• [from steve_portigal] Hong Kong’s Couples Invited to Wed at McDonald’s [NYTimes.com] – [We did visit a McDonald's in Hong Kong the other week but we didn't see anything like this!] McWedding starts at $1,280, which includes food and drinks for 50 people. The package includes a budget version of the usual trappings: a “cake” made of stacked apple pies, gifts for the guests and invitation cards, each with a wedding photo of the couple. (Hong Kong wedding photos are taken in advance, with the couple in rented finery.) McDonald’s employees dressed in black suits mimic the actions of hostesses at upscale hotels. They greet guests at the entrance, usher them to the signature book and deliver food, even if it is just a Big Mac and fries. McWeddings were devised in line with local customs, particularly Chinese numerology beliefs that determine the best dates for weddings or other important events. The engaged couple was given a photo frame shaped like Ronald McDonald, marked with the “limited edition number” 138, an auspicious figure.
• [from steve_portigal] Stalking insights with Steve Portigal [Foolproof] – [Lovely concise report from our UX Hong Kong workshop. Thanks, Tom!] Even a novice UX researcher knows the dangers of moving too swiftly to draw conclusions from fieldwork. It’s important to maintain a state of openness and observation. Leaping to solutions and recommendations can bias your view. This could cause you to miss something really revealing or valuable simply because it doesn’t fit with the way your view is developing. It shouldn’t be true, but in fact the older and more experienced you get the more danger there is that you’ll fall into this trap. Firstly you’re instinctively calling on experiences and patterns in user behaviour that you may have seen before. Secondly, the more senior you are, the more impact your (wrong-headed) views may have on the situation. The antidote? Spend some time with Steve.

• [from steve_portigal] Non-Jews Begin to Embrace Ketubah Wedding Tradition [NYTimes.com] – [Cultural appropriation of religious traditions as we continue to seek meaning through symbols] The decade of non-Jews discovering the ketubah coincides with three relevant social trends: the rise of Christian Zionism, the growth of interfaith marriage, and the mainstreaming of the New Age movement with its search for spirituality in multiple faith traditions. As a result, an increasing number of gentiles have taken up Judaic practices: holding a Passover Seder, eating kosher food and studying kabbalah, the Jewish mystical movement. “A lot of these things are grass-rootsy,” said Prof. Jenna Weissman Joselit, a historian at George Washington University, who has written extensively on Jewish popular culture. “They have to do with the growing popularity of intermarriage — openness, pluralism, cultural improvisation. And for those who are more religiously literate, they add another level of authenticity or legitimacy.”
• [from steve_portigal] More Focus Groups for ‘Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark’ [NYTimes.com] – [What is the meaning of using consumer research? Do we admire producers for being user-centered or do we decry them for being desperate?] The producers of the Broadway musical “Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark” are offering $60 goodie bags to people who serve in focus groups that will respond to several performances. Two focus groups attended Thursday night’s performance, and four more are scheduled to be at Friday night’s show and the Saturday matinee. It’s not unheard of for Broadway producers to use focus groups, and the musical has used them before since preview performances began on Nov. 28. But these are the first since largely negative reviews of the show by theater critics across the country were published on Tuesday. OnTrack Research, a marketing and consulting firm, is coordinating the focus groups, and here’s the rub: participants only get to see Act I or Act II, not both. They are then asked to fill out surveys and join in discussions in a “V.I.P. room.”

A little while ago, I got an interesting email message from Facebook:

To: Dan Soltzberg
Subject: Theresa Soltzberg said that you two are married…

Theresa said on Facebook that you two are married. We need you to confirm that you are, in fact, married to Theresa.

To confirm this relationship request, follow the link below:

http://www.facebook.com/n/?home.php

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Theresa is, in fact, my wife. After briefly considering several possibilities for practical joking, I followed the link, and was presented with this grand choice:

With the price of gas skyrocketing, will we see this replacing the Vegas wedding as the quick solution to getting married?

