truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

People Disrespecting Their Bodies: In November, in Monkwearmouth, England, a 22-year-old Iraq-war veteran told buddies he was bored and, imitating a prank from a "Jackass" movie, inserted a firework "up his backside," according to a Daily Mail story, and lit it. When it exploded, he was taken to Sunderland Royal Hospital with a scorched colon and other serious injuries.

John Sheehan, 33, was arrested in November, nude, near the rapid-transit station in El Cerrito, Calif., and when asked if he was carrying contraband, admitted that he had a "screwdriver" in his rectum. (Police treated the item as a potential weapon, training guns on him while he removed the six-inch-long "awl" wrapped in electrical tape.)

Daring young men use the danger of moving cars for attention, especially if there's a video camera rolling. An 18-year-old Topeka, Kan., man became the latest "Jackass"- imitating casualty when he bailed out of a car going 35 mph in October and suffered a serious head injury. Other video performers go "ghost riding the whip" (letting their cars coast in neutral while they climb onto the roof to dance), with at least two deaths reported. In the newest craze, Jonathas Mendonca, 22, was hospitalized in critical condition in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., in January after "skiing" (holding onto the back of a car) on Interstate 95 at 65 mph.

About one-fifth of professional rodeo bull riders have given up their cowboy hats and now wear modified hockey helmets with face masks because of the prevalence of serious injuries. Said one diehard, though, "I don't wear a cowboy hat because I'm a bull rider. I wear a cowboy hat because I'm a cowboy."

Most of the Japanese World War II suicide-mission dive-bombers ("kamikazes") were successful, but a few failed pilots are still alive (their missions aborted because of weather or equipment failure), according to a Los Angeles Times dispatch in September. These days, they resent being compared to extremist-Islamic suicide bombers, who, the kamikazes say, act out of hatred rather than love of country and who do not always aim at military-only targets. On the other hand, one of the survivors said that many kamikaze "volunteers" were, contrary to legend, reluctant to die but caught up in patriotic fervor.

The unnamed young man who won the latest "Jackass" contest, sponsored by Chicho's Restaurant in Virginia Beach, Va., in August, first came to the attention of police when he was spotted wandering around at 1 a.m. bleeding from an amateur Mohawk haircut. Also, his chest, stomach, buttocks, and legs were heavily industrial-strength-stapled, and he had slice marks on his side and a broken collarbone (from a back flip off the bar). He had also swallowed and vomited a live goldfish and broken a beer bottle over his head, but all in all, he said, he was proud. (The restaurant manager was fired.)