weekend's other Depressing Truth is brought to us care of a bad blind date out in LA that admitted to Andrea Sabesin that "it was hard to settle for one person because he knew there would always be more women coming along." Excuse me while I clutch my heart and digress:

I spent a good 60% of my waking hours on Friday watching the incredibly addictive TLC series Say Yes To The Dress in my parents basement and one common refrain from the no-nonsense, over-lipliner-ed, bifocal-peering-over salesladies was this, to an indecisive bride: "Hon, choosing a dress is like choosing a man. Once you found him you stopped looking. You didn't keep looking for new men." (One girl, confused: "But he's been my only boyfriend." She didn't end up buying the dress.) But anyway, the cloudier implications of this otherwise brisk advice were too devastating for me to spend too much time considering.

Luckily for Sabesin, because she seems far too nice to be dealing with douches who would actually say that on a first date, she found Scott Mantz, the film critic for "Access Hollywood" as well as "'The Billy Bush Show' on the Westwood One radio network." I love that that's his job. And besides being a marathon runner (I think at this point the designation is implied for any man over 40 who shows up in the Times?) Mantz is also, and here comes the big reveal, a Trekkie.

"I don't need to be with someone who loves 'Star Trek', just someone who allows me to love it," explains Scott, and isn't that just it?

And so he got even better in Sabesin: someone who "surprised him by dressing up as Uhura, the "Star Trek" pinup character, much to his inner-nerd delight."

No offense to anyone, but the rest of this week's couples are kind of just happy to be here. It's kind of an awkward weekend to get married, no?

But I suppose Ana Yang and Casey Muller, a pair of Facebook employees with Harvard and MIT degrees, are much richer and more influential than I'll ever be (she was Employee #1 at FriendFeed!). I didn't need to know the gory details of their black mold "situation" though, Rosalie R. Radomsky.

And I was pretty impressed with the credentials of Jocelyn Kirsch and Evan Guggenheim — phrases like "nurse in the pediatric epilepsy clinic" and "from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology" piqued my interest — and they even had me with the parenthetical aside about grandmothers known for awesome brisket and noodle kugel. But then the last third of the announcement devolved into borderline offensive food porn the likes of which I haven't read since my middle school Spanish teacher let us watch Como Agua Para Chocolate with the subtitles on.

Anyway, I've managed to get all the topics in here: divorce, angry relatives, food porn, Star Trek, and mold. Happy Thanksgiving! In honor of family overload, this week's face-off features two couples whose parents are given no role in the announcement whatsoever.

Jillian Ellen Kannengieser and Gregory Daniel O'Mullan

• The bride graduated from Georgetown and received a joint masters in health policy, planning and financing from LSE and the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LOVE that name - so very very British): +2
• The bride received her masters in nursing at Yale: +4
• The bride works in the neonatal intensive care unit :( at New York Presbyterian: +1
• The groom graduated from Rutgers and received a master's degree in cell and developmental biology at Rutgers and UMDNJ: +1
• The groom earned a doctorate in ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton: +4
• The groom works at a research unit of Columbia University +1

TOTAL: 13

Maria Jean Trumpler and Kathryn Marie Dudley

• One bride went to Princeton and received a PhD from Yale: +7
• The other graduated from Wisconsin and received a PhD from Columbia: +5
• Ms. Trumpler is the director of the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Studies" at Yale as well as a senior lecturer in women's gender and sexuality studies: +5
• Ms. Dudley is a professor of American Studies and anthropology at Yale: +2
• She has written two grim-sounding books: +1

TOTAL: +20 oh and also a rousing middle finger to all of the relatives, including my own, that anyone may have encountered this holiday weekend who continue to approach the issue of gay marriage with such frighteningly closed minds. I would threaten that history will judge them harshly, but I'd also like to think that the people who will be looking back in retrospect are the same ones who today manage to avoid such binary forces of thought.

In other words, NEVER eat the piece of pie I was saving ever again.

It was a clear black night, a big first date

Walter G was in the sheets, tryna consummate

His skirt for the eve, but she left in a huff

Rollin on his side, chillin all alone.

He hit the East Side, up to old Club D's

on a Mission tryna find Mrs. Walter G

Seen a group full of girls, pals from Trinity

All those skirts knew what up with IBD.

Oh, sorry about that! You caught me right in the middle of working on a toast for an old pal from tennis camp who is getting married soon. I thought in lieu of a graceful anecdote about the fun we shared at Windridge back in the late 80's I'd call him out via "verse" about the night he first roofied his fiance.

Because did you know that there is "a growing collection" of wedding toasts that are "sung, or even rapped"? It's true: an editor at Brides.com used to hear about this five times a year, and now it's three to five times a month! It's all the fault of YouTube, or the fact that we were "raised on" Family Guy, even though Family Guy first aired in 1999 and so anyone who was "raised" on it is currently like 14 years old.

But I digress. I'm more worried about the woman whose friend decided to base her toast on "'Eleanor Rigby' by the Beatles because that is her favorite song." Yeah, she changed the words, but do you really want people on your wedding day reminded of something whose original lyrics include phrases like "all the lonely people", "buried along with her name", and "no one was saved"?

Anyway, I'm just amped because I don't have to change the …getting' high like every day lyric for my friend's toast! This is going to be great. I can't wait to be a YouTube sensation.

***

One thing is for sure: the wedding of Bess Rattray and Paul Gartside should be soundtracked by a choral arrangement of Cape Breton Lullaby (anyone else have to sing that song in seventh grade chorus?) This wedding announcement is interesting beause it somehow miraculously manages to combine East Hampton, sailing, and Vogue magazine in a not-annoying way.

Rattray, a "freelance magazine editor in Shelburne, Nova Scotia" and the scionne of the East Hampton Star publishing family that is "one of the oldest in East Hampton and includes several generations of whalers" was taking a sailing class in Maine while there to write an article for Vogue. Everything about that last sentence makes you jealous, admit it! Looking to find someone to chaperone her on a sailboat, she found "laconic Welshman" Paul Gartside, a naval architect who was teaching a class on boat design.

