Once it hits your lips, Altarcations are so good. Phyllis Nefler will drink the NYT's Weddings & Celebrations milkshake beerbong like it's nobody's business, especially when it's got good guest stars like this week's. Tell 'em what's up, Nef:

I don't know why, but the first thing my eye was drawn to in the Weddings and Celebrations section this weekend was the where-are-they-now "State of the Unions" piece on Susan Orlean and her husband John Gillespie. Having been exposed to Orlean's mildly batty Twitter ramblings, I guess I was looking forward to some gems.

But the article was boring and the only minor chuckle came from the juxtaposition of this line:

After the release, the real Ms. Orlean spent a lot of time explaining that, unlike her onscreen doppelganger [Meryl Streep], she was not a drug addict and didn't sleep with her sources.

With the immediately adjacent "It's Complicated" movie poster, with its chilling post-coital rendering of Alec Baldwin and Meryl Streep. God, so much Meryl sexing in one morning! That saucy little minx. Who knew?

ANYWAY, this whole time I was vaguely aware that on the other of the article there was a wedding picture with three heads in it, one smaller than the rest. "That's nice," I thought. "Probably some whole story involving adopting or inheriting a kid. I'll get to that in a sec."

EXCEPT IT WAS THIS:

Jesus, New York Times. You win. You always do. Also, can I have your recipe for eggnog? Thanks in advance.

The two people in that picture who are not Buddy The Elf are Jessie Fuller and Peyton Brodnax DeWitt Rodgers, who goes by Buck. Her freelance company is called "Glass Half Fuller" and his dad started a math-puzzle writer fan club, and how can you argue with either of those things? Really, their story is so charming and their personalities in this video (which also gets bombed by Will Ferrell) so genuine that you can't even get annoyed at them for being "a descendent of Samuel Fuller, a founder of Plymouth Colony" and "a descendent of James Madison, the fourth president of the United States." Instead you're like God Bless America, land that I love you dad!

Jessie and Buck met as production assistants on a movie called When In Rome. Since then, they've worked on a Kevin Smith/Bruce Willis/Tracy Morgan collaboration called "A Couple Of Dicks" — I know — and now Buck is the PA on a film called "The Other Guys" which appears to be a buddy cop movie starting Mark Wahlberg and … well, I think you can guess.

Because I love these two, here is some free publicity for the film that started it all. It stars the Gossip Girl voice alongside Josh Duhamel and Will Arnett and can anyone tell me what Danny DeVito is doing in this trailer besides just being present in random scenes? Not that I'm complaining.

The announcement notes that when Jessie mentioned offhand that she loved Nancy Meyers, Buck made some calls and soon she was working on the set of "It's Complicated". Which I mean, I'll forgive the suspicious marketing synergies — at least they didn't drop in a line about Meryl in the missionary — because my favorite thing on Twitter last weekend was the #NancyMeyersFilmTitle hashtag. Enjoy!

While those two only first met back in March, the union of Aretha Davis and Angelo Volandes was a much longer time coming. The pair met as Harvard freshmen in 1989 but did not begin dating until she lost the glasses and let down her hair, obviously. Shortly after graduation he dumped her, feeling that "it was prudent for them to stay focused on their studies, law for her and medicine for him." They didn't speak for six years. :(

But they ran into each other again and got back together, and because he's Greek this means that there are a lot of references in the article to odysseys, and when they finally got engaged last year they decided to hold their wedding in an orphanage in India and ask for donations in lieu of gifts, so we get a touching — if maybe somewhat emotionally manipulative? — and gorgeous slideshow filled with photos like this.

Those two marriages sort of suck all of the air out of the room this weekend, but I want to give a shootout to Heidi Howard and Brett Allen of the Bates College staff for being the quintessential New England Campus Couple.

If you've ever been to boarding school or a liberal arts college, you know the types: they are young and athletic; they look great in Patagonia; they are beloved faculty members and coaches who ultimately have adorable mopheaded children who run around the quad and are babysat by half of the adoring field hockey team. Their lives are so perfect that I'm surprised some women's magazine hasn't suggested moving to a small New Hampshire school as a Way To Meet Men.

Elsewhere this weekend: a bride helps mold young innocent kindergartners into sneering and spoiled Buckley Boys; these two are the median composite of how I imagine Palo Alto;

and a medical student weds a NASA contracted instructor who saved up all his money at age 14 to buy a telescope and who "always knows so much about space and dinosaurs."

And now, on to this week's face-off.

Jessica Maier and Nick Camerlenghi

• The couple was married at the Memorial Church at Harvard University by a Harvard chaplain: +1
• The bride is keeping her name: -1
• The bride graduated from Brown and the groom from Yale: +7
• The bride has an art history PhD from Columbia while the groom has a master's in architectural studies from MIT and a PhD in art and archaeology from Princeton: +9
• Both bride and groom are professors, she at Tulane and he at Louisiana State: +1
• The brides parents are history professors at Harvard and MIT: +1
• The groom's father is an anesthesiologist: +1
• "The couple met in Rome in 2004 while researching their dissertations": +1

TOTAL: 21

Elizabeth Grenfell and Grant Quasha

• The couple are both Wall Street associates, she at Merrill Lynch and he at JP Morgan: +2
• The bride earned her MBA at Columbia: +4
• The groom "graduated cum laude from Harvard, from which he also received an MBA": +8
• The bride's mother owns a fashion accessory company callused "Empress Duchess & Tart": +1
• The bride's mother is the chairwoman of Lenox Hill Neighborhood House: +1
• The bride's father is the founder of investment firm Quadrant Management: +1
• "The bridegroom's maternal grandfather, William J. Ronan, was "the first chairman of the New York Metropolitan Transportation Authority and a chairman of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey": +3
• The couple got married in Jackson Hole the week before Christmas. Can we discuss this? Sure, she's from Denver, but he's from New York. It's hard to get to Jackson Hole from New York! There are no nonstop flights that I know of. So people had to take connecting flights, many of which were probably cancelled cause of the snow, but even if the weather had cooperated that's really asking a lot! Whatever, all the guests probably took their private jets anyway or just took the whole week off to launch themselves off of Corbet's Couloir (a metaphor for marriage?) and then hang out at the Mangy Moose. So: +1

TOTAL: 21

When will Will Ferrell make a skiing movie, anyway?