I guess it's not like he can run away or anything...

Reuters reports that a Sicilian court has decided alleged gangster Salvatore Ferranti is too fat for jail.

The accused mafioso weighs well over four hundred pounds, and apparently he gives new meaning to the old, defiant phrase, "They haven't built the cell that can hold me!" No, I guess they ran out of concrete.

Guards said they had to help Ferranti dress and use the bathroom. I assume they had to help him find his prick every morning when he needed to take a leak, which has to be the most humiliating job ever assigned to a turnkey. Turnover must have been considerable. Not that you can really blame Ferranti: you know it's not like he can see what he's doing.

A succession of '50s-pulp fiction paperback covers and bad B-movie posters keeps flashing through my brain. No prison could hold him! Too fat for jail, too young to die! He lived fat and furiously and only one man stood in his way! They served Justice--he asked for a double-helping! The list could go on, one lurid image after another. The fat gangster in a doorway (okay, just behind it, I know he wouldn't fit--but his framed silhouette, you know) with a woman in a slip and stockings sprawled on a bed in the foreground; an orange-and-white up close of the chubby mafioso pointing a globby sausage-like finger near his face while the gumshoe supports a frail in a (small) background corner... you get the idea.

It may be a minor obsession not merely because I'm overweight myself (but not four hundred pounds--Jeebus!), but also because my struggling novel project is a (hopefully pulpy) bit about an overweight vampire. I don't want to talk about that much, because it's really too good an idea to talk about. But it may be that in some corner of my heart I feel like there should be more fat people represented in pulp fiction. Not because we deserve it--we really should lose a few--but because we're funny-looking. (And jolly.)

Right. That didn't go anywhere I expected it to.

Hm. It also seems I actually wrote a blog entry. We won't go into the wheres and hows--let's just note that it's a light day with my place of employment all-but-closed and that I'm hoping the evil overlords of my employer's network have better things to do today. Anyway, I guess this means there won't be any need for a Neverwednesday Nights entry today. We have blog. Steve Holt!