"Is My Daughter-in-Law Going to Jail?", Part III

Once again the ineffable Smith family graces the headlines of the Local Rag. Readers will recall that George III apparently wants his daughter-in-law, Jen, to go to jail, and that the Smiths are mad at her for taking a million-dollar settlement from the cruise line. A "sellout", they call it. Your scribe still thinks that's pretty good money for a week-long "marriage" that seems to have ended dramatically on the honeymoon, even before the mysterious disappearance of the groom.

The hapless Smiths have twice tried to press their suit in court, and twice have had it tossed out onto the judicial dustheap. After the first failure last November, they refiled the action. But this time there will be no more refilings: the judge has now dismissed the case "with prejudice", meaning that he doesn't want to hear from them again. Sure, they can - and no doubt will - waste thousands of dollars more in a fruitless appeal of the judge's ruling, because they just don't seem to get the message. They are, to use an old nautical phrase, trying to "piss up a rope," and we all know how messy and difficult that can be. All of us except the Smiths, apparently.

So Jen did absolutely the smart thing by refusing to join her in-laws in their bootless venture, and arriving at a settlement on her own. The Smiths may still try to play a spoiler role, even though they benefit to the tune of about $200,000 from the settlement; one gets the sense from George's ill-tempered query that he would cut off his own nose to spite Jen's face. Well, he'll probably try.

So the saga continues, with a status conference scheduled in the Greenwich probate court next week. But the Smiths, with their long history (IMHO) of attracting bad karmic energy, are becoming increasingly marginalized. Even the judge doesn't want to give them the time of day anymore.