very funny wedding article

Great article in this months Vanity Fair called Can this Wedding Be Saved? by A.A. Gill  Worth reading the whole thing. But here's some of the funniest parts.

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A wedding is like porn in that it promises far more than it’s ever going to deliver; unlike porn, we witness this scene with our grandparents and our kids.

Some tongue-tied, giddy swain slumps to one knee and tugs a velveteen box from his pocket, and his sweetheart, who up to this very moment has quite liked him, is more acutely embarrassed than she ever thought humanly possible. She stares at the pitiful diamond. The engagement ring is the ugliest, gaudiest piece of jewelry most women will ever wear. It sets in motion the most stressful and tearful year of their lives.

Then you look at the clothes and you wonder why any human would want to appear dressed like that in front of a crowd of people, most of whom they’re going to have to see again.

She has to wear “The Dress.” The first bride to popularize white wedding dresses was Queen Victoria. She was a tiny, round, plain girl with a nose like a claw hammer and less chin than a terrapin. Charitably, the best thing you could say for her on her wedding day was that she looked like an ornamental toilet-tissue cover. 

It’s universally said that all brides look beautiful. Every bride is told repeatedly that she is breathtaking, but white is an unforgiving un-color unless you’re a baby or a corpse. White is particularly bad on pale, pinkish people, but not quite as bad as on sprayed-orange people.

Wedding dresses are a collective blind spot, an aesthetic dead zone. We are brainwashed to believe that a wedding dress is magic, that it has the ability to transform everyone into a raging, shaggable piece of hot, virginal, must-have, never-been-had gorgeousness. But, like all fairy spells, it only works for one day.

In any other context, a wedding dress makes you look like a transvestite, which is presumably why the groom isn’t allowed to see it before it’s too late to change his mind.

How wonderful the bride looks in her dress isn’t the only lie told at weddings. The happy couple is wafted up the aisle in a fog, a cacophony of lies. There are lies about the in-laws, about gaining sons and daughters, and about not having slept with any of the bridesmaids. 

We lie that we like the cake, we lie that the best man’s speech was funny, and we lie that this was the best wedding ever.

Viewed from the pews, weddings are theater produced by straight amateurs using their own money. The resulting spectacle is what a dog show would be like if it were organized by the dogs.

Who is Paul Ryan?

Who is 42 year-old Republican Congressman Paul Ryan from Wisconsin? Here’s some info.

Ryan co-sponsored a “personhood” amendment, an extreme anti-abortion measure. Ryan joined 62 other Republicans in co-sponsoring the Sanctity of Human Life Act, which declares that a fertilized egg “shall have all the legal and constitutional attributes and privileges of personhood.” This would outlaw abortion, some forms of contraception and in vitro fertilization.

 Ryan  is considered the architect of the GOP budget. His economic views are especially interesting if you’re a senior, or know a senior, or plan on becoming one someday….

Ryan wants to end Medicare, and replace it with a voucher system. All future retirees would receive a government contribution to purchase insurance. But since the $ amount does not keep up with increasing health care costs, the Congressional Budget Offices estimates that new beneficiaries could pay up to $1,200 more by 2030 and more than $5,900 more by 2050.

A recent study also found that had the plan been implemented in 2009, 24 million beneficiaries enrolled in the program would have paid higher premiums to maintain their choice of plan and doctors.

Ryan would also raise Medicare’s age of eligibility to 67.

In September of 2011, Ryan agreed with Rick Perry’s characterization of Social Security as a “Ponzi scheme” and since 2005 has advocated for privatizing the retirement benefit and investing it in stocks and bonds. The economic crisis of 2008 should serve as a wake-up call for anyone who thinks hinging Americans’ retirement to the stock market is a good idea.

Ryan wants to eliminate Pell Grants for more than 1 million students. He wants to cut the Pell Grant program by $200 billion, which could “ultimately knock more than one million students off the program over the next 10 years.

Ryan supports $40 billion in subsides for big oil. In 2011, Ryan joined all House Republicans and 13 Democrats in his vote to keep Big Oil tax loopholes and oil tax breaks as part of the 2011 spending bill.

He did this while cutting billions of dollars from investments to develop alternative fuels and clean energy technologies that would serve as substitutes for oil. 

He does, however, have very nice hair.