In this ad, Mom’s not worried ’cause her kid aspires to marry a “princess” and not “the winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics.” She’s worried ’cause her kid is a girl. That, according to supporters of California’s Prop. 8 is what will happen if the anti-gay-marriage measure fails. Homos getting married! Your children going gay! Cats and dogs living together! Total chaos! (Nothing about what kids learn from growing up in a state where discrimination is written into the law.)

Palate-cleanser:  NoOnProp8.com.

Daily Mail, via Boing Boing:

“A married couple who decided to go their separate ways agreed to divide their home and its contents literally — by sawing the house in half.

One day the house was standing on stilts in a Cambodian village. The next, only half was there.

The wife will keep the half that is standing, while the husband has carried off bits and pieces of the home to put them up in a nearby field.”

Getting your stuff back on January 12, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,

I dated my ex for about a year. We broke up last year, but I have yet to get all my things out of his apartment. He told me he has still kept my toothbrush. I don’t want him back, I just would like my stuff back! How would there be a good way to go about this?

— Jaime

Dear Jaime,

Surely you’ve replaced the toothbrush by now. But Breakup Girl still wonders what on earth he’s doing with your toothbrush. Has he bronzed it? Or, conversely, does he just keep it around for use as the “guest toothbrush?” Neither one is good news.

In any case, here’s what you need to do…

(more…)

YIKES. Seems Pitt’s pet cause — a deeply important one — is in trouble, according to SFGate.com (scroll down to second item):

A poll sponsored by CBS 5-TV indicates that California voters now favor passage of Proposition 8, the constitutional amendment to ban same sex “I do’s,” by 47 to 42 percent.

The poll of 670 registered voters taken by Survey USA is a big shift from one taken just last month by the Public Policy Institute of California. That one showed Prop. 8 losing, 55 to 41 percent.

Advocates of same-sex marriage over at the No on 8 campaign say their tracking polls show the same trend, with the ban now leading, 47 to 43 percent. The Yes on 8 campaign happily reports that it’s seeing a shift as well.

One explanation? Well, the latest poll was taken a few days after Prop. 8 proponents put commercials on the air featuring Newsom celebrating the state Supreme Court’s ruling legalizing same-sex marriage by half-yelling, half-growling to a City Hall crowd, “This door’s wide open now! It’s gonna happen – whether you like it or not!”

The same ads show a law professor warning that if the measure passes, it could jeopardize the tax-exempt status of churches and lead to “gay marriage taught in public schools.”

Same-sex marriage proponents dispute both arguments — but the ad does seem to be working.

Learn more — and take action — here. There’s even a wedding registry!

WWD reports that fashion powerhouse Diane Von Furstenburg has teamed up with DC to pen her own comic featuring the “empowering” adventures of Diva, Viva, and Fifa. (DVF! See?)

Publication coincides with the launch of DVF’s new Wonder-Woman inspired (?!) collection.

WWD: “The heroines — all wearing DVF clothes — make things happen.” As superpowers go, that’s pretty broad. Still, I’m down with the message, assuming at least one of them is packing the Wrap Dress of Truth.

Via BuzzFeed. (More here.)

Ooh! BG LOVES a good update!

Hey Lynn!

I don’t know if you remember my “lovelorn letter” from last year (around May 2007 you actually published my letter online* and one of my co-workers who had heard my unrequited love story said “Cheryl, this sounds just like you…did you write to this columnist?”) — was the girl crazy in love with my boss, but he was always the gentleman and never, EVER, gave me any reason to think he was the least bit interested.  I worked for him for a year and then moved on to a really GREAT job, lost a bunch of weight and wrote to you and asked “Do you think I should give it one last shot with him?”

Well, I did – I sent him my last e-mail, and it was a good one!!  I hadn’t seen him in six months, I had lost weight, I was in a great place – and he actually responded.  We went out for the first time on June 1, 2007 and we have been dating and crazy in love ever since.  We are planning to get married next fall (2009).

Thank you for your encouraging and straightforward column and for telling me to “give it one last shot” but if it didn’t work out, I would have “closure.”

Cheryl

* The letter is no longer available online. Original text after the jump…

(more…)

Kind of puts certain things in perspective, actually.

“I don’t know if you know about ‘The Valley,’ but a teenager getting knocked up is certainly not news for us,” said [Wasilla resident Caleb, 29]. “So I am not at all surprised. As for Levi Johnston, what is the big debate? Last I heard he was going to marry Bristol. Why wouldn’t he?”

The comedian Bill Maher has called Levi “America’s number-one political prisoner.” He’s begged the youth to remember he still has options. “This is the 21st century, at least in the blue states,” Mr. Maher said on TV the other night. “You don’t have to do this. You have options,” he said. “Just grab your skull bong, climb out the window and get on the highway.”

“What I’ve heard from family members is that it was a high-school sweetheart kind of a deal,” said [Josh Sieler, 26, born and raised in Wasilla] of Levi and Bristol. “In Alaska people tend to get together with somebody—and let me think of a way to say this—it doesn’t seem as frivolous as it does down in the states. There’s not as much of a guy-girl ratio; there’s not a whole lot of fish in the sea in Alaska. You know, I married my high-school sweetheart and we’ve been together 10 years.

“If anything, I think it’s going to make things easier,” he continued. “You know, having snow for nine months a year, winter nine months a year, I absolutely would go insane if I didn’t have a wife next to me, or a significant other. It’s nice to have a companion in Alaska. I wouldn’t say that he has to all of a sudden give up any aspirations or goals that he has in his life. As far as ‘getting out,’ you know, it’s hard to get out of Alaska. You figure we pay $500 to go to Seattle round trip.”

From this week’s New York Observer.

Here’s a sweet New York Times story about Gotham’s storied marriage bureau (locus of Matt Damon’s lowest-of-keys wedding to Sarah Silverman Luciana Bozan).

As the Times reports, the office itself may be heading for an extreme makeover — but it’s still a nice reminder that not all nuptials are extreme weddingpaloozas.

From the blog at RiverfrontTimes.com:

Has this election caused a lot of strife in your relationship?
Lauren: Not really.
Karl: People do take a lot of pictures of us, though.

Seriously: good for them. Just like them!