truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Recidivist unlicensed surgeon John Ronald Brown, 75, was convicted in 1999 in San Diego of causing the death of an 80-year-old man who had consented to have Brown amputate a healthy leg, thus bringing to the attention of many people the mental disorder of "apotemnophilia" ("body identity integrity disorder"), which is a sexual or sexual-like gratification from the removal of a "normal" limb regarded as ugly or superfluous. Very few licensed doctors will perform the surgery, and Brown's license had been revoked 20 years earlier after botched transsexual operations, but he continued to attract patients who had no other option if they felt desperate to improve their look.

The long-running battle between Alan Davis, 53, and officials in Altamonte Springs, Fla., began anew in May, upon Davis' release from prison after serving a year for his latest defiance of court orders to clear the "junk" out of his yard ("felony littering"). It was his third prison stretch in five years, and he said he is not done yet. Just before his latest stretch, he had placed a giant sculpted derriere in front of the Seminole County Courthouse. In May, he told reporters that he would rejoin the battle by ringing his yard with 42 smaller, similar sculptures.

In May, the University of Washington ran a two-month campaign of compassion to help out people hurt by the downturn in the economy. Fans of UW's football team who lost their jobs or are otherwise financially unable to renew their Huskies' season tickets can tap into a special philanthropic fund. A donor's $500 tax-deductible gift to "Dawgs Supporting Dawgs" would permit a hard-hit fan to maintain his place on the priority season-ticket list (though this year's seats would be in an inferior location).

Using GPS and state-of-the-art sonar, Columbia University researchers recently made the first comprehensive map of the wonders submerged in New York City's harbors. Supplementing those findings with historical data, New York magazine reported the inventory's highlights in May: a 350-foot steamship (downed in 1920), a freight train (derailed in 1865), 1,600 bars of silver (unrecovered since 1903), a fleet of Good Humor ice cream trucks (which form a reef for aquatic life), and so many junked cars near the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges that divers use them as underwater navigation points. Of most concern lately, though, are the wildlife: 4-foot-long worms that eat wooden docks and tiny "gribbles" that eat concrete pilings.

In April at a gallery in London, Mexican artist Raul Ortega Ayala's exhibit opened with the customary hors d'oeuvres for visitors. However, since Ayala's work specializes in the roles that food play in our lives, he served cheese made from human breast milk, to "explor(e) our first encounter with food emphasizing its territoriality and boundaries." He said his next piece would go the other way, with 10 menus showing what "presidents, public figures, mass murderers and cave men" ate just before dying.

Britons Sam Bompas and Harry Parr are revered chef-artists whose medium is the gelatin mold, with which they have created jelly models of, for example, London's St. Paul's Cathedral and a Madrid airport terminal, and who, for a New York customer, recently created orange-juice jelly inside some Compari jelly to produce a Compari-and-soda jelly. In April, the pair also opened a London bar, Alcoholic Architecture, in which vaporized gin and tonic saturate the air in equivalent strength of one gin-and-tonic drink for every 40 minutes of exposure.