Too weird to escape notice

Here's another reminder that publicity is difficult to avoid in a media-saturated world where the salacious and outré find enthusiastic audiences.

Witness the story out of our sister paper, the Houston Chronicle, about a local man who pleaded guilty last week to attempted murder for offering to kill a depressed woman he met through an online suicide chat group by strangling her during sex.

Reuters reports that he "took the plea deal to avoid subjecting his wife and child to a trial's publicity."

By this morning, the story had been picked up by news sources as far away as Singapore.