Bride Confronts Mystery Wedding Crasher After Searching Non-Stop For 4 Years

Michelle Wylie has spent the last four years trying to figure out the identity of an uninvited guest seen in photos taken on her wedding day. Now, thanks to the power of social media, her matrimonial mystery has been solved. “It was always in the back of my mind — who was that and why was he there?” said Wylie. In 2021, Michelle tied the knot with her husband John at the Carlton Hotel in Prestwick, Ayrshire, Scotland. When she was thumbing through the photos that had been taken that day, she spotted a man she didn’t know. She promptly asked her husband who he was, but John didn’t know either. The couple began asking their families if anyone knew the man, but no one did. Hoping to finally get to the bottom of the mystery, Michelle posted images on Facebook, hoping someone would recognize the man, or that the random stranger would finally confess. Sadly, the newlywed never got very far — until this week. She decided she was going to send a message to someone with a lot of followers and ask them to share the photo. She reached out to content creator Dazza, with over 400,000 Facebook fans and 129,000 TikTok subscribers, asking him to plaster the pictures on the two platforms. Within two hours, the unknown interloper was identified as Andrew Helliman. It turns out he’s not some sneaky creep who gets a kick out of crashing weddings. He actually made an innocent mistake when he was given misinformation about another wedding. Instead of showing up to the Great Western Hotel, Andrew entered the Carlton Hotel, unwittingly becoming a wedding crasher. He had been running late and rushed inside, where he found the groom waiting to go down the aisle. Having never seen the groom, he just assumed he was in the right place. “The fact that I didn’t recognize a single person didn’t raise any alarm bells,” said Andrew. Bells began ringing in his head once he saw the bride making her way to the altar. She wasn’t Michaela, the bride he expected to see. Knowing he couldn’t just stand up and walk out, he spent the next 20 minutes sitting awkwardly, trying to be inconspicuous. Thanks to Dazza, Michelle and Andrew finally met face-to-face. “You just don’t hear about things like this happening,” said Michelle. “I just can't stop laughing about it. It's great to finally find out who it was.”

 

Michelle and Andrew

 

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Restaurants in Germany Fine Customers Who Fail to Finish Their Meals

Several restaurants in Germany have come up with a novel way to reduce food waste — they're starting to fine customers who fail to finish their meals. The idea is not to make an extra buck off of stuffed patrons but to encourage them to order only what they’re able to eat. At Yuoki in Stuttgart, customers who don’t finish all of the food they take from the all-you-can-eat sushi buffet are charged $1.15 as part of the restaurant’s new “eat up or pay up” policy. Customers tend to overload their plates during the 2-hour buffet, and the new fee will help remind them not to waste food. Similarly, the Düsseldorf restaurant Okinii charges $1.18 for leftover food. The Chinese-Mongolian restaurant Himalaya also charges wasteful customers, though their policy is a bit more lax. Customers are hit with a $2.25 fee only if more than 3½ ounces of food is left on their plates. While all three restaurants seem to have implemented their wastefulness fees without major pushback, it remains to be seen whether other restaurants around the world will pick up on the trend.

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What Happens When a Whole City Moves on the Same Day?

Montreal has a knack for inconvenience. The winters are brutal, and when summer finally comes, it’s a safe bet that the streets will become clogged with moving vans. That's because July 1st has officially been deemed “Moving Day.” The tradition began as a humanitarian measure of the French colonial government of New France, who forbade landlords from evicting their tenant farmers before the winter snow had melted. Then, in 1973, the date was changed to July 1st, since children were still in school on May 1st. Today, Moving Day is both a boon and a headache for commercial moving companies. It’s so bad that people have to reserve their services at least six months in advance. Moving companies hire extra help during Moving Day, working around the clock to accommodate the public. Some companies even raise their rates for Moving Day, sometimes by as much as 250%. Cities also schedule extra garbage and recycling pickups for this period to deal with unwanted furniture and empty boxes left on the side of roads. Although Moving Day is seen as a headache for most people, bargain hunters love it because they can make a killing at garage sales that occur before Moving Day, as well as nabbing furniture and other items left on the street free of charge. As for the chaos involved in Moving Day, most people say, “It’s Moving Day, disasters are to be expected!”

 

 

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Glowing Antlers Failed, So Finns Try App to Save Reindeer

Finnish reindeer herders in the Arctic have painted Rudolph's antlers in fluorescent colors, hung reflectors around their necks, and even used movable traffic signs, but none of their efforts have helped reduce the annual 4,000 reindeer road deaths. Reindeer traffic warning signs were pinched by tourists for souvenirs, and reindeer would scrape off the fluorescent paint from their antlers. Now wildlife officials have decided on a new tactic: an interactive reindeer warning app where drivers can tap their mobile phone screens to register any reindeer they see and get warnings if they're approaching an area where reindeer have been spotted. They're hoping to save at least some of the 300,000 reindeer that wonder freely in the wilds of Lapland, sometimes described as the last wilderness in Europe. "Drivers often mistook reindeer with reflectors for people in the dark, thinking they wouldn't run into the middle of the road when they saw car headlights approaching,” said Anne Ollila, Director of Finnish Reindeer Herders Association. Reindeer husbandry provides work for some 10,000 people in the region, so wildlife officials are hoping the app will do the trick and keep the herds from diminishing.

 

 

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