truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Thinning the Herd: A 21-year-old junior at the University of California at Berkeley became the latest drinking-contest fatality, in a March game among friends repeatedly downing shots of tequila, vodka, and whiskey. ("[He] was a competitive guy," said his roommate.) And a 20-year-old Carleton University (Ottawa, Ontario) student plunged to his death in February during a contest to see who could spit the farthest off an 11th floor balcony. He had taken a running start.

An 18-year-old man drowned near Eudora, Ark., in December, when the he accidentally fell into a pit of water while attempting to drown his pit bull (which he thought was too old and docile), and the man's father also drowned when he jumped in to save his son. (The dog survived.) And when a construction trench collapsed in New York City in December, a worker was buried up to his neck, and emergency crews were summoned, but before they could arrive, a co-worker manning a backhoe tried to dig him out, but accidentally decapitated him.

After a bout of heavy drinking, a landscape worker, riding home with his buddies, fell to his death while trying to urinate out of the open door of their car at about 25 mph (Croesgoch, Wales, November). And a 46-year-old man became the most recent to fall to his death on the side of a highway after stopping his car in the dark and searching for a place to urinate (but falling 300 feet off a cliff) (Columbia, Calif., March).

In November, a 70-year-old businessman had just finished testifying against the Homer, Alaska, city council's proposed no-smoking ordinance (calling the reported dangers to health "baloney") when he keeled over, dead of a heart attack. (He had said that eating breakfast with smokers every morning "hasn't bothered my health any.") Also in November, in New York City, a 79-year-old man, who was using a blender to make a health drink for his wife, was killed when the appliance exploded, with a glass shard severing an artery.

Thinning the Herd: A 44-year-old man was crushed to death by a slow-moving tractor-trailer when he jumped underneath it to get the reportedly-"well-worn" baseball cap that the wind had just blown off his head (Lethbridge, Alberta, November). And a 55-year-old man died of a heart attack, most likely, said the police, during or moments after stabbing his wife numerous times in a domestic altercation (Keene, N.H., December). And a 23-year-old man was hit by a subway car at New York City's 34th Street station when he leaned over the tracks to see the oncoming train, not realizing that it was coming from the other direction

Questionable Judgments: From a November 2003 article in the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, on the fatal transmission of Rocky Mountain spotted fever from two dogs to their owner: "One man in Mississippi contracted Rocky Mountain spotted fever when he killed ticks he had removed from his dog by biting them with his teeth. This may seem unusual