Welcome to another edition of this journal created just for you from Lab 017 of the Great Unnamed School of Law. (GUSOL?) I was having a lovely time just peacefully reading journals, catching up on my entertainment news (sad: Michael J. Fox is leaving Spin City to devote his time to fighting Parkinson's), when some bonehead pulls out his cell phone and makes a phone call like this lab is his own private phone booth, and then of course whoever is on the other end of the line (air?) can't hear him well enough so he has to, you know, YELL, all while five or six other people are trying to work or read their entertainment news or whatever.

Did it not occur to him to, perhaps, step out into the hall? I hate inconsiderate people, and trust me, GUSOL is full of them.

Okay. So. While it may be an obscenely guilty pleasure (and I maintain that this is true for any girl who was 15 when this movie came out, even if they don't admit it) I must say that I enjoy an occasional viewing of that great work of cinematic art, Dirty Dancing.

Note the use of the word "occasional." As I'm sure some of you have noticed, there was apparently a law passed somewhere that this movie must be play on some cable channel at least once each day. It feels as though every time I've turned on my television in the past three months, there's Baby carrying that watermelon or Penny crying in the kitchen or that whole Sylvia and Mickey thing. It's a New Classic on TNT, it's a Rock 'n' Roll Picture Show on VH-1, it's Jim Bob's whatever-he-does on USA.

It's enough. Sure, I enjoy Patrick Swayze's naked back. I probably would enjoy glancing at, say, a photo of Patrick Swayze's naked back once a day, certainly. But I don't think I need the whole movie, all the time.

By the way, the guy who played Robbie the waiter died of a heroin overdose in 1991. He became a heroin addict while writing an article about heroin addicts. So there you go.

Truthfully, I don't like the new entry color scheme either, but the gray was getting so boring. I'll work on it.

I'd like to leave you with an excerpt from today's Trusts and Estates class. We're working on intestacy, which is what happens when someone dies without a will, and how you decide who gets what from that person's family. One of the numerous statutes on this subject, Section 2-106 of the Uniform Probate Code, reads in part as follows:

Each surviving descendent in the nearest generation is allocated one share. The remaining shares, if any, are combined and then divided in the same manner among the surviving descendents of the deceased descendants as if the surviving descendents who were allocated a share and their surviving descendents had predeceased the decedent.