Several days later, after Gartside invited Rattray to join him in a regatta, they parted ways and he returned to Vancouver Island. But seriously, fuck you youngs and your sexting: you're not going to seal the deal unless you actually seal an envelope:

Neither believed their interaction was more than a brief flirtation, but after returning home they each received a note from the other expressing great pleasure in their meeting.

The notes crossed paths in the mail, and three months later it was Mr. Gartside who crossed the continent as he embarked on a different kind of voyage.

How baller is that? They got married in Nevis. They really don't make freelance writers the way they used to. And last year they adopted an Ethiopian baby. Someone needs to acquire the film rights to these people. I'm seeing Meryl, or maybe Emma Thompson, I'm seeing John Slattery in a fisherman's sweater …

Mia Feldbaum and Mark McGoldrick also met over water sports, only in this case it was a canoe trip in the Yukon territory and one of them was paralyzed from the waist down.

The "combustible fuel of alcohol, drugs, and trouble" of McGoldrick's adolescence left him paralyzed (there's a copy editing error in the lede of the Times piece, see if you can spot it) but also inspired him to travel the world and graduate cum laude from Harvard Law. The pair met when Mia was leading the 800-mile canoe trip — "Mark and Mia met tough," remarked Mia's father. "They had grizzlies, floods, mud, big snags in the river."

The couple survived all those things, and also survived this small bit of creepinees:

When the canoe trip ended, the group boarded a van headed to Edmonton, Alberta, where Mr. McGoldrick would depart.

"She's driving through the night and everyone else behind us is sleeping," he recalled. "I was reciting poetry to her, very softly."

Unclear on whether it was the poetry of a wedding toast RAP.

Moving on, guess how old this woman is!

Freaking SIXTY. I mean, not bad, right!? I want what she's having, even if what she's having is minimally invasive.

That's Susan Mendik, who is really short and loves golf and one time she got stuck in Palm Beach, where she winters, on Valentine's Day in a snowstorm and she ended up meeting up with Moe Tarkinow, whom she had been fixed up with previously, and the proposal story kind of confuses me because I guess he had custom chopsticks printed up with with the name Suzy Tarkinow on them and gave them to her during her 60th birthday dinner and "the whole place erupted" but then she mentions that the next morning after she thought about it "I knew it was the right time and the right man" but does that mean she actually said "Let me think about it" at the time in front of the erupting room? Because if so, imagine how the servers must have felt!

Elsewhere this weekend, a bride named Rainbow would have a nondenominational wedding; the "founder of PhemPhat Productions, an entertainment company in Toronto that promotes women in hip-hop and produces the annual Honey Jam concert" must really have gotten all the good wedding toasts; I know it's traditional but I still think it's awkward for just the bride to pose for a picture; this man, as far as I can tell, loitered at college bars looking for younger women … and it worked!; this mother of the bride is named Phyllis Meller and she is a wedding planner - email me, Phyllis, so I can interview you!; and this bride is an aggregate composite sketch of what every dietician I have ever met looks like.

Oh, and I'm not going to watch the video this week, although I do admit that the teaser in the print section of the paper telling me that "Mr. Buxton later proposed over a rigged game of Boggle."

This week's matchup:

Emily Theriault and Luca Laino

• The couple were married at The Racquet and Tennis Club in New York, a fancy club where old men swim and then pad down the hallways totally in the nude: +2
• The couple met at Dartmouth where they both received MBAs: +7
• Both are investment bankers: +2
• The bride is a VP and the groom is an associate: -1
• The groom's father is an opthalmology professor at Cornell medical school: +1
• The groom went to Camp Trin Trin: +1

TOTAL: 12

Helen Bailey and Farhad Manjoo

The bride graduated magna cum laude from Yale and received a medical degree at UC-Davis: +7
The groom graduated from Cornell: +3
The groom writes about Facebook and Kindles and Y2K for Slate (his advice on blogging: "Don't expect instant fame" and "Don't worry if your posts suck a little". Duly noted!): +2
I am a Slate fangirl: +1
The bride's father is a senior Lockheed Martin engineer: +2
They both wear power-nerd glasses: +2

TOTAL: 17. I just want to know what password Manjoo uses for his registry.

It's finally happened. I've spotted a trend. I feel winking and sleuthy and knowingly with-it. I'm a cross between Rene Russo in The Thomas Crown Affair and Allen Salkin. I'm available for freelance work.

You ready for this?

Horseradish.

The root plant, part of the same family as mustard and wasabi, is a delicious addition to the Bloody Mary you are drinking right now, an important part of Passover, and an alleged aphrodisiac. (Gardening website Planet Natural is appropriately blasé on that last point: "It was also used by the Romans as an aphrodisiac. Although, what didn't they use as an aphrodisiac?")

It is also a trend. Thrice between this week and last, horseradish has been spotted in the wedding announcements in one form or another. And three is a trend, and thus it is so.

Last week, Melissa Johnson and Timothy Lagasse drank horseradish-infused vodka on their first date and ultimately held the condiment so dear to their union that they downed shots of same vodka at the altar.

For this week's featured couple Laura Strauss (of the Farrar, Straus & Giroux Strauses) and John Alexander, the horseradish plays a slightly more tangential but no less important role, appearing in a list of several vodka flavors served by the couple at their reception. Vodka because in Soviet Russia, shots take you:

Ms. Straus has, according to friends, a Russian soul. She is "a person of ‘strast,' of passions," said Paul Greenberg, a friend and the author of a love story partly set in Russia.

(I like Paul Greenberg's set of credentials there, by the way. Replace Russia with Brooklyn and everyone's an expert.)

