seeing weddings on 7-7-7

Michelle (my gorgeous wife!) and I had a nice day at the beach on Saturday, wandering around, eating at a Mexican/surfer bar restaurant called Zorro's (!) in Pismo Beach (or maybe it was Shell Beach? - near the border, anyway), and standing on a little promontory over the crashing waves below, enjoying the view and hoping the seabirds didn't come in for an attack - many of their "Guano Rocks" (as I like to call their small outcrops of boulders rising above the surf and with a rich whitish topping) were just offshore, so we saw at least hundreds of them resting comfortably and contributing their nitrates to the environment.

As we looked out from our little clifftop over the beach below (beware, those afraid of heights!), there were various little beach inlets, with natural walls where the cliffs went out almost to the water, then receded again to form another beach. The first couple of mini-beaches had the usual - women tanning, kids playing, a black Labradoodle swimming around with a stick in its mouth - but in the third one over, closest to the stairs down to the beach, we saw a bunch of women dressed in vaguely hideous hot pink bridesmaid outfits, and using my immense powers of induction, I surmised there was a wedding going on. When we saw various guys in tuxes with hot pink vests, well... you be the judge.

Upon return home and getting back on what Keith Olbermann likes to call 'the internets', I see that many folks thought 7-7-7 was a mighty lucky day to get married. (Vegas must have had a banner day, and I'm sure the slots were full of customers.) Of course, Tony and Eva were one such couple, as I'm sure even casual NBA fans are aware. I wonder if such weddings will actually beat the odds, as it were? To operationalize this query, let's ask: do people who get married on days they consider particularly propitious get divorced at a lower rate than the average population? Sociologists and anthropologists of the world, a new research question!

In the meantime, I'll stick with other statistical arguments. More on doomsday soon...