When 27-year-old Sergey Gavrilov’s mother refused to give him money for vodka, he did what any deranged Russian son would do—he hit her over the head with a brick, strangled her with an electric cord, put her body out on the balcony, and went on a two-day drinking and gambling binge. Soon after, he ran out of food so for the next month he made soup and pasta sauce using meat sliced from his mother’s frozen body. He confessed to the crime, but explained that “I did not like the meat very much. It was too fatty. But I was so hungry, I had to eat it.” He was given 14 years and three months in jail, slightly less than the 15 years the Russian criminal code dictates because, as the judge so sympathetically—or is that pathetically?—said, “He was not keen to eat the meat, he just was hungry.” Besides, the closest Safeway was too far to stagger to.