truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

In April, a circus clown performing in Liverpool was ordered not to wear his classic oversized shoes because he could trip and injure someone.

A team from Britain's University of Warwick announced in April that it had built a speedy, fully functioning Formula 3 race car using biodegradable ingredients in the frame (including carrots, potatoes and soybean foam) and chocolate oils in the fuel.

Safety First in Britain: Recently, 118 local government councils conducted formal tests on their cemeteries' gravestones to see how susceptible they are to toppling over and hurting people, according to an April Daily Telegraph report.

Ms. Indra Ningsih, a 26-year-old maid, was detained by a court in Hong Kong in April after her employer accused her of spiking her vegetable soup with menstrual blood. According to a report of the case in Hong Kong's The Standard, the maid was employing a belief in some Southeast Asian cultures that menstrual blood has special powers and would improve an otherwise-contentious relationship between the maid and the employer.

In shootings in May (in Rodeo de Medio, Argentina) and April (Salvador, Brazil), victims of chest wounds survived when robbers' bullets were partially deflected. According to Agence France-Presse dispatches, the Argentine man was an evangelical pastor who was holding a psalm book to his chest, and the Brazilian woman was protected by a wad of cash stuffed in her bra.

When Alcoa Inc. prepared to build an aluminum smelting plant in Iceland in 2004, the government forced it to hire an expert to assure that none of the country's legendary "hidden people" lived underneath the property. The elf-like goblins provoke genuine apprehensiveness in many of the country's 300,000 natives (who are all, reputedly, related by blood). An Alcoa spokesman told Vanity Fair writer Michael Lewis (for an April 2009 report) that the inspection (which delayed construction for six months) was costly but necessary: "(W)e couldn't be in the position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people." (Lewis offered several explanations for the country's spectacular financial implosion in 2008, including Icelanders' incomprehensible superiority complex that convinced many lifelong fishermen that they were gifted investment bankers.)