aphorisms. My favorite is “Know thyself,” which makes for an excellent rule of thumb when determining whether to hire help. As you note, cheap will-writing software abounds, and countless of your fellow non-immortals swear by the likes of Quicken WillMaker and Suze Orman’s Will & Trust Kit. There are also online services like LegalZoom.com, which asks clients to fill out a brief questionnaire, then prepares a will that is reviewed (for grammar and consistency) by a legal document assistant.

But these budget-friendly options are geared primarily toward folks with vanilla intentions. If you’d like to divvy up your business among kids from various marriages, for example, or you own property in far-flung locales, bequeathing can get mighty tricky. And while you can certainly create a complex will without human aid, do you really trust yourself to do so? Maybe not, if you’re the sort who’s allergic to fine print and dry legalese.

Don’t assume the Man will overlook any errors in the document you create, either—teensy technical mistakes can invalidate the entire thing. “We all want to assume that the law will just do what’s right,” says Ray Madoff, a professor at Boston College Law School and lead author of Practical Guide to Estate Planning. “But it’s really legalistic when it comes to estates.” And remember—you won’t be around to explain things.

If you decide that you’ll sleep better with an expert on your side, you needn’t shell out for a lawyer’s full-service package. A brief consultation with an attorney could provide you with enough information to fill out the forms yourself. Or you could hire a paralegal to help you assemble the document (though they cannot offer formal legal advice).

If this has helped, may I suggest you leave a little something to Mr. Know-It-All? Rare coins or Star Wars Burger King glasses are preferred, thank you.

I often work with my laptop on my thighs. But I’m worried that the heat from the computer is roasting my “family jewels.” Am I sterilizing myself?

Like the full-fledged human beings they can become, sperm turn listless when temperatures soar. And who can blame them? In the midst of a brutal heat wave, what sounds more appealing—jostling with 100 million of your tadpole-shaped brethren in a mad freestyle dash toward a fallopian tube or just lazily floating out with the tide?

But while heat makes for slothful sperm, it is far from certain that laptops have enough high-temperature oomph to stymie your dreams of fatherhood. “There’s never been a study that shows that putting a laptop on your lap actually affects fertility,” says Stanton Honig, a urologist and former president of the Society for the Study of Male Reproduction. A much-discussed 2004 study, for example, found that placing a laptop on a man’s legs for an hour caused his scrotal temperature to rise by an average 2.1 degrees Celsius; it did not, however, examine whether men who did this on a regular basis were less likely to sire children. And in July, researchers in Argentina announced that they had reduced sperm motility by placing samples of the stuff beneath a laptop for four hours—scary, perhaps, but several leaps away from proving a link between laptop use and reduced fertility.

Given the stakes, though, do you really need to wait for science to settle the matter? You don’t want to find out years from now that you could have produced progeny if only you’d slipped a thick hardcover book betwixt ThinkPad and thighs.

I went on two “meh” dates with a guy, and now he keeps calling and leaving messages asking me for a third. Given the brevity of the “relationship,” is it OK for a girl to brush off a suitor with a text message?

Your dilemma stems from the widely held assumption that texting is inherently inferior to talking, emailing, or sticking handwritten notes on windshields. But that viewpoint doesn’t necessarily hold water in the Twitter era, when we’ve learned to convey rich emotions in a modicum of space. And besides, maybe the premise has always been faulty—William Carlos Williams’ “The Red Wheelbarrow,” a masterpiece of American poetry, can fit in a single tweet with 48 characters to spare.

Granted, a texted kiss-off would be uncouth if you and the dude were a long-term item, since you would then owe him the chance to plead his case. But in this instance, your only obligation is to convey the courteous sentiment “Nothing personal, it just wasn’t meant to be.” Surely you can do so gracefully without wasting time on phone pleasantries.

But, please, stick with proper English. No one deserves to be dumped with a message along the lines of “s2s u r lame lol l8r.”

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Authors: Brendan I. Koerner

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