The West Tennessee Detention Facility in Mason, Tenn., made a video pitch for California inmates, hoping that some would volunteer to be outsourced under Tennessee's program to relieve crowding. The hard-timers should come east, the video urged, because of West Tennessee's "larger and cleaner jail cells, 79 TV channels, including ESPN, views of peaceful cow pastures, and ... the ‘Dorm of the Week,' (with its inmates) staying up all night, watching a movie and eating cheeseburgers or pizza," according to a March description in Nashville's Tennessean. "You're not a number here," one inmate said. "You come here, it's personalized." California's outsourcing program is facing a lawsuit from the prison guards' union, anxious about job loss.

• Retired German farmer Karl Szmolinsky told reporters in January that he had agreed to visit North Korea in April to give tips on how he managed to breed big rabbits, weighing 20 to 25 pounds, which he believes the Koreans view as one answer to their hunger crisis. He has already sent a sampler of 12 big rabbits, which should produce 60 offspring a year, with one providing "a filling meal for eight people," he told Der Spiegel.

• Walter C. Stevens, 81, thought he had buried allegations of a disreputable past, but an underground water problem at his former residence in Sierra Vista, Ariz., brought it back. When an area in the yard flooded, a plastic bag emerged, containing videotapes that the FBI now says Stevens had made in the 1970s and '80s of himself having sex with underage girls in Japan, South Korea and Thailand.

U.S. Justice Department statistics released in January showed that nationally, inmates in state prisons between the ages of 15 and 64 die at a rate of about 20 percent less than people of that age in the general population. Black inmates, especially, appear to suffer lower mortality behind prison walls, where the death rate is less than half what it is on the outside.

• Alabama state officials announced in February that they had identified more than $438,000 in abuses of the financial-aid program at Bishop State Community College in Mobile, including $87,000 in athletic scholarships awarded to 42 relatives of employees and others who played no sports. Included was one employee's 67-year-old disabled grandmother, who received scholarships in three sports. She was unable to use them, as she died shortly after the paperwork came through.

• According to a Beijing Youth Daily report distributed by Reuters news service in February, an unidentified Chinese businessman posted an online job offer for a "substitute" mistress. That is, in order to save his marriage, he had agreed to allow his wife to beat up his mistress and thus needed a stand-in to absorb the whipping, to spare the real mistress. He offered the equivalent of about $400 for every 10 minutes of pain.

• Gary Galleberg, a former vice mayor of Naples, Fla., pleaded guilty to battery in February for spitting on the table of restaurant diners whose offense had been to ask Galleberg, twice, to persuade his small daughter to stop banging on the window next to their table.

• Serbian anesthesiologist Spasoje Radulovic and surgeon Dragan Vukanic had an "all-out" fight in a Belgrade hospital's operating room in February, and then outside, punching and slapping each other while an assistant surgeon was forced to finish the operation. The nature of the dispute was not disclosed, according to a Reuters report.

• In Omaha, Neb., in February, Kevin Oliver, 36, was convicted of criminal impersonation for tricking two women into giving him urine samples by convincing them, falsely, that he was a recruiter for T-Mobile and needed the samples to complete their employment applications.

Crooks Who Need More Time in the Gym: (1) A 60-year-old woman turned on a 19-year-old man who had tried to hijack her car in Frisco, Texas, in February, and shot him with his own gun. (2) A petite clerk in her 20s followed on foot the man who snatched her store's cash drawer in Hamilton, Ontario, in February, confronted him and snatched it back. The man made another try for the cash drawer, but in a tug-of-war, the clerk again prevailed. (3) Four American senior citizens on a cruise, on a stopover in Limon, Costa Rica, fought off a band of young muggers in February, and in fact one senior (70) killed one of the thugs (20) with his bare hands, according to an Associated Press report.

The New York City children's services agency took away former "breatharian" David Jubb's 20-month-old son in February after Jubb refused to let doctors treat the boy's fractured ankle. As mentioned previously in News of the Weird, breatharians believe that humans can subsist primarily on air and sunlight. Jubb said he has evolved since those days and now eats, but extremely few calories' worth, and he drinks his own urine. He acknowledged that his child's diet is absent the generally recommended nutritional building blocks for infants, according to a New York Post report.

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