Check out this awesome gallery of the nerdiest wedding cake toppers we adore via io9.com!

How fitting that the quickie-wedding chapel that recently popped up on New York’s Lower East Side — the real one, not this one — is itself a fly-by-night operation. In fact, it’s still looking for backers. Small-time backers, in case you’re interested.

Wackadoo design/consulting firm GrandOpening has a performance-arty habit of opening-then-closing a number of businesses in its Norfolk Avenue storefront space. Over the past year and change, that’s included a ping-pong lounge and a drive-in movie theater. (Fer rills! Chex it!) The nameless chapel is its latest incarnation.

Getting hitched here includes an ordained dude at the ready, some Vegas-y Elvis backdrops and stuff, live, streaming vid of your nups and a few snapshots. In addition, you can book an hourlong reception to follow, complete with DJ and, I might assume, gawking manorexics.

But, according to the firm’s site, they’re hoping to find another $2k of funding before July 1 in order to really get the party started.

Who’s gonna bet on love?

Anyone remember the arranged wedding at the Mall of America? Cynics might assume that that couple — the bride chosen by the groom’s friends, the two met at the altar — would be long divorced, you know, from their third marriages. Not so! Eleven years (and three kids) later, they’re still happily committed. What’s their secret? “I don’t think it’s that much of a secret,” David Weinlick told TODAY last year. “It’s really about how we make it work together. Committed to being together.” (Okay, that’s not saying so much, but I think he knows what he means: to italicize “committed.” As in: not “let’s see IF this works,” but rather, “let’s see how we can commit to making this work.”) And voila.

All of this is to say you should probably seriously consider getting married at Navy Pier in Chicago on June 25. Now, the major difference here is that it’s okay if you’ve, you know, met your intended before you walk down the aisle. It’s a charm-us-with-your-charming-story contest run by  Vocalo.org — sort of like if NPR did Current TV, with much content supplied by users — who will supply the charmingest coupe with an officiant, cake, musicians, hair-styling and makeup for the bride — plus a lovely venue on Lake Michigan and a potential listening audience of zillions (who, one hopes, will all be directed to your gift registry).

Vocalo is seeking to interview couples on-air over the next weeks. More info here. Fun! (Really, you can’t afford not to enter.) And who knows, maybe next year they’ll have some sort of charm-us-with-your-charming-I-dig-being-single story contest. With cake, too, of course.

This surprise! wedding! reception! totally puts the “Awwww!” in AWESOME.

Quoth our tipster: “Ruins dress, saves lives!”

From Talking Points Memo:

It used to be that when you saw two men and one woman under a chuppah, everyone’s assigned role was clear. Not any more.

Last we left our whatevs-to-marriage heroines — authors Bella DePaulo and Jaclyn Geller; the former is running a three-part Q&A with the latter on the Psychology Today blogs — the discussion dwelled on the inequities of wedding registries, “single” v.”married” vocab and the notion that spouses trump friends any day of the week (and, I’m guessing, twice on your anniversary).

And now, our teasers for part deux:

— Singles supplementing couples’ life choices via endless streams of showers should basically just start registering for stuff the day they turn 25.

— Earning one’s M.R.S. degree is, sadly, still a popular college-major choice among coeds.

— Something I’ve never said/written before (not even when I actually was, speaking of, in college): ZOMG I have *GOT* to read me some Plato!

— Double ZOMG: They had road trips in the first century?!?

This is only the first installment of up-with-singles author* Bella DePaulo’s Q&A trifecta with author Jaclyn Geller, author of Here Comes the Bride: Women, Weddings, and the Marriage Mystique, and already I’ve got releases of hundreds of white doves mini-explosions of consciousness-raising going off in my head. To wit:

1. What’s up with all the wedding presents when — now that folks are marrying later — most spouses-to-be already have two of everything anyway? (Shouldn’t all-Freecycle weddings already be the wave of…right now?)

2. “Matrimaniacs” is the new “bridezillas.” Pass it on.

3. If we are going to reclaim the word “spinster” — Geller notes that it wasn’t always an insult — I vote for “noun: a female DJ.”

There’s much more: linguistics (“I don’t like the “single”/ “married” binary. It implies that any unmarried person is a fragmentary half-self awaiting completion in a spouse”), history (prehistoric prenups!), homosocial poetry!

Cliffhanger: In one of the next installments, Geller tells us what she writes on those medical forms that ask whether we’re single or married. (Perhaps she’ll also tell us how not to feel lame when it asks for “emergency contact” and we have to write in our parents?)

* See: Singled Out: How Singles Are Stereotyped, Stigmatized, and Ignored, and Still Live Happily Ever After

This bride-to-be has kissed a lot of frogs to find her Prince Charming, but now she’s afraid to take the leap. Can Breakup Girl warm her cold feet?

Another classic Breakup Girl animation finally hits YouTube!

Needing a Hollywood ending on January 19, 1998…

Dear Breakup Girl,
My best male friend and I got together for a short time about a year ago. He’s had some bad luck with girls in the past and is afriad of losing our friendship if we broke up. (Needless to say, we ended up back as friends fairly quickly regardless of the fact that everyone else says that we’re perfect together.) Now the complicated part is that he has been going out with a (FORMER) good friend of mine for several months and thinks he’s going to MARRY her! What should I do? I feel like I’m living out “My Best Friend’s Wedding!”
— Lost

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