You Want Fries with That Wedding Cake?

"We see this as a business opportunity."

Those words could apply to almost anything, including a wedding at McDonald's.

Yep, it's happening — or it will be happening, as of January 2011, when a Hong Kong outlet of the venerable American fast food restaurant begins accepting requests for what could only be described as a McWedding.

In a situation that is an economics instructor's dream scenario, demand is driving supply. It turns out that the idea came from customer requests. So many regular consumers of Big Macs, fries, shakes, McSalads, Happy Meals (well, OK, maybe not Happy Meals) asked for the thing at the place that the owner of the place decided to provide the thing being requested.

Seems the romantic attraction of meeting, dating, and becoming engaged at McDonald's was enough to drive some customers to want to legally formalize their relationship there.

And it's not just the reception, with a menu filled with normal fare. No, it's the whole nine yards of marriage ceremony, wedding cake (the only unusual item on the menu), and reception for up to 100 people. All the happy couple (or the family of the bride) have to pay is 250 British pounds ($400). One thing that won't be on offer is champagne, since alcohol isn't allowed (not even BYO).

And, in a reminder that business is business, the restaurant manager wishes to inform prospective McWedding participants that the restaurant will remain open during the ceremony and reception and that, because it would be normal business hours, restaurant staff would be obliged to serve customers unassociated with the wedding, even if it meant that the flower girl who got a sudden craving for McDonaldLand cookies would have to stand in line.

No word yet on whether the outlet will offer any sort of honeymoon catering or other … arrangements.

$1 Billion House Towers over Mumbai

Nothing like being ostentatious in an era of nearly global austerity.

Mukesh Ambani, a very rich Indian man, has moved himself and his family into his new house in Mumbai. No ordinary house, this one has 37,000 square meters (nearly 400,000 square feet) of space. Now, the family (two parents, three children) isn't large enough to need all that space, so they all have plenty of room to spread out — and out and out — maybe invite a few neighborhoods full of friends over for a week at a time.

The house is so big that it requires 600 staff to keep the lights on and the floors clean. Those staff probably don't all live onsite, but they could, if they bunked in together on the bottom four floors. The available parking space could accommodate all 600, though, if they carpooled, four to a car. A total of 160 cars can fit in the underground garage. That leaves a comfortable 10 spots for the fleet of cars that the Ambani family no doubt owns.

You don't have to get there by car, though. You can fly your way in, landing at one of three helipads on top of the 173-meter-high (567-feet-high) building. From there, you can make your way down to the living space, pausing long enough to appreciate the small trees growing in the elevated garden (complete with high ceiling so the trees won't have to be cut down to size every few months).

Don't miss the onsite health club. Not just a gym, the health club has all manner of facilities resembling a full-building club, including swimming pools and a dance studio. Speaking of dance, you'll appreciate the large ballroom and 50-seat cinema as well, for dance and/or movie entertainment-filled evenings, after which you can sleep it all off in one of the many guest rooms scattered about the place.

Ambani is certainly the richest person in India, but it's bigger than that: He's the fourth richest person in the world. How did he get that way? He owns much of Reliance Industries, a mammoth conglomerate of oil, commercial, and biotech companies worth 18 billion British pounds (nearly $29 million). He had no problem paying for the new house, which cost a bit more than $1 billion.

By the way, the name of the house is Antilia, which was a legendary Atlantic Ocean island never found by Spanish or Portuguese explorers. Some traditions connect this island with the story of the Seven Cities of Gold.

Google Road-testing a Really Smart Car

I'm not sure what to think about this new self-driven car that Google is trumpeting. The self part of that self-driven doesn't mean you drive and no one else in the car. No, it means that the car is driving itself.

See Google is always on the lookout for new markets. This time round, they're looking to get into the AI road software business. Now, I'm not sure if this is just another opportunity to showcase Google Ads — theoretically, if you're in the car but you're not driving, you could be a captive audience for more Google Ads on your laptop, smartphone, dashboard, rear view mirror, makeup case mire, or whatever other kind of screen you could see from where you sit.

