7/7/7 – It’s Your Lucky Day! – Thousands Marry in Las Vegas
Okay, it’s true: I don’t believe in luck. Big time superstitions – even small, insidious ones – can be the undoing of any gambler, but mostly, I have always been big on mathematics and science and not so much on defying the inevitable. The law of large numbers is on your side, so long as you’re gambling with an edge. I’ve seen that principle in practice so many times, if I have a “belief,” it’s in the math.
There are some very troubling mathematics and probability issues surrounding marriage today. Well, it’s not a new problem, but it seems to be a very consistent one – I’m sure that everyone has the same impression about marriage, more or less: the odds of any marriage working out for the long term (much less forever) just aren’t really very good. According to a page in WikiPedia, the United States is second only to Sweden in the rate of divorce. To be perfectly frank, the page’s accuracy on WikiPedia is in question because the statistics were not linked to their original
encyclopedic source, but I don’t see how they could be very far off, based on what I’ve heard off and on through the years. The page claims the rate of divorce in the United States is 54.9% as compared to 1.1% in India on the low end. Whether the numbers are exactly right or not, give or take a few percentage points, a “house edge” of 6-8% is crushing to any would-be “player.” It makes it pretty clear – if you’re gambling on a life-long domestic partnership, you’re a pretty big dog at the start…
Reading all that you might think I’m a huge cynic about marriage. Man I gotta tell ya – I have a huge place in my heart for an underdog – a real come-from-behind success story. That just gets me. And I really want to believe that there’s someone who’ll hold my hand til it’s tired, old, and wrinkled.. I believe in love. It’s the strongest emotion we have the capacity to feel and respond to. It’s humanity’s one last hope to start getting it right before we self-destruct. That’s how I feel about it. So am I cynical? Hell no. In fact, in honor of all these thousands of people who came out to our
fair city on Saturday, stood in lines hundreds of people long in 114 degree heat for hours waiting for a chance to get a marriage license to put it all-in on the one beautiful thing worth risking it all for… I’ve made one formal exception to my belief system in honor of these people and all their romantic hearts for getting married on 7/7/7 – for you, I believe in luck – for just one day. 
Cheers, you guys.. Good luck, bon chance, buona fortuna… Just remember to keep it interesting!
I was riding around Saturday in the early evening and decided to grab a couple of real quick snaps of the wedding chapels, having heard that they were really busy with the people who wanted to get married on 7/7/7. I had no idea how busy they were! There had to have been thousands of people down on the north end of Las Vegas Boulevard in the various wedding chapels and things. Some were drive through style like one of the couples in one of these photos. They had cars lined up waiting for their turn. One had 4 cars in a row and I seriously doubt they even had room for more than that. The few photos I snapped with my little digital camera really give no indication of just how nuts it was – the scale and the numbers of people running down a mile of the Boulevard.. and that isn’t representative of all the hotel-resort weddings that were taking place and other chapels elsewhere. I was impressed. This many people going to all that trouble just in case they might have a little lucky edge! Like so many people cured after taking a placebo in medical testing, who knows? Maybe that work is all the “luck” they’ll ever need!
As I left that part of near-downtown and headed south I couldn’t help but giggle at the two girls sitting – languishing – in the swings out in front of the Talk of the Town strip club. They were watching the chapel across the street and had a look on their face as if they were thinking “damn it’s gonna be a lonnnng night…” Cheer up, girls… I’d get a lap dance on my wedding night! 
Will ya still need me, will ya still feed me when I’m sixty-four?
–Paul McCartney, before he was a Sir
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