Straus's Russian Soul's online dating page, which contained "lesser-known lines from Shakespeare's Sonnet 116", caught the Oxford-educated Alexander's attention, and the two hit it off on their first date when she learned he had studied Russian in boarding school.

Straus continued to date others, to the dismay of Alexander, but later we learn this probably wasn't the worst idea given the small detail that his divorce didn't become final until a year and a half after their first date.

Anyway then they got into some real Russian culture:

Inspired by a Russian friend, the couple became regulars at a Russian-style bathhouse in Lower Manhattan, where he and Ms. Straus would whack each other with supple oak branches, a method of stimulating circulation.

Supple and stimulating! Rosalie R. Radomsky, you naughty former news aide.

The largest manufacturer of prepared horseradish in the United States is Gold's, a kosher condiment company based in Hempstead, NY. That's "Gold's" as in newlywed Melissa Gold, the fifth generation of her family to work at the company.

Gold met her husband Adam Gottlieb "the old-fashioned way – set up by their maternal grandmothers, who were in the same Yiddish club at their retirement community in Monroe Township." (I'll just point out that a photograph of her "surrounded by the company's line of mustards in squeeze bottles" was involved in that particular meeting of the minds.)

After some charming fumbling and bumbling on the first few dates the couple finally became serious after Passover, much to the great delight of their sweet bubbes. It took until then, notes the Times parenthetically, because Passover was "Ms. Gold's busy season with stepped-up horseradish production."

I suppose while we're mentioning trends I'm contractually obligated to stifle a yawn at the "Field Notes" article about cougars.

You may wonder why the Times is returning to a topic that it already covered (twice!) a month ago. I guess now the "cubs" are pursuing the "cougars" and not the other way around, based on some anecdotal evidence about attendence at a couple of cougar speed dating events and cougar cruises? I dunno, my biggest takeaway was that Benjamin Franklin liked sexing the older ladies because they were "so grateful!"

The cougarticle was made all the more random by the fact that the biggest older woman-younger man age gap in any of the adjacent wedding announcements was one year. On the other hand, bring on the intergenerational gays! Andre Caraco and David Azulay have 12 years in between them, William Gorman and Joseph Nardone are 15 years apart, and James Godfrey and Gregory Miller are separated by 17. Who's the trend piece writer now?

Elsewhere this weekend, Donald Rumsfield's speechwriter and special assistant entered into a second union of lies; this bride has the most random (and thorough!) set of freelance assignments that I've ever seen listed in one announcement; I'm still trying to figure out a way to weasel myself into a Birthright trip; a decorated major in the Army got a nice homecoming; if your iPod keeps breaking you have this guy to blame; and Roger from the final cast of Rent is lightin' some candles of his own.

This week's faceoff is not even a contest, just to make that clear right up front. But while the runner-up couple might not have stood a chance against the winning powerhouse couple in the conventional points system, they have healthy power-Brooklyn cred. I can say this because I once wrote a love story based partly in Brooklyn. In my head.

Lauren Arana and Jesse Weinraub

• The bride graduated cum laude from Vassar: +3
• The bride received a master's in nonprofit and NGO leadership at Penn: +4
• The bride grew up in Brooklyn: +1
• The bride's mother is an education director at Berkeley Carroll School: +2
• The bride's father is an architect: +2
• The groom went to Wesleyan, the most annoying liberal arts school in the US: +10
• The groom works in the documentary department at HBO: +2
• The groom's dad is former New York Times Hollywood institution Bernard Weinraub: +2
• The groom's mom is former Washington Post food reporter Judith Weinraub: +2
• The bride is keeping her name: +1

Total Power-Brooklyn Points: 29

Lisa Rockefeller and Edward Sebelius

• The bride graduated cum laude from Princeton and received an MBA at Dartmouth: +8
• The groom graduated from Georgetown, from which he also received a law degree, and received a master's degree in public administration from Harvard: +6
• The couple was married at the Gasparilla Inn in Boca Grande by an Episcopal priest: +2
• "The bride is a descendant of William A. Rockefeller Jr., who with his brother John D. Rockefeller were among the founders of the Standard Oil Company": +3
• On the other hand, William A. is no John D.: -1
• "His mother is the secretary of Health and Human Services. Until May, she was the governor of Kansas.": +3
• I have an insane crush on Kathleen Sebelius and her hair of blinding perfection: +2
• No seriously, she must have looked so good at the wedding: +1
• The bridegroom's maternal grandfather is a former governor of Ohio, his paternal grandfather was a congressman who represented western Kansas, and his dad is a federal magistrate judge: +5
• The couple met in Iowa in 2003 while working on John Kerry's campaign: +2
Total New American Monarchy points: 31

My only issue is that I'm bummed the Times didn't take full advantage of the whole meeting-on-the-Kerry-campaign. Because really, they totally could have worked in this.

Yesterday I was having brunch with a newly married couple in Park Slope—by the way, I know it's cliche and sooo Curbed comment section circa 2006 to mention how many kids there are in Park Slope, but sweet Jesus there are so many [Ed. goddamn] kids in Park Slope!—and they presented to me a piece of paper that may forever change the way I view politics and love forever.

The document was enclosed in an official-feeling folder of heavy navy blue stock embossed with a giant raised seal of the Borough of Brooklyn that features a woman holding a hatchet which: hahahah Park Slope Mom amirite? Inside the folder was basically a cross between the Certificate of Participation that you get in third grade rec soccer or maybe after you finish a Lamaze class, I wouldn't know, and a Blingee if you were to print it out with a dot matrix printer. I think there were still a few places where they hadn't fully ripped off the perforated margins.

The paper solemnly stated: "President of the Borough of Brooklyn MARTY MARKOWITZ Congratulates [name of the couple, rendered in cursive font] on the Occasion of your wedding." Surrounding the text was, no joke, clip art images: cupid, wedding cakes, hearts, a lil groom, what have you, and then most hilariously a right-click-copy-alt-tab-right-click-paste'd picture of the couple cribbed straight from their New York Times announcement.

