Hello Darkness! The Official Blog of Helen Keller

As may have been fair comment in the past, I have relied on outrage to fuel articles. Very rarely was the rage proportionate, but it makes for comic fun, in the same way colliding into somebody who took too long to remove themselves from the counter at Tim Horton's AFTER getting their coffee, putting their TimCard back in their wallet, rearranging their purse and maybe even sampling the TimBits would be.

Not this time.

I should confess that I can lose myself in entertainment. During Paranormal Activity, when Katie whipped Micah's corpse into the camera at the end (SPOILER!) and came walking in, I ran to the front of the theater, tore down the screen and ran screaming into the parking lot where I hid behind a dumpster till dawn. I may have murdered a hobo, it's still mostly a blur.

At the end of Inception, I stormed out of the theater and yelled at the popcorn maker for tampering with my totem. Then I cried. The police showed up, there was more yelling and I woke up in a hospital bed. To this day, I'm not sure if I managed to kick myself awake.

I walked out of the Happening horrified...that I had wasted 10 bucks on a piece of shit.

Rich Bride Poor Bride occupies a slot on Slice right before television prime time begins; 7:00 to 8:00 pm.

Here's the basic premise of the show: An engaged couple applies to the show to film the good, the bad and the ugly of their wedding planning. They submit a budget to a wedding producer, who immediately frowns at how little they're planning on pissing away on a single day of their lives. They then gripe, bicker and scheme for an hour before revealing at the end how much they blew their budget by.

For a show premise, it's not that bad, compared to other ones like IRT: Deadly Roads.

Here's where the anger comes in. 99% of all the episodes follow a simple script. In it, the bride and the wedding planner conspire to convince the groom that they are the arbiters of proper wedding ideas and, consequently, all of his wedding ideas are liquid shit. I'm not talking about cheap grooms who simply object over price, unless it threatens the budget. I'm talking about grooms who have ideas they'd like to see at the wedding/reception, even if it is a Mortal Kombat 2 arcade machine which isn't set to free-play and requires quarters. Plus you're not allowed to pick Kitana because she sucks.

Each of the grooms bristles at being told that they are ruining their own wedding, but they all, uniformly it seems, back down and just let the bride and the planner run the fuck out of the credit-card.

I deplore the inherent sexism at play. Even though the wedding is supposed to be a celebration of two people joining their lives, it often plays out as a unilateral "Queen For A Day" extravaganza that happens to include a groom as a piece of the puzzle. Any idea proposed by the groom that doesn't fit into a bride's pre-conceived idea gets tossed. I sit pitying these grooms that hand over their balls in the belief that "if Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy".

There's also the previously mentioned notion that somehow the bride is the arbiter of what's proper for a wedding and what isn't. Quite frankly, I'm unmoved by the idea that because she's been planning her wedding since age 3, she's possessed by superior mental faculties. Last time I checked, women are people too and as I have seen many times in my life, people are wrong, short-sighted and fuck-up an awful lot.

And I'm not impressed at their decisions OR their rationale.

I would berry, berry much like to see an episode where the groom just puts the wedding planner in her place. As soon as she cuts him off when he proposes having a mini-Ferris wheel in the church or a barber offering haircuts at the reception, he slaps his hand down and plainly informs her that she works for them, not just the bride, and that by failing to incorporate his ideas she is ipso facto failing at being a wedding planner.

Her job should be to find workable solutions to both their ideas rather than playing bridal advocate/Ass-Kisser. If the groom wants to divide the wedding party into teams and have a paintball shoot-out, she should work to incorporate that; perhaps a giant canvas where guests can spell out well-wishes via a paintball gun. When she simply informs him he's retarded, she's never seen that at a wedding and enacting his wishes will cause such cosmic imbalance that a solar flare will engulf the Earth killing us all, she's just being a bitch.

Brides also need to learn that it really ISN'T Queen For A Day. It just isn't.

But this never happens. It trails off with a shot of the husband and wife on the couch reminiscing about how much they spent, with all of the indignity and righteousness trailing off like the ending to Jarvis Cocker's Big Julie.

It's disappointing. But I watch it because Final Jeopardy is too easy.