truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

The former Bob Craft filed a lawsuit in November against the owners of the reckless-stunt-filled MTV program (and movie) "Jackass," claiming it has defamed him, in that five years ago, he had his own name legally changed to "Jack Ass," which he thought would call attention to his national campaign against drunk driving. Ass, who lives in Montana and filed the lawsuit there, claims that the TV show and movie have damaged his reputation ("which I have worked so hard to create," he wrote) to the tune of at least $10 million.

I Demand My Rights: Freya McDonald, 15, and her family said in January that they would soon file a lawsuit against the Speyside High School (Morayshire, Scotland) for violating the European Convention on Human Rights by giving her 11 after-school detentions in 9 months.

Not My Fault: The town council in Enfield, Conn., was criticized in December for letting its insurance company pay settlements in two incidents last year, to softball players who claimed they hurt themselves sliding into bases in city parks. Mark Brengi said he tore ligaments sliding into third base and settled for $45,000, and one week later, his brother Scott broke an ankle sliding into second base on the same field and settled for $90,000. Said one Enfield taxpayer (and former pro baseball player), "You're supposed to slide before you hit the base."

Margie Schoendinger of the Houston suburb of Missouri City, Tex., filed a lawsuit in December against George W. Bush for a lengthy series of alleged actions while he was governor, including "watching" her and "having sex" with her and her husband. The rambling and nonsequitur-laden complaint, filed in Fort Bend County Court and reported on by the weekly Fort Bend Star, names the Sugar Land (Tex.) Police Department as corroborating many of the plaintiff's allegations (example: that "plaintiff had seven dates, which became seven lovers, had told no lies, committed no crimes, gotten two traffic tickets, and dated George W. Bush as a minor"), but a Department spokesman said no one had any idea what Schoendinger was talking about.

Two men who have sat on juries in notoriously litigation-friendly Jefferson County, Miss., filed a lawsuit against the TV program "60 Minutes" in December, claiming that they were defamed in a segment about Mississippi juries' generosity. Anthony Berry was on a jury that gave out $150 million in an asbestos case, and Johnny Anderson was on one that awarded $150 million in a diet drug case, and both say the 60 Minutes segment made the juries seem so extravagant that they must be getting kickbacks. The two men's lawsuit (filed in Jefferson County, of course) asks for more than $6 billion.

In November 2001, News of the Weird reported on a language its practitioners called The Truth (but which is basically indistinguishable from gibberish), which at that time a few Canadian defendants were using in tax-evasion trials (with a huge lack of success). In December 2002, Janet Kay Logan, 46, and Jason Zellmer, 22, were convicted in Madison, Wis., of creating phony lawsuit documents, despite their using The Truth in their trial and attempting to call as a witness the language's creator David Wynn Miller, also known as the "king of Hawaii," who informed the judge that the genesis of The Truth was when Miller "turned Hawaii into a verb" and showed "how a preposition is needed to certify a noun." Logan insisted until the very end that the lawsuits were legitimate because she is a judge in the "DI-STRICT court of the Unity State of the World."