!!!!!!!!

Seriously, is this a thing that someone from the Brooklyn Borough President's office actually does? Does Marty make it himself!? Do only NYT weddings with right-clickable photos earn the honor? I tried Googling the phenomenon but it was hard to figure out what search terms to input and also I suspect that the real dirt is only to be found in bridal "forums" and you couldn't pay me enough.

But if you've received or ever even heard of one of these glorious mailings please let us know. Maybe I need to assign John Cook to the case STAT.

***

Last week we discussed couples' treatments of Halloween but wow, this couple really took the holiday and ran with it ... I'm kind of scared.

This is not the bride and groom, but I bet they had some wild superhero sex later that night.

Melissa Johnson, "known for her sardonic humor and love of dark, gory films and burlesque" was surprised when she fell for chipper Timothy Lagasse, an "endlessly upbeat designer and fabricator of puppets" who works for shows like Sesame Street. (Dude, what is the Times' deal with the Sesame Street hard-on? Also, hello perverts who found this page by Googling Sesame Street hard-on! You may want to go read this Vanity Fair article before it's too late.)

She became smitten when Lagasse came into her office and told her everything he knows "about puppets, film, food, politics, monkeys and the world all at once." Wait, monkeys? Whatever, they were both involved in relationships at the time but then at another later time they were no longer both involved in relationships and so they got together and then "tested one another's mettle" with trips to Disney World followed by a trip to Morocco in which she refused to book hotel rooms just so she could make sure "he could travel in the Third World."

He proposed to her in a graveyard ("one of their favorite spots in Brooklyn" and this was their wedding:

James Godwin, a Universal Life minister, performance artist, painter and puppeteer, officiated at the ceremony, during which the couple slipped on wedding bands and announced, "With this ring, I mark you mine!" They then downed shots of horseradish vodka and smashed a pumpkin to symbolize their union.

Weird vodka shots and smashed pumpkins? If that's all it takes, I think a lot more of you might be married than you let on. It's like when you go to some unpronounceable country and accept a free necklace from a street vendor and now technically he can sell you for drugs.

If there's one thing the Times enjoys more than Sesame Street staffers it is old people, and Nancy Kelton and Jonathan Zich do not disappoint. Kelton's dive back into the ole dating pool post-marriage was so traumatic that it inspired her to write this book, with chapters like:

• Lawyers and Other Orators From Hell
• Shrinks and Other Psychopaths
• Men with Addictions, Ambivalence, and Wives They Have Not Quite Divorced
• Men Whose Libidos Are in Rest Homes

And that was in 1995! Imagine the horror that The Internet brought into the mix. "An abundance of certifiable loons" is how Kelton charitably described J-Date. And so you can imagine that when she finally met a seemingly normal guy, she took all the necessary precautions on their first date:

"I fired away questions," she said. "Really creepy ones. About his health and the health of his parents, whether they had cancer or problems with their hearts, and if he ever had a colonoscopy."

To be fair, at least she didn't make him talk about all his exes! I hear that really turns people off.

Christopher Knott-Craig was equally smooth the first time he met Nichole Stelma. The couple "met at an ATM machine in the basement of an Oklahoma City hotel," and I am going to cancel my subscription to Cosmo right now because they NEVER have put that on their list of 101 Unexpected Places To Meet Men! Knott-Craig noticed Stelma because she was wearing "huge sunglasses in a basement with no windows". So he went in for the kill:

Ms. Stelma remembered that he said, "My, it sure is bright in here!" Ms. Stelma knew the man who was with Mr. Knott-Craig and tried to talk to him instead.

"She didn't pay any attention to me when I was making fun of her," Mr. Knott-Craig said. "I thought he was cute," she said. "He looked like a little surfer boy so I was trying to act like I was too cool for him."

That whole exchange reads much better when you voice it with the sort of thick and dopey Southern accents befitting two people who hail from Alabama and "Sugar Land, Texas".

I just want to highlight this couple because they're so pretty.

Doesn't she look just like Kate Bosworth? Blue Crush era Kate Bosworth, just to be clear, before Kate Bosworth became a scary skeleton?

Elsewhere this weekend, the wedding of the executive vice president of Princeton University reminded me to go back and read this epic Chris Rovzar report from a night at Princeton ("The party was like any regular Yale party, except without hard liquor, dancing, minorities, or jeans"); keep a close eye on any mysterious umbrella-related injuries befalling the lead in Mary Poppins is all I'm saying; a dissertation fellow at the Brown Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America went for extra credit with a wedding that "incorporated Hindu, Jewish and Muslim traditions"; and you can rest easy: Dr. Jupiter is keeping her name.

And now, you know the drill.

Margaret Claire Hoover and John Phillips Avlon

• The groom graduated from Yale and received an MBA from Columbia: +7
• The groom is on the board of the Bronx Academy of Letters and the CItizens Union of New York: +1
• The groom is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute: +1
• The groom is a columnist at the Daily Beast: -1
• The bride's father is a real estate-y guy and "a trustee of the George S. Patton Museum Foundation and his mother is a trustee at the Trinity Pawling School: +3
• The bishop of Florida "took part": +2
• The bride is "a great granddaughter of Herbert Hoover, the 31st president of the United States" and, predictably, "on the board of overseers of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and on the board of the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library Association": +3 (would be more, but I mean, the Hoovervilles and all)
• The groom wrote a book called "Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics": +2
• The groom is a liar, because his wife is a Fox News commentator who worked for the White House from 2004 to 2005 AND he himself was "the chief speechwriter and the deputy director of policy for the presidential campaign of Rudolph W. Giuliani": -10
• The groom kinda looks like Jon Gosselin in this pic: +0

