This Week in Wedding Planning News

For today’s busy Certified Wedding Planner, keeping up with wedding industry current events can be challenging. With that in mind, here is a recap of what you may have missed this past week.

The former world’s heaviest man, Manuel Uribe, married his fiancée, Claudia Solis, in a ceremony in Monterrey, Mexico that was filmed by the Discovery Channel for an upcoming documentary predictably dubbed “My Big, Fat Mexican Wedding”. In other big wedding news, the pictures are in for the mass wedding of 700 couples in the Nagorno-Karabakh Republic, an independent state nestled in Azerbaijani near the border with Armenia.

In an effort to avoid bigamy, Tatsuhiko Kawata set fire to the hotel in which he was scheduled to be wed. Police reported his current marriage as the reason for canceling the wedding and arson as his way of notifying his fiancée. In a multiple weddings publicity stunt, the so-called “World’s Most Romantic Couple” and Danish celebrity wedding planner couple, Anette and Kenneth Lund, have tied the knot a total of six times, including a record breaking four Las Vegas weddings in one day.

Choosing the right venue can make or break a wedding. Signs are good if you win a contest that celebrates your wedding during the naming inauguration of Princess Cruises latest Love Boat. It is a somewhat bad omen if you book the Corazon Club in Dublin, which recently closed, leaving several couples without their venue or their deposits.

Forbes Magazine detailed the eight financial threats to (affluent) marriage. Apparently, eight out of ten very wealthy couples would divorce should their net worth nosedive. Unfortunately, USA Today reports that couples booking weddings at luxurious hotels such as The Pierre in New York are settling for disk jockeys over live bands, miniature cupcakes instead of elaborate multitier cakes, and truncated guest lists.

To help boost the economic plight of the pastoral class, wedding officiating is touted as the perfect way to pay off debt, put the kids in braces or college, purchase a new car, or party at Disneyland. Alabama’s Weddings 911 columnist, Alene Gamel, is asked whether the Internet will displace traditional wedding announcements and replies with a brief history of invitations and decides that electronic invites should RSVP in a few years.

Celebrity nuptials remained in vogue with rumors that Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt, two of the world’s most famous unmarried parents, are reported to be considering a simple wedding ceremony. Best selling event planning author and host of the WE network’s “My Fair Wedding”, David Tutera, has partnered with Knork Flatware, a cutting edge cutlery company, to provide customers entertaining ideas and designs that represent their own personal style.

From the silly to the surreal, anime wedding news included Hello Kitty wedding gowns for the childish bride and a disturbingly serious effort in Japan to legalize marriage between humans and cartoon characters. If added to the top eight complaints that irk wedding guests, we assume the bride being a cartoon would rank higher than her wearing a cartoon.

Off the beaten path, the driveway paving father of Missy Quinn, a 16-year-old girl who lives in a gypsy caravan, threw his beloved daughter a wedding costing over $160,000. The celebration featured a Rolls-Royce Phantom, Swarovski crystals, bridal hot pants and bra top, gallons of fake tan, and a promise from the newlywed Mrs. Moghon that she would pursue a career in glamour modeling and that the 17-year-old Mr. Moghon best not expect her to cook or clean, but had better spend his days catering to her every need. In ironically unrelated news, mustached wedding parties have apparently become all the rage.