truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Finally, after four weeks of one customer's walking out on a dinner check, the staff of an O'Charley's restaurant in Bloomington, Ind., caught him. The diner had appeared on four consecutive Wednesdays nights, ordered two gin and tonics each time, then eaten a rib-eye steak each time, then asked to use the rest room each time, and then walked out on the same $25.96 tab each time. On March 28, the staff finally wised up and waited for him outside as he again tried to sneak out, and he was arrested.

Doug Guetzloe, one of central Florida's most prominent political operatives (and a subject of investigations by the Florida Elections Commission and a highway agency in Orlando), had long eluded criminal charges by denying any knowledge of unethical activities that prosecutors were sure he was involved in. However, late last year, Guetzloe missed a payment on his rental storage locker, and 50 boxes of his personal and professional records were seized and auctioned for $10 to a curious citizen, who then gave them to Orlando's WKMG-TV, which had several earlier investigations of Guetzloe still pending. Based on early readings of the storage-locker papers, Guetzloe was indicted for felony perjury in March, and the case continues.

Fake police officers have graced News of the Weird (most recently in 2006) for pulling motorists over for officious scoldings on traffic safety, but a March 20 stop in Boca Raton, Fla., by an imitation, off-duty sheriff's deputy was special. He was riding with his girlfriend when he decided to stop a discourteous motorist, and when a real cop later showed up, the "deputy" was revealed to be not a cop and also not a "he." Rachel Otto, 21, wore her hair short on top and shaved on the sides, and her outing as a woman apparently shocked the girlfriend, who had been living with Otto for a week. Police said Otto's rap sheet included nine arrests for impersonating police officers.

Adding to the list of stories that were formerly weird but which now occur with such frequency that they must be retired from circulation: (81) Pre-schoolers and first-graders who happen to find their parents' drug stashes and innocently bring them to school, sometimes even for "show and tell"-type sessions, as happened in March in Shreveport, La., when a first-grader brought in crack cocaine that might have been his 20-year-old mother's. And (82) people who call in fake bomb threats for the most selfish of reasons, such as to delay an airline takeoff that they're running late for, or to postpone a school exam they're not prepared for, or to get off work, as Brandy Killin, 26, allegedly did in Kearney, Neb., in March, to her employer First National Omaha.

And in October, a New York City mugger nearly choked Jennifer Chow to death, sending her to the hospital, where she was diagnosed with a latent thyroid cancer. (In March, she reported being cancer-free.)

In Bridgeport, Conn., in March, Fermin Rodriguez, 21, was charged with assault for stabbing his wife several times (after an argument over her alleged infidelity); police said that following his attack, he apparently handed his knife to the couple's 2-year-old son and said, "Now, you stab Mommy."