NEWS OF THE WEIRD

Fondness for fatness

. While the morbidly obese struggle with their health (and society’s scorn), those who eroticize massive weight gain are capturing increased attention. A July ABC News report showed commercial and personal websites give fullbellied “gainers,” such as New Jerseyan Donna Simpson, and their admiring “feeders” the opportunity to express themselves. Ms. Simpson became a 602-pound media sensation in March, when she began offering pay-per-view video of herself to an audience of horny feeders. Wrote another gainer-blogger, “Lately, I’ve been infatuated with the physics of my belly ... how it moves with me.” When he leans to one side, he wrote, “I feel a roll form around my love handle.” In the end, though, as a medical school professor put it, “The fetish may be in our heads, but the plaque is going to be in (their) arteries.” 

The entrepreneurial spirit

. The dating website BeautifulPeople. com, supposedly limiting its reach only to the attractive (though claiming 600,000 members worldwide), announced recently that it would sponsor a companion egg and sperm bank for its members to sell their essences for a fee. However, as managing director Greg Hodge told Newsweek in June, homely customers were welcome. “Initially, we hesitated to widen the offering to non-beautiful people. But everyone — including ugly people — would like to bring good-looking children into the world, and we can’t be selfish ....”

. The video company EA Sports sells sports games based on real-life professional leagues, with its biggest moneymaker “Madden NFL 11,” which allows joystick-using “coaches” to compete with each other based on actual pro football players’ abilities. In June, EA Sports announced a new touch of realism: Just as football teams “scout” opposing players, EA Sports will sell joystickers complex “scouting reports” on the talents and tendencies of their fellow joystickers. 

Strange afflictions

. Michelle Philpotts of Spalding, England, and her husband, Ian, and their two children have adjusted, since a car crash 20 years ago, to her anterograde amnesia, which, every day, robs her of short-term memory, forcing her to constantly re-learn her life. According to a June profile in London’s Daily Mail, that includes Ian’s convincing her that the stranger in her bed every morning is her husband, which he does by showing her their wedding photographs.

. An April National Geographic TV special tracked “Silvano,” an Italian man for whom sleep is almost impossible. He has “fatal familial insomnia,” making him constantly exhausted, and doctors believe he will eventually fall into a fatal dementia. Only 40 families in the world are believed to carry the FFI gene. 

Animal planet

. Wild elephants recently rampaged through parts of Bangladesh, and according to the head of the country’s Wildlife Trust, those super-intelligent animals “are quick to learn human strategies.” For example, he pointed to reports that elephants (protecting their migration corridors) routinely swipe torches from hunters and hurl them not randomly but directly at the hunters’ homes.

. Recent research on the “cat virus” (toxoplasma gondii) acknowledges that, to be viable, the virus must be passed in rodent feces but can only be hosted in a cat’s stomach — and thus that the “toxo” somehow tricks the rodents to overcome their natural fear of cats and instead, amazingly, to entice cats to eat them. Scientists are now studying whether, when human dopamine goes haywire, such as with schizophrenia, a toxoplasma-gondii-type phenomenon is at work.

. Biologists from Britain’s Exeter University who set out to study the sexual behavior of field crickets in a meadow in northern Spain reported in June that they set up 96 cameras and microphones to cover a population of 152 crickets that they individually identified with tiny, numbered placards on their backs (after DNA-swabbing each one). Publishing in the journal Science, they claimed the study is important in helping us understand how “climate change” will affect habitats. 

Least-competent criminals

. Austin, Texas, police issued an arrest warrant in June for Jose Romero, who they say robbed a Speedy Stop clerk after demanding money and menacingly pointing to his waistband, which held a caulking gun.

. Steven Kyle took about $75,000 worth of merchandise from Cline Custom Jewelers in Edmonds, Wash., in June, but as he left the store, employees shouted to passers-by, several of whom began to chase Mr. Kyle. Almost immediately, Mr. Kyle dropped his gun and the jewelry and fell to the ground exhausted. (He later revealed that he had only one lung.)

. Police in Houston said the man killed when he drove his 18-wheeler into a freeway pillar on July 6 was part of a two-man scheme to defraud an auto insurance company. Police said it was the other man who was originally scheduled to drive but that, citing the “danger,” he (wisely) backed out. N Inmate Carlos Medina-Bailon, 30, who was awaiting trial on drug-trafficking charges in El Paso, Texas, escaped in July by hiding in the jail’s garbagecollection system. Mr. Medina-Bailon’s body was found later the same day under mounds of trash in a landfill. 