truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Rap as a Second Language: In a June copyright infringement case, British High Court judge Kim Lewison ruled against the composer of the 2001 song "Burnin'," explaining that he could not help Lewison because he did not know what certain lyrics meant (such as "shizzle my nizzle"). The lyrics, said the judge, although written in a form of English, were "for practical purposes a foreign language" and therefore, he could not be sure whether the borrowed use of the lyrics impugned them.

The Palo Alto, Calif., City Council scheduled for a final vote in May a proposed code of conduct that includes (in order to coax civility among members) an official admonition to avoid even non- verbal forms of disagreement with each other, such as rolling one's eyes or shaking one's head or frowning. One former resident told the San Jose Mercury News that the proposal is a prime example of the "Palo Alto mindset."

Pennsylvania's attorney general and prosecutors in Arapahoe County, Colo., made similar interpretations of child pornography laws recently in defending their decisions not to reveal information. The attorney general said he could not publicly identify websites he had ordered suppressed by internet service providers because, to identify those sites would be "disseminating" child pornography. And the Colorado prosecutors refused to show defendant Joseph Verbrugge the 200 photographs it would use against him (as is required in all criminal cases) because to do so would be to disseminate child pornography to him. (In January, the a Colorado appeals court rebuked the prosecutors.)

The attorney general of the Australian state of Victoria told reporters in February that the government would soon propose legislation to abolish the common-law practice of varying the death benefits for widows according to how pretty they are. Technically, the doctrine allows a discount on a widow's compensation if she has strong prospects of remarriage, and judges thus unavoidably take note of her attributes in deciding how much money she needs. (The widow most recently judged a looker lost about US$62,000 until an appeals court intervened.)

An Iowa child welfare agency seized half of an 11-year-old boy's $220 savings account in February (built up by doing chores) because his father (whose name was on it, too) was behind on the kid's child support payments.

Rules Are Rules: Freshman Missouri state representative Cynthia Davis, at a legislative orientation session in December in Jefferson City, took her turn at learning how to preside over debates and interrupted Rep. Chuck Graham, who had the floor. According to a report in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Davis recited the rule that members must be standing in order to speak and that Graham was thus out of order, in that the veteran legislator Graham has been in a wheelchair for 21 years, the result of a car accident.