A woman in Florida has been arrested for allegedly biting the head off a friend’s pet snake.

Cynthia Christensen asked her friend, the snake owner, if she could try holding the python. She then told a surrounding group of friends that she was going to bite the creature’s head off. While the snake’s owner was otherwise engaged, Christensen then apparently proceeded to do just that.

When the owner turned around, she saw the reptile hanging limply in Christensen’s hand, without its head, reported the St. Petersburg Times. While the owner did not actually see the beheading, her boyfriend, who was watching from a nearby house, told police he saw it all.

In her own defence, Christensen told police the snake had bitten her. But she then changed her mind and said a dog had attacked it. She has been charged with cruelty to animals and, if convicted, faces a fine and jail for up to five years.

Masculine competition ends in tears

You often see in the movies those big guys who look at another big guy and say “Who you lookin’ at?” or some such. Well, it also happens in real life and, as we all know, reality is much stranger than fiction.

A man has been arrested in Japan after he sprayed tear gas in other man’s eyes after an apparently pretty average staring competition near the ticket gate at JR Osaka Station turned nasty. The accused pulled out a can of tear gas he had in his possession (for self-defence purposes) and used it on his competing starer.

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Rail staff subdued the man and police officers arrested him for inflicting injury.

The victim and about 10 other onlookers were affected by the spray and were treated by doctors. However, their conditions were not serious, police said.

Not so sweet revenge for Brisbane worker

A Queensland man accused of being lazy took revenge by urinating in a colleague’s water bottle, a Brisbane court heard recently.

Rodney Clyde Grant, of Kalbar, pleaded guilty in Brisbane’s District Court to contaminating goods in April 2003.

His workmate Dennis Russell, it was heard, left his water bottle unattended in the railway yard in which they worked. When he next drank from the bottle he noticed it tasted strange and spat the liquid out.

Later, the story goes, the unusual tasting “water” was mentioned at a staff meeting. Grant, apparently unable to resist, blurted out that he had “pissed in the water bottle”. His reasoning, he explained, was to make Russell feel bad. It seems he succeeded.

Russell understandably became concerned and had medical tests done, but he was cleared as healthy and unaffected (physically, Folklaw assumes).

Grant was said to have regretted the incident, and at the time was under an enormous amount of stress, the court heard. He had been accused by the complainant of not pulling his weight in the workplace. He has since resigned and is working elsewhere.

District Court Judge Michael Shanahan gave Grant 150 hours community service and ordered him to pay his victim $500 in compensation.

The case of the spud firearm

Three men in Germany are facing weapons charges after being caught with a potato gun.

The men had been trying the gun out in front of spectators, they said, having found instructions on how to assemble it on the internet.

They were spotted by a police patrol driving away from a lake at some speed. The police gave chase and pulled them over. They were carrying appropriate ammunition and gloated to the officers that the gun could fire a piece of potato more than 300 yards. They also explained they had used bits of piping and a fuse from a gas stove to make the gun, and several spray cans to fire the weapon.

Under German law a potato gun is classed as a firearm and none of the men had a permit to carry one.

Grunt and squeak and squawk with the animals

Scientific analysis has shown that dog barks differ depending on what the dog is trying to say.

For example, a dog bark expressing that there is a stray cat in the yard will sound different in dog language from ‘Hey guys, there’s a burglar upstairs’.

Using this rationale, Israeli prison guards are being trained to understand the different tones, notes and noises that make up dog language.

The training of the guards is being carried out by an electronic system that analyses the dogs’ barks in each prison, according to Israeli paper Jedijot Achronot.

The system, rather unlike Dr Doolittle’s methods, uses a traffic light to distinguish between three main warning levels: green means that there is very little of concern happening, yellow reports a suspicious situation and red means, inevitably, that a prisoner is about to escape.