Prison dental floss, errant bottle rockets, miffed mistresses — it’s 2012’s memorable suits

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The Week magazine has released its list of “America’s 9 craziest lawsuits” for 2012, and as with years past, they provoke quite a few reactions of, “Really?”

One involves four inmates in a Florida prison who assert that their rights to dental floss were denied. The sheriff claims there’s a risk that it would be used as a weapon or a rope.

Another suit finds a Georgia woman targeted by her local homeowners association for painting her 4-year-old granddaughter’s playhouse pink and purple, thus violating the association’s rules.

When a woman was having an affair with a Nassau County, N.Y., police officer, it caused her “severe and substantial emotional damage.” So she sued the department for negligence, saying the county should have stopped him. (The claim “defies imagination,” said a county attorney.)

A fraternity brother filed suit for injuries when he fell off a deck after being startled by a bottle rocket that was fired out of a fellow brother’s … well, it wasn’t a bottle.

And, adding to the many law student/law school lawsuits in the past few years, a student at Lincoln Memorial University and the John Duncan School of Law in Tennessee said she wasted $80,000 on law school tuition — because she did not complete her undergraduate degree and is ineligible to take the bar exam.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Chamber Institute for Legal Reform released its own list of ridiculous lawsuits for 2012, which include:

* An intoxicated Florida driver pleading guilty to manslaughter, then suing victim he killed;

* A Michigan woman filing a $5 million suit for the leftover gas still in her repossessed car;

* A California restaurateur sued for ADA violations over a parking lot he doesn’t own; and

* Bay Area parents who sued the school after their son was kicked out of honors class for cheating.

My prediction for 2013? Someone will sue someone else and offer a twist on the infamous “Twinkie defense,” saying that lack of the golden spongecake caused depression.

Hey, it could happen.