TOTAL: 8

Christine Angele Pace and Andrew Lee Ellner

• Both doctors: +3
• "The bride She graduated [sic] summa cum laude from Williams College and received her medical degree from Harvard": +6
• The groom graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he also received his medical degree: +10
• The groom also holds a master's in science from London School of Economics: +2
• The bride's mother is a hospital chaplain and her father retired as a reporter for the New York Times: +2
• The groom's father is a professor at BU and chief of infectious diseases at Boston Medical Center: +1
• The bride is rocking what appears to be a side ponytail in this picture but that seems to be, on closer inspection, one of those half-messy buns: +1, I guess, for not caring? But a true side ponytail would have been awesome.
• The bride and groom met because she was delirious and thought he was her boss and started talking to him about a patient and he thought she was cute so he let her ramble on, which come on, that's just mean, because if it were me I probably would have kept talking for like 20 minutes and maybe even started crying: +2
• Blah blah blah "volunteer work providing medical care for the homeless: +1

TOTAL: 28

I spoke last night to a dear old friend who was heading to her colleague's wedding.

"So do you have your costume packed?" I deadpanned.

She didn't take the joke. Her voice became robotic, almost fearful.

"We were specifically instructed no costumes," she recited. A chill swept through the air accompanied by swirling leaves. I shivered. "The bride does not want costumes."

Contrast this tyrannical Halloween policy with the more costume-friendly (but highly passive-aggressive) strategy favored by Annie Catherwood and Caleb Frankel. This couple's announcement, released online by the Times on Saturday morning, preemptively described their Saturday evening wedding:

The wedding ceremony was followed by a Halloween masquerade reception, with many guests in full costume.

I hope it was! In either case, can't you just imagine a militant and scowling bride, ripping off rogue bunny ears or slapping feathered masques on startled guests, depending? I hope the airline didn't mix up any of those two weddings' groomsmen's stuff is all I'm trying to say.

***

I think the greatest thing to come from the Sunday Styles cover article about a cool hip wedding band is the coinage "LOB". It stands for Level Of Brutality, and isn't that so on? I didn't know this til I read it, but it's really how I view not only weddings but the world. (The LOB of getting to the marathon in a few hours is off the charts, for example.) The geniuses behind this rubric are the rockers behind The Dexter Lake Club Band, a wedding-band-but-not that has become "one of New York's premier wedding bands for people who would never dream of hiring a wedding band."

(Apparently, Amanda Peet was one of those people.)

First of all, there wasn't a tuxedo in sight, just dark suits and skinny ties. Nobody was doing any cheesy patter. There was no horn section, no back-up singers, no creepy vocalist singing "Wonderful World." Instead, there was a floppy-haired lead singer working his way through Rolling Stones tunes; another signger, big and bearded, belting out 80s hits; and a killer rhythm section,"

The Dexter Lake Club Band comprises such members as Tim Ruedeman, a "most improbable vessel for a voice that can perfectly channel everybody from Steve Perry to Axl Rose." The "enigmatic Christian Oates" owns a smoke machine and reads the Economist, while "lank-haired Gunnar Olsen ... could be clutching a marriage license in one hand and a bride in the other and would still clearly be with the band."

And then there's frontman Matthew Stinchcomb, now married but "once notorious for enjoying the benefits of being a handsome, single man with a guitar" who once woke up post-wedding "in a closet, wearing only leather pants, his guitar abandoned outside on the gravel driveway." I can't help but think of this:

They met, of course, at Oberlin.

Brett Martin provides some of the best wedding writing I've read to date, bringing to life the "roving female vigilantes, beckoning nondancers with their demanding, accusing fingers" and "the middle-age couples who've somehow lost the connection between their upper and lower bodies and can only dance with one or the other at a time." (I can assure you from personal experience that it isn't just the middle-aged who can fall victim to that particular affliction.)

The piece was so enjoyable that it compelled me to Google Martin; lo and behold, Ancient Gawker was on the case, care of Mascot Emeritus Andrew Krucoff. My only quibble with Martin is that he doesn't mention the provenance of the band's name:

We are gonna die.

So maybe it's my hangover and/or my lingering animosity toward the amateur hour that was last night, but good god this weekend's weddings SUCK BALLS. The lone exception is the featured union of Gita Pullapilly and Aron Gaudet, which made me cry.

I'd say yes to THAT dress.

Pullapilly (that name is a delight; it makes me think of this) met Gaudet when he was bored with his production job and looking for a change. The pair wanted to create a documentary but lacked a fitting subject until it dawned on them that Gaudet's elderly mother would be the perfect inspiration.

The 70-year old Joan Gaudet, you see, had taken up a new pastime: "driving herself to Bangor International Airport as part of a group of Maine residents who greet every soldier passing through that airport on their way to or from Iraq and Afghanistan." The article describes her waking up to a 2am phone call and driving to cheer on a plane of returning troops alongside "30 other elderly greeters."

The resulting movie about the Maine Troop Greeters was called "The Way We Get By" and here's the website and the tagline is "Sometimes all it takes is a handshake to change a life" and the Washington Post called it "not so much a slice of life as the whole pie, the highs and lows of twilight living" and oh my god I'm crying again.

It gets better: at one screening of the film, the audience learned that the couple, engaged but having sunk their savings into making the documentary, did not have any wedding plans. A wedding planner in the crowd was touched and "helped mobilize a small army of vendors to freely give the couple the wedding they were too weary and poor to assemble themselves." Oh, and at another screening the couple met "Joseph R. Biden, Jr":

Breaking into a smile so broad his dimple seemed permanently etched in his left cheek, the bridegroom said, "The vice president told me that he had once met a man who shook his hand, looked at Mrs. Biden and said ‘You really married up.' Without missing a beat, Mr. Biden looked at Gita, then looked at me, grinned and said, ‘You're about to marry up, boy.' "

That man is a national treasure. Here, enjoy my favorite photo.

