YOU CAN'T TAKE IT WITH YOU: Say you've got a very large pile of money and want to make sure that your worthless children don't get any of it. Also, your worthless grandchildren. And, also, everyone you might have ever met in your entire life. You write your will like lumber baron Wellington R. Burt, who made sure that no one got any of his money until twenty-one years after his last grandchild (then living at the time he wrote his will) was dead and buried.

Some of the press is calling this "bizarre." It is nothing of the sort. Mr. Burt could push his estate no further into the future than now due to a important little bit of law -- the Rule Against Perpetuities -- which prevents someone from keeping control over their estate long after death. Mortmain -- the dead hand -- isn't something the law favors. And Mr Burt's lawyers knew -- as every student studying for their first year property exam or bar exam knows -- that "No interest is good unless it must vest, if at all, not later than 21 years after some life in being at the creation of the interest."

What this means is that none of his leeches spawned from his loin got at his $100M until 92 years after he died. And a dozen or so people who never met the cheap bastard are now set for life.

"I WAS SHOUTING TOO MUCH ON THE FIRST ALBUM," ADDS PLANT. "I STOPPED SHOUTING A LITTLE BIT BY THE SECOND ALBUM. BY THE THIRD ONE I FINALLY LEARNED HOW TO SING":  In the fall of 1973 Led Zeppelin toured the West Coast in support of Houses of the Holy, and the Los Angeles Times sent a 16-year-old Cameron Crowe to profile them. Here's your lede:

The majority of the San Diego crowd, not unlike those in the 29 other tour stops, had spent at least seven hours waiting outside the Sports Arena in anticipation of the evening’s performance by British rockers Led Zeppelin. Sold out by mail-order weeks in advance, the event had led many to pitch their sleeping bags outside the doors the night before. Now, with house-lights dimmed and 8 o’clock several moments away, 18,000 hold their lighted matches high while throngs crush toward the stage-front.

Just as hysteria reaches a peak, four musicians take the brilliantly lighted stage and the thunderous opening notes of “Rock and Roll” blast through 33,000 watts of amplification, more wattage than the sound system used at Woodstock....

Crowe's website, The Uncool, currently has over 150 of his old pieces online, including a profile of the Allman Brothers (his first Rolling Stone cover story, also 1973) with a backstory which may sound extremely familiar: I left the tour in an emotional mess and wound up catatonic in the San Francisco airport, where I ran into my then-stewardess sister Cindy. She cheered me up and sent me home....

GIVING HOPE TO PUDGY TWELVE-YEAR-OLD DORKS EVERYWHERE:  That's what Dan Suitor said the last time we discussed the maturation of Matthew Lewis, the actor playing Neville Longbottom in the Harry Potter films. Below the fold, kids, the Neville Longbottom Deathly Hallows II teaser poster, and yes I'm still pissed they cut the St. Mungo's hospital scene from Order of the Phoenix:

A HICKEY FROM KENICKIE IS LIKE A HALLMARK CARD—WHEN YOU ONLY CARE ENOUGH TO SEND THE VERY BEST:  Drug addiction and its consequences have inevitably claimed the life of Jeff Conaway. The star of Grease and "Taxi" was 60.

MY SIGNATURE MOVE IS CALLED THE INSECT: A few quick, non-incisive notes about the return of So You Think You Can Dance:

• Mary Murphy is back, and there's actually a story about her absence from the judging table. At first it was fatigue -- she was tired from back-to-back seasons, and then negotiations for last season started to drag, and then she over-committed herself, and then she agreed to be a choreographer instead of a judge, and then she got throat cancer and went on radiation treatment. I'm happy to say that she's currently in remission. I do not care to hear her scream or spout nonsensical catch phrases, but one learns more from Mary Murphy in those instances when she buckles down to give a critique than from any of the other judges. I guess I can't say I'm thrilled that she's a weekly judge, but I'm certainly thrilled that she's cancer-free.
• There are two go-to moves for the contemporary dancers that I don't think we've talked about yet. The first is The Barber Pole. Dancer makes a corkscrew motion with his/her body around an imaginary center, imitating the red stripe on a barber pole. The second is the one where the dancer gets all pixellated and you can't tell what's going on. Or maybe that's just my DirecTV having trouble with Fox.
• Was the first 45 seconds of I, Dummy's turf the best thing you ever saw? We've seen gliding, but the way that his gliding accelerated ... dang.
• Also love that the turf dancers got filmed doing their thing on Grand in West Oakland. My bike commute!
• SYTYCD did, by the way, set the world record for saying "beautiful San Francisco!" and then immediately cutting to shots of Oakland. It was kind of insulting that they pretended the Paramount Theater is in San Francisco.
• So Atlanta was a neverending stream of great dancers. Why not show us more than 0.3 seconds of them dancing? This show really doesn't grossly overdo it with the bad auditions (like Idol does), so even if they couldn't cut the 15 or so minutes (out of two hours) they spent on those, couldn't they trade some of the montage, b-roll, and up-next for a couple more 90-second auditions?

DOES HE GO BOWHUNTING FROM HIS JETPACK?  Mark Zuckerberg now will only eat meat he has killed himself.

Related, of course: David Foster Wallace, "Consider the Lobster" (Gourmet, August 2004).

I DON'T BELIEVE YOU—YOU'RE A LIAR:  An interesting question I saw someone pose on a message board recently and I've been batting around with friends: prior to Adolf Hitler, who was America's go-to "so-and-so is worse than [X]" historical comparison in common parlance?  Related, before one could be considered as smart as Einstein or a rocket scientist, what individuals and professions were similarly esteemed?