This happens now, with passengers. If Google is driving your car for you, then you're no longer the driver but are instead a passenger, free to make phone calls, surf the Web, answer email, tweet, write a blog post, record a Facebook update, or whatever else you might do in the Web 2.0+ generation.

But back to the car. So the system has a host of cameras, inside the front seat area and strapped onto the roof (in a setup that looks a bit like Darth Vader's fighter ship), and these cameras feed all kinds of information back to a central computer that does the rest.

This isn't exactly a new thing. Automated vehicles have been on the roads for years. This particular project has had seven test cars logging more than 1,000 miles with no human intervention whatever. The number of miles in which a human has to step in occasionally (such as to wait for a pedestrian who was taking an extremely long time to cross the road at a crosswalk or to avoid cyclist who had carelessly run a red light) is well over 100,000. So these folks know what they're doing.

This latest test involved a human-free navigation of Lombard Street, San Francisco's famously windy street. That test went off without a hitch — or a crash or even so much as a dent.

Google also reports having a Prius driving a preprogrammed route up a major highway in the middle of traffic for a distance of 35 miles. A human was behind the wheel but had to do nothing other than monitor traffic. The AI software did the rest, including braking, accelerating, and even changing lanes. (The car, of course, drove the speed limit the entire time.)

Where does this leave us? Probably not as close to the Jetsons as we might think. Still, it's probably closer to that sort of thing than most people realize.

No Gray Area Here: STOP Means Stop

An argument is raging in Southern California over the legality, fairness, you name it of the installation of cameras at remote STOP signs and of the issuance of expensive tickets for people who were caught on camera blowing through the signs. In particular, the people who got citations in the mail are complaining that they didn't realize that they were driving through a speed trap and, further, that they had no warnings to prevent subsequent infractions.

Right issue, wrong focus.

The argument that a physical stop by a patrol officer who handed out a citation would have prevented further infractions doesn't hold up when compared to a list of repeat offenders that nearly every law enforcement department could furnish. Also, the argument that drivers didn't know that they were photographed violating traffic laws and so didn't know that they were breaking the law doesn't hold up, either, since the clear presence of a STOP sign is a black-and-white (and red) indicator that a traffic law is there to be obeyed.

But again, that isn't the point. The point is this: A STOP sign means STOP. The octagonal red signs at intersections don't have shades of gray in the wilderness. A STOP sign is absolutely a restriction on forward progress, full stop. Unlike stop lights, which have yellow lights that can be interpreted as "Proceed with caution" but are more likely to be interpreted as "Get through the intersection before the light turns red," STOP signs go straight to red.

STOP signs are absolute. They say what they mean. Drivers should follow instructions.

To argue that a STOP sign doesn't need to be followed because it is at an intersection in a remote area assigns a qualifier to a situation that has no room for qualification. Down that slippery slope lies vast potential for confusion and injury, not to mention future arguments about when and whether the law applies in certain situations. We just don't want to go down that road as a society in any meaningful way. Traffic laws are on the books to protect drivers, cyclists, pedestrians, and anyone else who might be using roads. Traffic laws are not intended to be followed discriminately, nor should they be so enforced.

STOP does not mean SLOW AND PROCEED IF NO ONE IS COMING. STOP means STOP. If issuing citations to drivers who break the law in this regard is what it takes to get people to focus on road safety, then that is a price worth paying (and yes, I would be willing to pay a steep fine if I so broke the law).

Double-lottery Winner Counting His Millions

Third time lucky? You have to like his chances.

A Missouri man has won a million dollars in the lottery twice — three times, actually, since his second win was $2 million.

Ernest Pullen, a 57-year-old retired telecom employee and military man from Bonne Terre, Mo., won big in two different lottery events in his home state. In June, he won just a $1 million prize as part of a "100 Million Dollar Blockbuster" promotion run on the Scratchers lottery system. In September, he won another Scratchers event, "Mega MONOPOLY," to the tune of $2 million. (Now that's a lot of hotels on Boardwalk!)