Elsewhere in the back of the Sunday Styles a couple affirmed their commitment to wearing matching glasses; the executive producer of "I Love You, Man", "Observe and Report", and "Without a Paddle" looks exactly as you'd expect; lesbians lesbianed; and this couple is attractive but they're only 26!?

This boring week's boring matchup:

Abigail Franklin Vietor and Holland Arthur Sullivan, Jr

• The bride graduated from NYU and received a "Master of Letters" from St. Andrews (I have my Master of Letters from St. Paul's Nursery School) and a Master of Science from London School of Economics: +5
• The groom graduated from Yale: +3
• Then got his law degree at ... Baylor: +1
• The groom kind of looks like Edward Norton, no?: +1
• The bride's parents are kind of weirdly into historic reenactments: her dad is "chairman of the board of trustees at the Mystic Seaport Museum" and is the "governor of the New York Society of Colonial Wars" and her mother is "the president of the Bowne House Historical Society" and "trustee of the New York State Archives Partnership Trust": +5, and I hope there was some creepy powdered wig theme at the reception.
• The groom's dad helps the rich get richer: +1
• The wedding was officiated by an Episcopal priest: +1

TOTAL: 17

Ella Elizabeth McPherson and George Raymond Iestyn Llewellyn-Smith

• "The bride, 29, and bridegroom, 30, met at Cambridge University in England, from which they both received Master of Philosophy degrees, she in Latin American studies and he in real estate finance": +9; I like that real estate finance constitutes "Philosophy".
• The bride is also pursuing a doctorate in sociology at Cambridge and went to Princeton undergrad: +4
• The bride's father works for the International Monetary Fund and is retired from the World Bank: +2
• The groom graduated with "first-class honors" from the University of Adelaide in Australia: +only 1, because someone the other day told me that "Australia is the Alabama of the world".
• The groom's parents do Australian things in Australia: +1
• "The bridegroom wore a wedding ring that was inscribed, Halloellaween, a play on the bride's first name and Halloween: +1, and aww.

TOTAL: 18

In addition, "the couple's invitations read: 'Black tie welcome, costumes at your discretion.'" That is the second best way to have a Halloween wedding. The best way to have a Halloween wedding is don't.

Some of your entries were good, some were bad, and some were very, very ugly. We whittled it down to ten. Vote for the one you like best and it just might win. We're still going to pick our favorite anyway—this isn't American Idol, this is the real world—but popular opinion just might sway us. The poll is at the bottom. Enjoy!

"And I'm Spent..." by Kimsama

"I don't know I think it's supposed to move" by Colander

Opposites Attract by Anonymous

Balloon Boy 2 by Anonymous

"If only they had read the contract they signed, Ivanka and Jared would have been spared the humiliation of being kicked off their own dance floor for 'sexual bending.'" by Kimsama

"Such a charming wedding tradition. Imagine, though, the poors have to do it with cake!" by Kimsama

Monster Mash by Foster Kamer*

*not actually eligible to win the cash

"It's subtle..." by Anonymous

Trump Soho by Anonymous

Bachelor Party by Anonymous

It appears that a friend (or family member?) got a little close to the bartender at the couple's second reception at Manhattan's Puck Building last night and can't stop thinking about him. Like anyone obsessed with that hottie behind the bar who gives a little wink for a bigger tip, he took to Craigslist to see if he could score. Please apply a big [sic].

Bartender at Ivanka Trumps wedding celebration - m4m - 32 (SoHo)

I was with my cousin and couldnt think of what I wanted to drink. I ended up getting a JW and Coke and by the look on your face I could tell you werent a fan... well, of the drink I hope. You had on black frame glasses and black hair. You're stunning. If you remember me, what color was my tie?

If we were that bartender, we would get right to responding, because this guy has got to be rich! Any of the Kusher-Trump cronies who might be a poor, gay single would be trying to score someone with some scratch among the well-heeled attendees. Only one with his own business (trust fund? excellent job? jewelry line?) would even bother looking twice at the help. This is your Cinderella moment, anonymous bartender. Seize it!

Also: tomorrow we're picking the winner of our Javanka wedding photo contest, so you still have time to work this anecdote into your entry. Winner gets $150.

The Africa honeymoon follows Wednesday's private reception for their nearest and dearest friends, relatives and tenants — 1,000 people at the Puck Building. And even then friends may still be discussing the wedding invitations they'd received. It had a flier inside for Donald's other golf properties.

Thanks, dad. You're a real embarrassment.

We asked for attendees of yesterday's nuptials to send us their own pics when we saw the New York Post's exclusive wedding portrait this morning. After we saw the photos pop up on the websites for People, Star and PopSugar, we started making calls to find out how they got the pics, too.

A phone chain commenced. First their wedding photographer Fred Marcus Photography wouldn't tell us anything beyond "No comment." Then Steve Rubenstein (who reps both Jared and the Post) told us to call Ivanka's rep Rona Graf who told us the wedding pics are free handouts and to call Getty, which is distributing the photos. Getty, though, said that we had to promise to only use the photos for a "positive story." (That is how you get headlines like People's "FIRST PHOTO: 'Beautiful and Smart' Ivanka Trump & Jared Kushner.") This, Getty said, was on orders of a P.R. representing the couple (they wouldn't say who exactly) and since Gawker doesn't make ludicrous pledges, you'll have to go elsewhere to get your Kushner-Trump nuptial photographic fix.

So, we're starting a Gawker Contest*: We're offering $150 to the best Photoshop job on any of their handout wedding photos. Also, we'll pay the same prize to the person that sends us the best wedding photo that hasn't been released yet. Put your entries in the comments, or email us. The entire KushnerTrump clan anxiously awaits your work.

*Standard contest rules apply.

Plenty of guests must have tons of pics of the wedding. Why let the Kushner-Rubenstein-Post cabal control its entire image? If you have any wedding pics, email us—anonymity guaranteed—and we'll make our own unauthorized wedding album. The people want to see their betters in their full regalia!