Anyway, I confirmed, and just wanted to share my nuptial joy with all of you . . .

In Suketu Mehta’s stunning Maximum City: Bombay Lost and Found is the following passage

I ask him about the rituals of the renunciation. He gives me a parable. A long time ago, a man was conducting a wedding. A cat was running around the marriage hall, disturbing things. So he tied it to a pillar. Afterward generations of the man’s family, whenever they had a wedding, found a cat and tied it to one pillar of the hall, believing it to be a required wedding custom. The goings-on around this diksha, the doctor says, are like that cat tied to the pillar: The original meaning has been lost, and people are just doing it because that it how it has always been done.

Reader’s Digest reports, via the New York Times about the growing presence of fake wedding cakes. Average price for a wedding cake is $543, and

“For as low as $100, you can snag a pretty good replica made out of foam, with a secret compartment tucked in the back for hiding that special first piece,” the article states.

It’s intriguing to play an Idiocracy-esque futurist and imagine how the ritual will decay (or is that evolve?) further. In 50 years will we wave a knife around and toss sugar packets, to symbolize the symbols of the cake and the cutting-of-the-cake?

Anne points out the similarity to the Roast Beef story where successive generations cut the ends of the roast beef because that is how they were taught. When they go all the way back to the origin, it turns out they didn’t have a big enough pan and so that “ritual” was simply a coping mechanism.

Learn more about cake rental at CakeRental.com.

Sunset, Pacific Grove, CA

Last weekend we went to a wedding (at gorgeous Asilomar, in Pacific Grove). The weekend before we had visited some friends who recently been married, and they showed us their photo album and their Polaroid album, where everyone who attended posed for a Polaroid and inscribed the page in the book where the picture was posted. In fact, some wedding crashers appeared in the book, with (their real?) names signed.

So, weren’t surprised when this wedding featured something similar. But the experience was far from perfect. As we headed from the ceremony into the reception, we waited in a long line – not to greet the happy couple, but for the bottleneck in the process – the picture. You had to complete the task in order to be granted admission to the reception. Indeed, they were not permitting couples or groups to pose together, but singling out each individual person to stand alone (while those behind them watched on) and yelling “smile” at them. Suddenly, the notion of having my picture taken took on privacy/government/civil-liberties overtones. Every single person was being documented; the celebratory feeling was drained away when they insisted upon solo shots. The wedding scenario is highly scripted, even as it evolves, and there are meanings (couplehood, for example) attached to many of the minor rituals; well there are no doubt meanings attached to all of the rituals, whether implicit or explicit. So when creating new rituals, one has to be sensitive to the context. Lining up for individual photos before we can eat evokes an immigration process; posing quickly for a snapshot with a data is celebratory.

Sure, it wasn’t a big deal and didn’t impact the wedding experience greatly, but I was impressed by the power of small details to shift meaning and reframe/reassociate an entire transaction.

news story

A San Mateo man accused of stealing a car with a bride sitting in the passenger seat in her wedding gown pleaded not guilty Tuesday to one count of carjacking and one count of being under the influence of a controlled substance, authorities said.

Alan Ticas-Soto, 21, allegedly stole the car from a Taco Bell parking lot in San Mateo at about 11 p.m. Oct. 29.

He is accused of jumping into the driver’s seat and backing up the car with bride Valerie Zahn seated inside.

Zahn, 22, was waiting for her new husband, Almanza Zahn, to return with takeout food.

The couple had stopped while on their way to a hotel in Burlingame following their wedding.

Responding to his wife’s cries for help, Almanza Zahn helped her escape, uninjured, from the car.

Wait – they had a wedding and went for Taco Bell aftewards? It was 11 pm, so presumably not a civil ceremony, presumably some sort of reception? Obviously the the crime is terrible anytime and terrifying in this instance, but as far as going to Taco Bell afterwards, I don’t know whether to feel bad, or disturbed.