reports Reuters:

COLOGNE, Germany (Hollywood Reporter) – A German cannibal is taking legal action to stop the release of the horror film “Butterfly: A Grimm Love Story,” which he claims is based on his life.

Keri Russell (“Felicity”) stars as a graduate student researching imprisoned cannibal Simon Grobeck (Thomas Kretschmann). Russell is drawn into Grobeck’s world and becomes obsessed with the Internet cannibal community. “Butterfly” is scheduled for a March 9 release in Germany.

But not if Armin Meiwes, who was sentenced to eight-and-a-half years in prison for eating a man he met over the Internet, has his way. In a statement Monday, Meiwes’s lawyer, Harald Ermel, said the film is a “slavish re-enactment” of the real-life events and his client did not give permission to producer Atlantic Streamline to fictionalize his story.

“I feel used,” said Meiwes, who filmed the killing and confessed to the crime but denied it was murder since his victim volunteered to be eaten.

William Corder’s Trial, bound in William Corder’s skin

A Boston Globe article exploits a fairly well-known bibliographic curiosity to provoke some public shock:

Brown University’s library boasts an unusual anatomy book. Tanned and polished to a smooth golden brown, its cover looks and feels no different from any other fine leather.

But here’s its secret: the book is bound in human skin.

A number of prestigious libraries — including Harvard University’s — have such books in their collections. While the idea of making leather from human skin seems bizarre and cruel today, it was not uncommon in centuries past, said Laura Hartman, a rare book cataloger at the National Library of Medicine in Maryland and author of a paper on the subject…

The library has three books bound in human skin — the anatomy text and two 19th century editions of “The Dance of Death,” a medieval morality tale.

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Bibliophile publications, and the literature of the supernatural, sometimes feature colorful stories of rare older books, particularly grimoires (i.e., instruction manuals for practicing black magic), purportedly bound in human skin (usually that of a virgin slave), but real examples seem to be mostly unique Victorian and Edwardian exhibition bindings of anatomical texts or avant garde literature.

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The above story probably came about via a reading of this one from the Harvard Law School Record.

The St. Louis World Aquarium is planning to sell its two-headed albino rat snake (Pantherophis, formerly Elaphe, obsoleta?) on eBay.

41 year old Sharon Tendler, a British subject of the Jewish faith, plighted her troth yesterday to Cindy, a 35 year old (evidently male) dolphin, in Eilat, Israel.

I’m not a pervert.

said the bride, according to the Bangkok Post.

Prenuptial Agreements are standard operating procedure among Hollywood celebrities these days. Sandy Cohen of AP reports:

LOS ANGELES – No mother-in-law sleepovers. Only one football game per Sunday. Mandatory sexual positions…

Prenups are the norm for most stars — even regular folks should have one, if you listen to Kanye West — and these documents can dictate far more than who gets what. Attorneys say some recent celebrity prenups include:

• Limiting the wife’s weight to 120 pounds or she must relinquish $100,000 of her separate property.

• Allowing a spouse to perform random drug tests, with financial penalties for positive results.

• Requiring a husband to pay $10,000 each time he is rude to his wife’s parents.

• The previously mentioned rules regarding mothers-in-law, football and sex.

“Everything is legal unless you’re dealing with custody of children or child support,” said Los Angeles divorce attorney Robert Nachshin, who has represented Barry Bonds (his ex signed the prenup the day before their wedding) and author Terry McMillan (who discovered the young hubby who brought her groove back was gay). “Everything else is up for grabs.”

“People have their own little peculiar peccadilloes they’re concerned about,” said attorney Leon F. Bennett, who has represented Marlon Brando, Kelsey Grammer and Dennis Hopper. “People of wealth have a sense they have power over others that their money can acquire, and reality shows it can.”

Infidelity clauses are common, Nachshin said. Michael Douglas agreed to pay Catherine Zeta-Jones millions should he stray, and Denise Richards made similar requirements of Charlie Sheen.

Steve Zorn, a 22 year old rap performing resident of St. Paris, Ohio was drinking in celebration of an expected record deal (I celebrate my own expected record deals of an evening pretty frequently too), and finding his pen gun not working, naturally put the gun this head and triggered it, assuming this was perfectly safe. His equally-swift mother, Lisa McCoy-Horn, is reported to be lobbying lawmakers to outlaw pen guns, i.e. already pretty-universally-illegal small-caliber, single-shot weapons that resemble pens.

Paul Hellyer, former Canadian Minister of Defence and Deputy Prime Minister under Pierre Trudeau, speaking September 25th at the University of Toronto, told an undoubtedly-surprised audience that “UFOs, are as real as the airplanes that fly over your head,” and procceed to expose US preparations for interstellar aggression.

“I’m so concerned about what the consequences might be of starting an intergalactic war, that I just think I had to say something.”

Hellyer revealed, “The secrecy involved in all matters pertaining to the Roswell incident was unparalled. The classification was, from the outset, above top secret, so the vast majority of U.S. officials and politicians, let alone a mere allied minister of defence, were never in-the-loop.”

Hellyer warned, “The United States military are preparing weapons which could be used against the aliens, and they could get us into an intergalactic war without us ever having any warning. He stated, “The Bush administration has finally agreed to let the military build a forward base on the moon, which will put them in a better position to keep track of the goings and comings of the visitors from space, and to shoot at them, if they so decide.”

Hellyer’s speech ended with a standing ovation. He said, “The time has come to lift the veil of secrecy, and let the truth emerge, so there can be a real and informed debate, about one of the most important problems facing our planet today.”