truTV: Not Reality. Actuality.

Residents of an Austin, Texas, neighborhood undergoing a federally mandated sewer replacement noticed that, for several weeks starting in September, the work crews would spend the first three hours of their 12-hour days digging a huge hole in the street, and the last three hours re-filling and paving over it (repeating the process each day). The 20-by-20-by-20-foot hole in Monroe Street was too big to be covered with metal plates, and the city's "policy" of minimal traffic disruption required repaving for nighttime use, at least doubling the cost of the work.

Britain's Bristol City Council warned residents in government housing in September to always leave their sheds unlocked. Otherwise, thieves would have to break the doors down to get inside, and taxpayers would be stuck with the repair bills.

However, in September, a federal jury in Baltimore rejected the claim by a 64-year-old West Virginia man that a Frederick, Md., surgeon had stapled his rectum shut during an operation. The jury accepted the doctor's explanation that it was the man's longtime, heavy smoking that caused his rectum to become swollen and shut for 17 days.

Police in the Bavarian town of Neu-Ulm said they were investigating a dentist who allegedly barged into the home of a 35-year-old patient in September, tied her hands, forced her mouth open, and removed dentures worth the equivalent of about $500 because the woman's insurance company had declined to pay.

Never Give Up: In September, Melvin Dummar, now 62, the man who famously claimed to be in Howard Hughes' hand-written will (based on having given Hughes a ride in the desert in 1967), was turned down again by a federal appeals court in his latest challenge to the "official" 1976 will.

In September in Potsdam, N.Y., a man wanting to build a convenience store was turned down and so installed a row of nine used toilets in his front yard, as "artwork."