truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Creme de la Weird: In February, on "signing day," when hundreds of highly-recruited high school football players announced which colleges they would attend, lineman Kevin Hart of Fernley (Nev.) High School met local reporters with his coach at his side and dramatically chose the University of California over the University of Oregon. However, when the reporters called those college's coaches for reactions, they learned that Hart had not been meaningfully recruited by either school, or any other prominent one. Hart explained two days later that he passionately wanted to play at a major school and that when no offer came, "I made up what I wanted to be reality." Hart did not elaborate on what conceivable useful outcome he could have expected from the ruse.

In February, on "signing day," when hundreds of highly recruited high school football players announced which colleges they would attend, lineman Kevin Hart of Fernley (Nev.) High School met local reporters with his coach at his side and dramatically chose the University of California over the University of Oregon. However, when the reporters called those colleges' coaches for reactions, they learned that Hart had not been meaningfully recruited by either school, or any other prominent one. Hart explained two days later that he passionately wanted to play at a major school and that when no offer came, "I made up what I wanted to be reality." Hart did not elaborate on what conceivable useful outcome he could have expected from the ruse.

A man who said he didn't feel safe walking his dog unless he had his gun with him, wounded himself on a walk (Palm Bay, Fla., February).

During the media hoopla on Feb. 5, about that day's 24-state "Super Tuesday" "national primary" for president, enthusiastic voters called election offices for the addresses of their polling places so they could run down and vote: 400 called in Virginia (but its primary would be the following week); 1,000 called in Dallas (its primary would be a month later); "hundreds" called in Florida (its primary was the week before). At least six people were lined up to vote by 6:30 a.m. at one precinct in Milwaukee (Wisconsin's primary would be two weeks later).

Since at least the early 1990s, trillions of discarded plastic items have converged, held together by swirling currents, to form the Great Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch that now covers an area twice the size of the United States and weighs about 100 million tons. "Every little piece of plastic manufactured in the past 50 years that made it into the ocean is still out there," said one researcher quoted in a February dispatch in London's The Independent. An oceanographer predicted that the Patch would double in size in just the next decade. A 2006 United Nations office estimated that every square mile of ocean contains, on average, 46,000 pieces of floating plastic.

In February, at a polling place in Chicago's 42nd Ward (according to a Chicago Tribune report), one election judge (a woman in her 30s) was charged with battery for punching another election judge (a woman in her 50s) in the face.