truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

They're either earnestly civic-minded or people with issues, but in several dozen cities across the country, men (and a few women) dress in homemade superhero costumes and patrol marginal neighborhoods, aiming to deter crime. Phoenix's Green Scorpion and New York City's Terrifica and Orlando's Master Legend and Indianapolis' Mr. Silent are just a few of the 200 gunless, knifeless vigilantes listed on the World Superhero Registry, most presumably with day jobs but who fancy cleaning up the mean streets at night. According to two recent reports (in Rolling Stone and The Times of London), unanticipated gripes by the "Reals," as they call themselves, are boredom from lack of crime and (especially in the summer) itchy spandex outfits

In December, Idaho State University sent certified-mail letters to its adjunct faculty to disclose (as required by law) that some of them would soon be laid off. However, only the first-class mail fee was billed to the university, leaving each professor to pay on receipt the certified-mail surcharge in order to find out what the university would send them that was so important. (The Idaho State Journal reported that it was the Postal Service's error.)

In December, a Flybe Airline flight from Cardiff, Wales, was preparing to land as scheduled at Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris when the pilot announced that they had to return to Cardiff because, he said, "Unfortunately, I'm not qualified to land the plane in Paris." Because of the heavy fog, the plane would have to be instrument-landed, and the pilot had not yet completed certification.

And in December, a 3-day-old infant was doing well in Colorado Springs following the discovery and removal of a tiny, almost-perfectly-formed foot from his brain by Dr. Paul Grabb.

Hysterectomies by ordinary surgery can take hours to perform, several days' recovery and six weeks off from work, largely from the trauma of cutting open the abdomen, but recent advances in laparoscopy have reduced the burdens dramatically because the four required incisions are each only about one-eighth of an inch long. The Chicago Sun-Times reported in December that one of the leading practitioners, Dr. Richard Demir of South Barrington, Ill., had recently been recognized by the Guinness Book of World Records for having removed a 7-pound uterus via laparoscopy (by cutting the organ into smaller pieces and pulling each out through the tiny incisions).

Officials in South Africa, where government only recently came to accept the connection between HIV and AIDS after years of denial that provoked the country's epidemic of cases, revealed in December that supplies of retroviral drugs are being used recreationally as hallucinogens smoked by schoolchildren. Health officials told BBC News that the drugs are prescribed to those at risk for AIDS, but are not taken seriously by symptom-free, HIV-diagnosed South Africans who are just now starting to understand the decades-old disease.