Wedding section

Something must be in the water at Google News. The oddest game show items keep turning up there.

The latest is a bunch of stories about Mark Labbett's marriage. For those who don't know, Labbett has developed an international reputation as "The Beast" on various versions of The Chase. We Yanks can watch him on GSN every weekday at 4:00 PM Eastern. Sadly, GSN hasn't produced any new eps of The Chase for quite a while. The show was still drawing large audiences in first-runs, but there were rumors about old-skewing demos and an outsized prize budget.

Mark got married in 2014, and I vaguely remember a few titters about the fact that he was marrying his second cousin. But the subject went away until recently, when he chatted about the rather distant consanguinity (how about that word!) on a British talk show. "It wasn't something we were aware of at the time. It's just one of those things that happened."

Well, um, okay. Nobody's saying that the marriage is illegal or even questionable. I checked the laws in my neck of the woods, and first-cousin marriage is a no-no but second-cousin marriage is apparently copacetic. I'm not sure about the U.K., but I'm not planning to marry my second cousin there. So it's not an issue for me.

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