It's not surprising that Missouri Lottery officials can conclusively state that this occurrence is the first of its kind. A lottery official put the odds at winning merely $1 million at 1 in 2.28 million. Winning $2 million after winning $1 million? Infinity is not enough.

But what about the money? Surely the state government gets part of that $3 million in tax. Well, yes. In fact, the payout was reduced further because Pullen chose to receive his winnings as lump sums, rather than as annuities. The $1 million payment was chopped to $700,00 right away, and the $2 million prize was a mere $1.3 million. And that's taxed income, remember.

Still, a man's house is his castle, and Pullen plans to spend some of his winnings on fixing up his castle. He probably has enough to install a top-notch security system.

Now We're Ready for the Aliens

Some things make me sleep better at night. This just might be one of those things: As far as aliens are concerned, we (Planet Earth) may yet have a leader.

The cliche of alien beings landing on Earth and uttering words to the effect of "Take us to your leader" is a cliche for a reason: It's entirely possible. Yes, it is entirely plausible, possible, predictable, and lots of other words ending in -able or -ible that intelligent members of a non-Earth species who arrive on our home world and can somehow approximate language that we humans can understand will assume that we have a leader and, more to the point, ask to be ushered into the presence of that leader.

If that happens, we need to be ready. And now, it seems, we are.

The United Nations (did you know this?) has an Office for Outer Space Affairs. It even has a catchy acronym — UNOOSA. UNOOSA has a leader, Mazlan Othman of Malaysia. She's an astrophysicist, a fact that will no doubt come in handy during the first discussions with alien beings who land on Earth and want to do something other than liquefy our defense systems.

Look at her picture: Othman is a kindly sort. At 58, she's been around the block a time or two in terms of astronomical research. She knows the chances of meeting a representative of an alien species (and she knows the chances are slim). However, she also knows that with the advent of the Hubble Space Telescope, the James Webb Telescope, the International Space Station, and all manner of other hunks of scientifically enhanced metal orbiting Earth, humans' chances of detecting intelligent life anywhere other than most places on Earth are growing by leaps and bounds.

This is undoubtedly not news to the U.N. scientific advisory committees, which will hear Othman's case very soon. If they agree that she and her office are the ones who should be put forward for a First Contact tete-a-tete, then (barring a no vote by the General Assembly), that is exactly what will happen.

Nightmares of alien overlords ruling the world? What nightmares of alien overlords ruling the world? We have a leader (or at least we will soon).

Love Killed the Social Media Star

Proving once again that too much of a good thing can be bad, workers at a library in Australia are reporting a horticultural case of death by Facebook.

Seems the Queensland state library hooked up a plant to a watering device, added in some electrical designs, threw in a bit of social media, and there they were.

Meet Eater, as the plant has come to be known, issued a call for fans and Wall posts on Facebook. Anytime someone went to the page and wrote something on the Meet Eater's Wall, the plant got a squirt of water.

Better yet (or worse yet, depending on how much you know the rest of the story), each time a person Liked the plant, the water rations went up.

Well, the plant proved pretty popular and so many Likes made so much more water trickle into the plant's container and before you could say "Man the lifeboats," the plant was waterlogged. Library officials report that the plant has "died" twice.

Turns out you can get a lot of water if you get 5,000 Likes. Surely these people were thinking they were doing the right thing, giving water to what was surely a plant that needed some attention, other than the kind brought on by the apparatus invading the plant's container in the name of a social media experiment.

But the writing should have been on the Wall when the number of Likes started to skyrocket. Still, the people looking after the poor plant say it's all part of their experiment.

Also part of their experiment is the opportunity to get up close and personal with the plant. See, the plant is the real thing, not just some virtual center of attention. If you happen to be in the neighborhood of the Queensland state library (and you'd be in Australia, of course), you can stop in and give the plant some real-world TLC. Organizers of the project have set up certain sound effects to reflect activity, including a sort of crooning sound that results from contact between the plant and green thumbs and a full-on crying suite triggered by the plant's being abandoned for more than a certain amount of time.

Somewhere, Akihiro Yokoi is smiling.