Legally Weird

Finding love isn't easy. Especially when the object of your affection is serving time. According to recent headlines, there may be a willingness to overlook a person's faults (including criminal record) for a love story that most likely won't end in "happily ever after." Forget emotionally unavailable. Dating websites should include a checkbox for "physically unavailable due to incarceration" to fully disclose that your fairy tale might be contingent on a jailbreak that will likely result in your own criminal charges.

Do you remember that scene from "Legally Blonde" (now more than 20 years old!) where Elle Woods throws a slew of legal jargon at her hair stylist's ex and convinces him to give up possession of their tiny dog? What was she talking about? Does interacting with legal concepts have to be that confusing?

A few extremely odd marriage stories — make that "marriage" stories — popped up recently in the news. Thousands of people in Japan say they have married fictional characters. An Australian man announced that he intends to marry a robot. A Cambodian woman married a cow, believing it contains the soul of her late husband, and a woman in London married her cat to avoid a landlord's restrictions on pets.

On April 11, the highly publicized defamation trial between Johnny Depp and his ex-wife, Amber Heard, kicked off in Fairfax County, Virginia. Depp has already taken the stand for hours of soft-spoken testimony. Heard is scheduled to testify sometime later during the six-week proceedings. Also on the star-studded potential witness list are James Franco, Paul Bettany, Ellen Barkin, and Elon Musk.

The judges who host courtroom reality TV shows have usually been real judges. Last November, however, ABC stepped sideways when it announced that its new entry into the courtroom reality-TV field would be hosted by a funny and popular TV personality, Steve Harvey, who has no legal experience whatsoever.

In a surprising reversal, Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and largest shareholder of Twitter, abandoned his plan to join the social media company's board of directors and instead offered to buy the company outright and take it private. Dare we say it, the internet is all a-twitter. Some people are joyous; others are livid and horrified.