truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Tobacco Kills: A 72-year-old woman accidentally, fatally, set herself on fire while filling her cigarette lighter (Somerville, Mass., February). A trucking company was ordered to pay a $2.7 million legal judgment because its only employee smoking area was across a 100-yard, poorly lighted parking lot, where a 55-year-old smoker was accidentally run over returning from a break (Pittsburgh, Pa., February). A 42-year-old man died of head injuries caused when he opened the door of a moving car to spit tobacco juice and fell out (Mineral Wells, W.Va., March).

Undignified Deaths: A 23-year-old professional snowboarder (in Nagano, Japan, for a competition) fell about 50 feet to his death while playfully sliding down the handrail of a staircase at the Panorama Land Kijimadaira hotel (February). A 28-year-old student actor accidentally hanged himself while rehearsing, alone, a scene in which his character survives a hanging (Baton Rouge, La., December).

Undignified Deaths: A 77-year-old man drowned in February while fishing, after a tire flew off a car in a nearby auto accident, hitting him on the head, and knocking him into a canal (North Highlands, Calif.) And a 67-year-old man was crushed to death in Shamokin, Pa., in January when two paramedics, carrying him in his wheelchair up about 20 steps, accidentally dropped him, and one fell on top of him.

Motorist B.J. Justin Lundin, 20, stopped his car in the middle of a 2-lane road near Weatherford, Tex., in January, got out, and attacked the driver behind him in a fit of road rage over the driver's having earlier objected to Lundin's tailgating; Lundin was then accidentally struck and killed by another car trying to get around the two cars.

A female murder victim was identified in January (even though her body had been dismembered) when the coroner checked the serial numbers on her breast implants (Nottinghamshire, England).

Undignified Deaths: A 90-year-old woman was fatally crushed when a clumsy, 485-lb. circus bear performing at a retirement home tripped over her wheelchair and fell on her (Hanover, Germany, August). A 52-year-old woman delivering newspapers before dawn on her motorcycle was killed when she accidentally ran head first into the rear end of a racehorse being walked along a road to a nearby stable (Utsunomiya, Japan, January). And, from a New Orleans Times-Picayune obituary that contains no explanation: "Eric D. 'Big Head' Vicks, a laborer, died Jan. 20 of a head injury."