Weird Week: Romantic attack, dead cat becomes chopper, and fat corpse fire

• Marry me, or DIE! It’s not the best proposal ever, is it? A woman in Florida has been arrested for trying to kill her boyfriend of two months because he refused to marry her. Reports say she needed to be wed in order to avoid being deported. And they say romance is dead!

Nikoleta Karoly tried to choke her lover, who had also been slapped so hard he feared he’d lose his hearing, and had previously threatened to stab him.

Karoly apparently admitted to police that yes, she had scratched and beaten him, but it was ok, as she did it while they were making love.

Who needs Romeo and Juliet when you’ve got that kind of romance.

• Ah, the Dutch! With their scenic canals, merry cycleways, traditional wooden shoes and open-minded attitude to, well, just about everything. Including, it seems, turning deceased pets into flying machines,

It was reported this week that artist Bart Jansen saw nothing wrong turning his dead cat Orville into a remote control helicopter.

After having the expired pet stuffed, Jansen apparently consulted a friend and remote controlled helicopter enthusiast on how to make the cat fly. The flying cat will now go on display at the Kunstrai art festival in Amsterdam.

• The Dutch are also innovators in entertainment. For instance, reality TV has always been rubbish. Other than launching the ‘celebrity’ careers of a generation of idiotic self-involved wannabes, it hasn’t served any purpose - until now.

A Dutch company says it will put a colony on Mars by 2023 in a venture that will be funded by the TV rights to the colonists themselves.

By producing the biggest reality TV show the world has ever known, Mars One hopes to put four colonists every two years on the Red Planet and have their every moment of colonial toil and misery become the subject of a soap-opera-like programme.

Just imagine, Big Brother, but with only four contestants each going slowly mad with isolation, malnutrition and a dwindling oxygen supply. Actually, that might even be watchable as long as the viewers could choose who gets sent to Mars. After Rolf Harris’ cringeworthy appearance at the Jubilee, I’m sure he’d get the vote.

• Never come between a woman and her shopping. A man in North Carolina received the kicking of his life this week after a dispute over groceries in a shop ended with his opponent removing her fake leg and beating him with it.

Police are unsure exactly how it started and little is clear at this point, other than the fact that the woman’s dialysis tube was pulled from her neck during the scuffle.

• Firefighters in Austria say that a fire which took hold of a crematorium may have been caused by a fat corpse.

Burning fat from the 440-pound woman’s body is thought to have blocked an air vent at the facility in Graz.

Firefighters were able to control the blaze by blasting the vents with water, but are calling for more crematoriums which are cable of dealing with obese bodies.