Here come the brides — better run for cover

It's wedding season again. You can tell because the average bridal magazine currently weighs more than the average bride.

Bridal magazines are massive because they carry enormous amounts of advertising designed to convince the bride-to-be that her wedding will be a hideous disaster if it costs less than a nuclear aircraft carrier. "If your parents have any money left over for retirement, you have FAILED" — that is the message to brides from the U.S. wedding industry.

There are no magazines for grooms, of course. The groom's sole wedding responsibility is to arrive at the ceremony wearing pants and not actively throwing up. Everything else is up to the bride, who must make thousands of critical wedding decisions, such as: Should she invite all her relatives or just the attractive ones? Where should the guests sit? Should they shoot firearms into the air?

On that last question, my advice is: No. I base this on an Associated Press story, sent in by many alert readers, concerning a wedding last October in Serbia, which, as you are no doubt aware, is a country located somewhere. The AP story, which I swear I am not making up, begins as follows:

"In an apparent first, wedding guests shooting off celebratory rounds in central Serbia brought down a small aircraft, local media reported Sunday."

You read that correctly: Wedding guests "shot down a plane." The AP states that "Shootings and fatalities are frequent at Serbian weddings because of the centuries-long tradition of blasting away with firearms in celebration."

Now, I have been to some exuberant wedding receptions, including one where a good friend of mine — whom, out of respect for his privacy, I will identify here only as "Joseph DiGiacinto, 235 Main Street, White Plains, NY 10601" — waded into a large fountain and attempted to overthrow, via hand-to-hand combat, a religious statue. But as an expression of joy at the union of a man and a woman, this pales by comparison with shooting down aircraft.

Fortunately, the two people in the plane survived. But this should serve as a reminder to brides of the importance of discouraging reception guests from discharging their firearms unless they have a good reason, such as that the band vocalist is attempting to perform "I Will Always Love You" in the official Whitney Houston Diarrhea of the Vowels version ("And IIIIIIIeeeeeIIIIIIIII, will alwaaaaays love yoooooeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooouuuuuuueeeeeeeeooooooo" BANG).

Speaking of things going bang: We need to straighten out a common wedding misconception concerning rice. Somehow, a rumor got started that you should not throw rice at the bride and groom, because if birds eat the rice, it swells up in their stomachs, and they (the birds) explode.