PALMER, Alaska (AP) – It was admittedly rather ugly, but Brenna Dinkel’s cabbage was big enough to win the Giant Cabbage Weigh-Off at the Alaska State Fair.

Just before the weighing began Friday in front of a packed grandstand, 11-year-old Brenna pointed out one particularly gooey leaf to her friends.

“Yuck,” she said.

Brenna named him Bruce.

How heavy was Bruce?

Mike Campbell, the official from the state Division of Weights and Measures chosen to end all arguments, said it tipped the scales at 73.4 pounds.

Brenna won the $2,000 first-place prize for the second year in a row. Last year she won with an 85-pound cabbage. Barbara Everingham set the state record in 2000 with a 105.6-pound cabbage.

Brenna credited her grandfather, Don Dinkel, for helping her this year – as well as a big fence that helped keep the moose out.

Thief steals judge’s identity

MOUNT CLEMENS, Mich. (AP) – Somebody out there has stolen Mary Chrzanowski’s identity. And that’s a pretty powerful thing since she’s a Macomb County Circuit judge.

The thief recently obtained Chrzanowski’s Social Security number and birth date, then opened accounts with a Syracuse, N.Y., address and ran up a $5,800 phone bill and $500 in credit card charges.

“Unbelievable,” Chrzanowski said. “I guess I’m lucky the debts incurred were not high. Things could have been worse.”

Chrzanowski, who lives in Harrison Township, discovered the theft after receiving a call from a collection agency about her telephone bill.

“It’s not a good feeling to have bill collectors knocking on your door demanding payment for a bill you never incurred,” she said. “I will now spend the rest of my life checking my credit report in fear that this will happen again.”

The judge may not have to pay the bills, although she’s aware it could take several months to clear her credit.

This isn’t the first time she’s been the victim of theft. Her home was burglarized in the late 1990s, and the thieves were caught.

Back then, Chrzanowski asked for leniency, asking the judge to not to put them in prison if they’d return all of her jewelry.

“All I’d like to accomplish this time is an awareness by the person that stole my identity that they got caught,” she said.

Utilities fighting squirrels with ZAP

ALLENTOWN, Pa. (AP) – Shocking news: Squirrels and power lines don’t mix.

These cute but pesky rodents are a leading cause of unplanned outages. They chew through power lines, fry themselves by completing electrical circuits and generally wreak havoc on power grids.

Utility companies, always on the hunt for new ways to combat animals, may have found an inexpensive solution to what has long been a vexing problem.

If you can’t beat ’em, zap ’em.

The ZAPshield is an $11 polymer disc that arrived on the market some three years ago and delivers a nonlethal, electrostatic jolt to any varmint touching it. In Pennsylvania, two large utilities have both deployed the ZAPshield.

The idea is to give the squirrels enough of a shock to keep them away from sensitive power equipment, but not enough of one to hurt them. Inventor Jim Rauckman compares the feeling of getting zapped by the ZAPshield to walking across a carpet on a dry day and then touching someone.

“It teaches them not to be up there,” he said.

Jury-duty ducker’s report no Dickens

HOWELL, Mich. (AP) – The court-ordered report Brandon Dickens was ordered to write after ducking out of jury duty has not passed muster.

Livingston County Circuit Judge David Reader said Dickens’ paper was plagiarized. To the 20-year-old Dickens, the report merely contained “quoted” material.

Not surprisingly, Reader had the last word.

“Really, what I was looking for, Mr. Dickens, was your own work,” Reader said last week in upping Dickens’ punishment from three days in the courthouse to four days – and ordering him to rewrite the paper.

Dickens originally landed in Reader’s doghouse in June, when he failed to return to jury duty after a lunch break. The judge ordered him to spend three days observing a civil trial and to write a five-page paper on the history of jury service.

When Dickens turned in the paper Aug. 30, a court employee recognized phrases from something else the employee had read previously. An Internet search showed many of the phrases came word for word from an article in an online magazine.