Update: The conspiracy deepens! PopSugar just posted a gallery of the photos with the credit line "Photo courtesy of Brian Marcus/Fred Marcus Photography via Getty Images." When we called Fred Marcus Photography to find out who's licensing these photos, the not-very-helpful lady who picked up the phone just repeatedly said "No comment." More: Star appears to have shelled out for the pics, too.

As I would imagine her father might say, let's just cut to the bullshit and get to the point. Ivanka Trump is getting married to Jared Kushner like, right now. Depending on when you read this they might literally be clasping hands under the chuppah at this very moment. That's not even the beautiful sun you see shining out there today — it's just the reflected wattage from the two real estate scions, "lit from within by wealth and privilege".

But for all that wealth and privilege, the Times wedding announcement is kind of a hot mess! On the one hand, it's got the primo spot in print: upper left hand column, adjacent to the featured "Vows" article about a zaftig production lady who had to spend her special day with, of all people, Kelly Ripa. But there are numerous oddities. In contrast to the standard listing of names in the announcement headline, we get a complete sentence: "Ivanka Trump Weds Jared Kushner". Which is fine, (and maybe more SEO-friendly?) except the layout appears like this in print:

       Ivanka Trump
Weds Jared Kushner

So that for a moment I thought he had some secret first name and wasn't just Jared Kushner but was W. Jared Kushner. And I'm sorry but people who do the first initial thing always kind of creep me out! So that caught me off guard. Moving on, great picture (the Post has the full one; I like her outfit) but they totally didn't "arrange themselves with their eyebrows on exactly the same level and with their heads fairly close together".

Who wrote this announcement? No, I'm seriously wondering, because we need to discuss the context and grammatical decisions behind each and every sentence. First, we get a full E! Where Are They Now episode about mama Ivana, who "founded two companies in New York: Ivana Inc., which handles her speaking engagements, books and other commercial ventures; and Ivana Haute Couture, which sells jewelry, perfumes and cosmetics on television". But in contrast, information about The Donald is extremely glancing, solely relegated to the nonrestrictive clause "her father's real estate company" in a sentence about Ivanka.

Probably not surprising. But Donald gets off easy in comparison to Charles Kushner:

"The bridegroom's father, who is a founder of his family's real estate business, stepped down as the company's chairman in 2004, owing to his legal problems, and has since resumed his title."

WHAT. I get that they've already namedropped the name of the family empire earlier in the paragraph (in addition to being the publisher of the New York Observer, Jared is, casually, "a principal in the Kushner Companies") but that sentence! So catty, structured as it is so that the whole "stepping down" is the primary active verb; the meat of the sentence. Me-ouch. Given the close relationship between father and son, the language is all the more puzzling.

[Photo via New York Magazine]

I like Jared and Ivanka. They're both such pretty princesses, and say what you will about the evils of nepotism: at least they keep themselves busy. Ivanka's Twitter feed has also won me over. Just this morning she went on a hike (I really, really would love it if she subscribed to Peggy Noonan's definition of "hike", btw) and her crowdsourcing call to arms about possible wedding song selections yielded a treasure trove of suggestions, including this, which: yes.

Jesus, other people got married this weekend too, you know. Like the aforementioned Lori Schulweis, a production coordinator for the Regis and Kelly show who had the distinct fortune of having her meager love life and her weight discussed live on air all the time. That is not something that ever ends well. Finally, even the poor woman's 97-year old grandmother was like "um, have you tried match.com, dear?" Ultimately she found David Buder, who didn't mind it on their first date when she "was pulling out a picture of her dog" and "somehow the bar stool she was on tipped".

But more importantly: how annoying would it be to have Kelly Ripa as a guest at your wedding?

Here we have Madeleine Resnick and Jeffrey Novich, two lovers brought together by their love of higher education — she is the membership coordinator at the Penn Club, he a private SAT tutor — and questionably named startups:

"The bride's mother is a public relations consultant there, and is a founder of BigOoga.com, a networking site for entrepreneurs. The bride's stepfather is a financial analyst at Northern Trust Bank in Chicago.

The bridegroom, 29, is a private SAT, math, and physics totor for Bespoke Education in New York. He is also the founder of VocabSushi.com, which helps students learn vocabulary using sentences from news articles."

Good god I hate the Internet.

Elsewhere this weekend, some frightened groom has to contend with a father-in-law who was a top State Department official in Caracas, Venezuela and Chiang Mai, Thailand (oh yeah, Jack can talk Thai REAL well); this picture looks photoshopped, right? and multiple couples met at the nation's most important singles bar: Harvard.

In fact, one early-blooming power couple met even before they made their way to Cambridge! Shane Wilson and Jessica Manners — OMG yes "Ms. Manners", and you're goddamn right she's keeping that name — met when they attended one of those high school nerd camps (oh, don't roll your eyes, you know you all went to CTY at Johns Hopkins too, geeks!) to study topics like "the future of New Jersey" and, apparently, "how to talk to the opposite sex".

In the wake of the Thrillist/Jetblue (TM) World's Most Boring Scandal of 2009, I should make a full disclosure: I am not a fully objective party, having once shared a delightful brunch with Jessica and Shane that was marred only by their blatant disinterest in firing up a game of Taboo. What was up with that, guys?

And so normally I steer clear of the featured video interviews with One Lucky Couple on the Times website, because they're just a little too Christopher Guest-y for me to accept that they're real, but I made an exception in this case. And the 2ish minute mark aside — "we both got in early so ... that worked out" — this was pretty touching! As one friend put it, when you know the people involved, "it's like Altarcations, but all of the ha's are awwww's."

And really, when the groom brags to the national newspaper of record that his bride's "nose is very squishy", you kind of have to awwww. Because that, folks, is true dorky beautiful love.

