What If???

I'm a HUGE fan of industrial tours. My dad started me off as a kid by taking me to the Blue Diamond Almond factory somewhere out in California. He is a wonder source of trivia. Did you know that Godiva Chocolate is actually owned by Campbell's Soup??? Or the umbrella company, anyway. We added a bunch of interesting tours to our family road trips as kids- Bunny Bread (which is the N'awlins equivalent of Wonder Bread), Russell Ice Cream, Coors Beer, Hershey, Gerber baby food, blah, blah, blah...

The best with Dad was in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Know what is there? KELLOGG CEREALS! It was great- free sugar cereal at the end!!! I never knew that flake cereal really are flakes!! I had somehow imagined in my crazy brain that some machine sort of blobbed out flake-shaped stuff. But it turns out that they roll this paste out onto these huge drums and let it dry. And as it dries- it flakes!! For real!!

Then in my teacher life I always got to take plenty of industrial tours of the field-trip variety. At that point I was mostly just praying that children didn't mortify me publicly and that I had a constant head count. When I was teaching at M.D. Anderson I was able to take small groups of children to some really cool places (hello- skiing in Utah!!??). One of those industrial tour field trips with those kids was to the Houston Chronicle.

It was SO NEAT! I am a big newspaper person. Get one in every place I visit just so I can see what all is newsworthy there. I do the crossword and jumble every night. (Sudoku can go to Hell. Damn numbers.) And Dear Abby and the ethics columns make me swoon.

Did you know that they use something like two tons of paper every MINUTE when they are printing the paper? It is unreal! The operation is truly 24/7. It's mostly computerized layout and stuff now... though I was shocked that there was still one point in the whole process that uses the real old fashioned cut and paste. The tour gave us the inside scoop on the whole deal- from the ideas and reporters offices to the truck drivers and street urchins that hawk the paper.

Now here was what stuck with me: They actually print a huge portion of the paper BEFORE the day it goes out. For example, the food section (a favorite of mine) comes out on Wednesdays. But they actually print it on Sunday nights! And the majority of the Sunday paper is printed on Wednesday night and ready to go by Thursday morning.

Well... do you know what is in the Sunday paper? The weddings. So that means that the wedding announcements are largely actually printed PRIOR to the couple making the trip down the aisle. Seems risky to me.

I've thought about this a lot. And I've decided that if I were scheduled to get married on Saturday and I had actually shelled out the $2000+ to print it up in the paper the ceremony would go on. I don't care if he suddenly called my momma a fat whore. That wedding shit would be happening. The newspaper gets sent out to something like a MILLION people- literally!

And if my husband stood me up..... well- I just don't know.