truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Extreme Plumbers: Julio Cesar Cu, 42, and his three diving partners work exclusively by touch because their full-time job is in water so dark that flashlights are useless: to unclog and repair the antiquated Mexico City sewers ("a sea of human waste and industrial chemicals," according to an April Los Angeles Times dispatch). The city itself is in a valley surrounded by mountains, with frequent flooding and poor drainage in its combined stormwater-sewage system. Said one environmentalist, "You walk the streets, smell the stench of raw sewage, and can only imagine what's happening underground."

News of the Weird reported in 2001 on the staffing problem of British circus knife-thrower Jayde Hanson, after his assistant walked off the job after being nearly hit in the foot, which would have been her third injury that season (which was the number of injuries an ex-girlfriend had suffered as Hanson's assistant before she walked off in 2000). In April 2003, Hanson was performing with his new girlfriend, Yana Rodianova, 22, on Britain's ITV program "This Morning," showing off his world-record form as a speed knife-thrower, but one of the knives hit Rodianova on the head, drawing blood before the live cameras.

People Who Shouldn't Have Matches: Luis Chavez, 33, was arrested in Cypress, Calif., in February after he allegedly set off aerial fireworks in his condominium bedroom (motive unknown), leading to a $135,000 fire. And Patricia Martin burned down her Kings Mountain, N.C., house in February after she lit a piece of paper, then extinguished the flame, to create smoke to get rid of a nest of spiders in the house but failed to completely extinguish it.

Least Competent Person: Ms. Selimy Mensah, 39, was hospitalized in Leonia, N.J., in February with second- and third-degree burns. According to police, Mensah started a fire in her second-floor apartment when she, for some reason, tried to open a canister of spray paint with an electric can opener.

Improbable Threats: A February Boston Globe dispatch from Guangzhou, China, reported that a recent favorite tactic of employees who are owed back pay is not to sue but rather to make serious attempts to commit suicide in public; said one construction worker who dangled from a high-rise, "There was no other way to get what the company owed us." And a 22-year-old man robbed a bank in Cleveland, Ohio, on March 12 by walking up to a teller and sticking a gun in his own mouth, threatening to kill himself if he didn't get the money. (Five days later the man was shot to death after he pulled a gun on an Akron police officer.)

Tyrone Jermain Hogan, 20, pleaded guilty in Los Angeles in February to attempted carjacking, six months after trying to steal a van that unbeknownst to him at the time was carrying a martial arts team visiting from Florida International University; the students, said their instructor, held Hogan "like a pretzel on the ground" until police arrived.