[Ed. Even I emailed Phyllis the following editorial directive earlier this morning: "SQUISHY NOSES!!!11!" Of course, she was already on this. Also, even though they're not being scored: she's keeping her last name, -2, but it's "Manners," so +4. Amirite?]

This week's matchup:

Heather Elliot and Stuart Rachels

• The bride graduated from Duke, received a Master of Philosophy from Yale, and earned a law degree at Berkeley: +5
• The groom graduated summa cum laude from Emory, was a Marshall Scholar at Oxford, and earned a PhD at Syracuse: +5
• The bride was Ruth Bader Ginsburg's law clerk: +1
• Ruth Bader Ginsburg did not have any part in officiating the wedding: -1
• "In 1981, at age 11, Mr. Rachels became the youngest American chess master, a record he held until 1994": +2
• The couple are both professors: +3
• At the University of Alabama: -1
• The bride's mother had the same job as Rene Russo in Outbreak: +1

TOTAL: 15

Lindsay Levkoff, Jeffrey Lynn

• The bride graduated summa cum laude from Tennessee, earned a master's at Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar, and tacked on a Harvard MBA: +7
• The groom has a law degree from Oxford with an MBA on the way, graduated magna cum laude from Penn, and also went to law school at UVA: +9
• The groom's mother is chairwoman emeritus of the Arizona Theatre Company and his dad is on the board of trustees of the Heard Museum in Phoenix: +2
• "Ms Levkoff and Mr. Lynn may be among the few couples who can say that former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher played Cupid for them.": +1985

TOTAL: Hubba bloody hubba.

Alliterative apologies in advance, because this is going to be an abridged Altarcations.

I am vacationing in Arizona and did you know it's like impossible to find a New York Times up in here? I had to drive around in my rented Chevy Malibu for like 45 minutes just so I could find a place that would sell me the Times for SIX DOLLARS. It wasn't easy: everyone here reads (shivering) USA Today and the only place that sells the Times is Starbucks — the whole "latte-sipping, Times-reading liberal elites" thing makes SO much more sense to me now — and the first Starbucks I went to was all out, and after contemplating approaching a scary man and offering to pay him a couple of dollars just for the Styles section I decided that would be creepy and so had to go to ANOTHER Starbucks down the road. My only consolation was that on my drive back I got to think about this and giggle a lot:

Anyway, the point is that I am going to help you help me by giving you some cursory thoughts on this week's Vows for you to expand upon in the comments as/if you see fit. Let's begin.

Jessica Valenti got married. Your reaction to that sentence is a binary event: either you're like who? (likely) or you're throwing down your dogeared copy of "Sisterhood, Interrupted" in OUTRAGE and declaring whichever wave of feminism you are currently surfing to be DEAD.

Valenti, you see, is the controversial writer behind the website Feministing and several books with names like "Full Frontal Feminism" and "He's a Stud, She's a Slut". (Weirdly, I know her best from the time she got into an epic battle with Ann Althouse over this picture:

No, I'm serious, this was an actual Internet feud. You can read about it here if you're stuck inside in the New York rain and bored out of your mind.

And you can read about Valenti's OTHER controversy — her marriage — over at our sister site, which has covered it much more ably than I can. (Sample comment: "Sometimes I call my sweetie's weewee his Tool of Oppression.") Jezebel is the Daria Morgendorffer to my Quinn, you know?

Valenti married Talking Points Memo's Andrew Golis, <she wore light grey instead of white, and there was no bended-knee proposal, so don't worry, she's not a pawn of the patriarchy. Also, Golis claims to be a feminist but then says that he "has always detested 'fishy fish'" and even vomits after eating ceviche so I mean, take from that what you will.

What else. The Times has taken a few week off from their cherished storyline of old people reuniting after years and years, but the old people are back and sprightlier than ever! Leslie Sutton-Smith and Mark Blackman dated way back in 1976 when they were members of the Columbia Marching Band and she was having trouble choosing between him and his twin brother and the funny/aww thing about this announcement was that she talks about first noticing her beloved (and his twin) because they both "had red hair and beards" which as you can see ... is no longer the case.

Next we have Emily Schopick and Matthew Robinson, who have big toothy smiles and a lot of degrees and met when they stood next to one another at a food bank on "Mitzvah Day" packing donations for three hours and "managed to get some kibitzing and joking in, particularly about Spam." Sez Mr. Robinson: "I kept pretending to put things in my pockets." HA! Oh man, he's going to make a hilarious dad someday.

Balancing out the Jewiness of that last couple are Lauren Worthington and Robert Morse: "The bridegroom is a descendant of five Mayflower passengers, including William Brewster and John Alden." FIVE? Honestly, that's just embarrassing and he should be ashamed.

(Speaking of embarrassing family lineage, this correction cracked me up: "Because of an editing error, a report las tSunday about the marriage of Caroline Driscoll and Bryan Barancik referred incorrectly to Jerome I. Barancik. He is the father of the bridegroom, not the groom's maternal grandfather." Haha, can "beloved cunt" be far behind?)

Also speaking of embarrassing family lineage:

"The bridegroom is a paternal great-great-great-grandson of Justus C. Strawbridge of Philadelphia, a founder of the Strawbridge and Clothier department store in Philadelphia." Okay, now we're really reaching.

Finally, I didn't know that the plural of attorney general is "attorneys general" but now I do; this might be the most pretentiously-oddball proposal story I've ever read (spoiler alert: it involves expensive stationary); this might be the most boring how-their-relationship-evolved story with absolutely NO payoff that I've ever read (spoiler alert: "They made plans to meet the following Tuesday, a date Mr. Albano had to cancel because he became sick. 'I thought it was because he wasn't interested but then he called me the next night for dinner,' she said." GET ON WITH IT, GRANDMA!); and I'm sorry but this picture just cracks me up.

I'll leave any scoring to you, although I'd think the real horserace is between them (check out his parents' boards!) and them. You are all witty and attractive and I love you. Marry me? You don't have to wear white.