Please finish this lead sentence in a May 9 story in the Louisiana Record: “A New Orleans woman who was allegedly injured when she fell after stepping on a moving treadmill is____.”

A.       grateful the fitness club staff came to her aid swiftly.

B.       embarrassed that she didn’t understand how to use such a simple machine correctly.

C.       suing her fitness club.

If you answered anything but C, then you clearly hold too much faith in the nation’s lawsuit system. As it happens, the New Orleans treadmill case kicks off our monthly “Most Ridiculous Lawsuit” poll where we ask you, our readers, to tell us which lawsuit can rise (or sink) to the level of most ridiculous.

Our second nominee concerns the professional golfer Vijay Singh, who admitted in a January Sports Illustrated article that he had used deer-antler spray, then a banned substance for golfers. The PGA opened an investigation, only to close it after twelve weeks when antler spray was removed from the list of banned substances. Singh promptly sued, despite the fact that he had admitted to using a banned substance – and despite the fact that the 50-year-old golfer has made more than $67 million in his career (courtesy of the PGA).

Our third entry comes to us from neighborly Canada, where an Edmonton jail inmate happened to kill a fellow inmate after stomping on the victim’s head 26 times. (Unfortunately, the United States doesn’t have a monopoly on ridiculous lawsuits.) If you’re thinking that the victim’s family has sued, well, you’d be wrong. The stomping inmate has sued the jail for $500,000 for putting him in the same cell as another inmate.

Finally, to round out this month’s nominees, we have the Philadelphia-area father who’s suing the local high school for kicking his son off the track team. According to the school, the track coach removed the son from the team for unexcused absences from practice. The father disagrees and said the school violated his son’s rights. For damages, the father is asking the school to award his son the varsity letters and championship jackets for the 2012 and 2013 seasons – that, and $40 million.

You can vote on this month’s “Most Ridiculous Lawsuit” here.

Vote for this Month’s Most Ridiculous Lawsuit

It doesn’t get much more ridiculous in the world of ridiculous lawsuits than last month’s winner: A woman who was suing for “severe and permanent injuries” because of a car accident nevertheless managed to finish a half-marathon (13.1 miles, that is) with the respectable time of 2 hours 43 minutes. While running 12-minute miles won’t win you any Olympic gold medals, it certainly puts you on the healthier end of the “severe and permanent injuries” scale.

Which doesn’t mean we’ve run out of ridiculous lawsuits for our readers. Quite the contrary. Part of our purpose in letting readers vote on the most ridiculous lawsuit of the month is to drive home the point that ridiculous lawsuits happen every day – and will continue to happen until we reform our tort system.

This month’s nominees for “Most Ridiculous Lawsuit” certainly meet the high bar set by our half-marathoner (click here to vote):

• A non-disabled customer sued a local fast food restaurant after he slipped and fell on the wheelchair ramp. The restaurant is accused of “creating a dangerous ramp, failing to warn and failing to remedy an unreasonably dangerous condition.”

• After frogs swarm his land, a homeowner seeks punitive damages because of his “frog phobia.” The man already received $1.6 million in compensation following a runoff accident that flooded his land, but apparently the little green hoppers are so terrifying he needs just $250,000 more.

• A pro basketball fan reportedly sued his favorite player (Derrick Rose) because Rose missed the regular season with a knee injury. The Bulls still made the playoffs despite Rose’s absence, which we guess wasn’t enough to ease this fan’s emotional stress.

• A cop who got arrested for a DUI has sued the city that fired him. Claiming a violation of his rights under the Americans with Disabilities Act, the (former) police officer is seeking $6 million in the suit.

So which one is the most ridiculous lawsuit of the month? Cast your ballot now.

Answer: About $250,000.

Question: How much does it cost to maintain the store’s recording system?

Answer: About $100,000.

Rafael Cuellar, the owner of a grocery store in Passaic, NJ, estimates he has spent around $350,000 to install and maintain his store’s camera and recording devices. Doesn’t that seem like an awful lot of money to spend to repel or catch shop lifters?

Yes, it is. Which is why preventing shop lifting wasn’t the reason Mr. Cuellar invested in his security network in the first place. The cameras and recording devices are in place to monitor every inch of his store to protect Mr. Cuellar from frivolous lawsuits.

“Yesterday alone we had a consumer who came back in [the store] and claimed she fell,” Mr. Cuellar recounts in the video, Supermarket Swindle. “Once the loss-prevention director said, ‘Let’s pull it up on the camera,’ she goes, ‘No, I just twisted my ankle.’ And the story changed all of the sudden.”

Indeed, Mr. Cuellar said that one-third to half of all the lawsuits filed against his company every year are fictitious or overblown. Fictitious or not, however, all those lawsuits raise Mr. Cuellar’s insurance premiums, which are his second largest expense behind payroll.

In other words, spending nearly half a million dollars on cameras and DVRs is a drop in the bucket compared to what Mr. Cuellar would spend on a reward settlement, which could be in the millions.

Just one such reward settlement has the power to wipe out Mr. Cuellar’s small business.

But it’s not just store owners who suffer the expenses of frivolous lawsuits. Consumers pay as well. The Food Institute estimates that feeding a family of four will cost $4.16 per week more this year than last. That’s an extra $200 a family must spend this year.

Rising food prices are just one consequence of frivolous lawsuits. Mr. Cuellar notes that he could have invested a lot of the money he spent on cameras to hire more employees or cut prices. But the danger is too great.

“Being an entrepreneur, you always want to continue to grow,” Mr. Cuellar says. “But I do think twice about it, because of the things I can’t control.”

Unless we enact measures to combat lawsuit abuse, small business owners like Mr. Cuellar will continue to funnel their hard-earned money into protecting what they have, not building what they want.