I was struck by this news item.

One in 9 couples planning to marry this year, or 225,000 engaged pairs, owe $3.7 billion in personal loans for canceled weddings during the pandemic, according to a new analysis from Loanry, an online personal lender. That works out to about $16,444 in outstanding balances on average for each couple.

“This last year will have been devastating for many couples,” said Ethan Taub, founder of Loanry, “especially for the percentage paying off loans for weddings that haven’t happened.”

The analysis considered five factors: the average number of weddings that take place each year, the percentage of those postponed this year, the number of personal loans taken out for weddings, the average cost and budget of a wedding, and the average loan amount for a wedding based on Loanry’s own data.

I can understand couples who want to have a nice wedding. Some like to have really grand weddings but the idea of taking out a huge loan for what is a one-day party is something I cannot wrap my mind around, because it means you will start married life with a huge debt burden hanging round. your neck.

It is one thing to take out a loan for college education because that is an investment that one can hope to recoup with higher income. But wedding expenses are not like that.

In Sri Lanka, wedding expenses were usually borne by the bride’s parents and there too there is the deplorable practice of families spending far more than they could afford just to keep up with the Joneses and to impress people.

In the US, I blame the wedding industry who have created the impression that a big fancy wedding is what everyone should aspire to. Celebrities feed into this mindset but they have the money to have a splashy party.

Thanks to all who stopped by to read and for your stimulating and informed comments (and also for pointing out the errors!)

Calamities of Nature

Anyone who has tried to assemble IKEA furniture has stories to tell about trying to figure out the purely diagrammatic instructions and understanding what goes where and what to do when parts are left over.

But now the company has entered the tiny home market, selling a 187 sq. ft. home for around $50,000.

It is not clear if the home has to be assembled by the buyer.

I have been noticing some errors occurring recently with the spelling of homonyms. Here are three examples:

Writing eek when they mean eke

Writing discrete when they mean discreet

Writing complementary when they mean complimentary

I am sure there must be others that can be added to the list.

For some reason, the errors rarely go in the opposite direction, maybe because words like eek, discrete, and complementary are less likely to come up naturally.

Seth Meyers shares this story of a man who actually pried open the jaws of an alligator to save his puppy.

This story touched me even more so because the puppy is a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, who looks just like Baxter the Wonder Dog.

Marcus Ranum has alerted me to the fact that the Utah monolith has disappeared as mysteriously as it appeared.

The tall, shiny, metal structure, now famously known as a “monolith” was discovered in Utah last week, and had prompted multiple theories about how it had come to be there ranging from TV show set leftover, to art work, to aliens.

But now, almost as mysteriously as it appeared, it has been removed by what local officials called “an unknown party”.

“[We] did not remove the structure which is considered private property,” A Bureau of Land Management spokesperson said in a statement. “The structure has received international and national attention and we received reports that a person or group removed it on the evening of 27 Nov”.
…

“All that was left in its place was a message written in the dirt that said ‘bye bitch’ with a fresh pee stain right next to it,” Marino posted to instagram. “Someone had just stolen the statue, and we were the first to arrive at the scene”.

Marino said they saw a pickup truck with a large object in its bed driving in the opposite direction shortly before they got there. A Reddit user also found the structure, which many believed to be abstract art, had been formerly removed.

The object’s origins remain unknown but Bret Hutchings, the helicopter pilot who discovered it, estimated it to be between 10ft and 12ft high (about three metres).

Here’s video of what was left behind. (You can silence the annoying music.)

The structure was not buried as deep into the ground as was thought. We were told that this was pretty remote and rugged terrain. Placing the monolith there surreptitiously would not have been easy. Getting it secretly out again after all the publicity is pretty amazing.

Only aliens could have done it.

Internet sleuths quickly set about trying to find the actual location in remote Utah of the monolith that was reported a couple of days ago by a helicopter crew that was surveying the area to count bighorn sheep. The crew did not reveal the GPS coordinates for the site, fearing that people would trek in the difficult terrain and get lost and even die. But that did not deter people from the thrill of the chase. And now, within 48 hours of that report, people have found it and gone to the site.
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