The world is a divided place, with just about everyone divided on at least one important issue. No, nothing political—we’re talking about creamy versus chunky peanut butter. People get pretty passionate about it, which might explain why a prisoner named Kenneth Parker sued over the issue.

As The New York Times tells us, Parker was serving 15 years at the Nevada State Prison in Carson City for robbery when he went to the prison canteen and paid $5 for two jars of chunky peanut butter. The canteen only had one jar of the chunky variety, so they substituted a jar of creamy. Parker sued the prison under the Civil Rights Act of 1871, demanding $5,500 in damages because his rights had been violated and he’d suffered “emotional distress.” The prison offered him an extra jar of chunky-style peanut butter, but Parker refused to settle his case.

Parker explained that to him, this wasn’t a frivolous suit. “It was just the idea of them taking something from me,” he said, adding that if he hadn’t sued, he would have felt like he was giving the prison permission to do whatever it wanted to him. Unfortunately for Parker, he should have taken the free jar of peanut butter: As the City Journal notes, his case was quickly dismissed.

Sometimes lawsuits filed by prisoners that seem absurd on their face are absurd for a reason—although that reason isn’t always as clever as the prisoner might think. Case in point: Robert Lee Brock, who sued himself.

Brock was serving 23 years for breaking and entering and grand larceny when he hit on an idea that’s either a brilliant get-rich-quick scheme or the dumbest idea you’ll hear all day. As Time explains, he filed suit against himself for “violating my religious beliefs.” Specifically, since Robert Lee Brock chose to get drunk and commit crimes, Robert Lee Brock should make restitution to Robert Lee Brock—to the tune of $5 million.

As noted by the Orlando Sentinel, the brilliance comes in when Brock went on to claim that since he was impoverished and in jail, he couldn’t actually pay the $5 million himself—so the state should pay it on his behalf. Brock piously claimed that once he was released from prison he would of course pay the state back. While the judge in his case was amused and impressed by his ingenuity, calling it an “innovative approach to civil-rights litigation,” the case was dismissed as frivolous—and pretty quickly.

While a lawsuit over melted ice cream might seem like the very definition of a nuisance suit at first glance, there were likely larger issues at play when an inmate named Roy Clendinen, serving time in a prison in Syracuse, New York, filed a civil rights lawsuit in 1992 when a guard refused to put his ice cream in a freezer, letting it melt.

As OZY points out, food is often used in prisons as a reward and punishment mechanism. Prisoners can be goaded into certain behaviors with food used as both a lure and a potential punishment. And the acquisition of luxury items like ice cream can be very difficult in prisons, making them more valuable to the prisoners who manage to acquire them, so it’s not crazy to say that the ice cream in question was worth way more to Clendinen than it would be to someone not serving time in prison. So Clendinen’s suit for $1 million, claiming the purposeful ruination of his treat amounted to cruel and unusual punishment, wasn’t as far-fetched as it might seem at first glance, although the ease with which prisoners can file lawsuits like this one certainly played a role. The suit was eventually dismissed, but there’s no word on whether Clendinen ever got his ice cream.

Religion is tricky business sometimes. After all, as BBC News informs us in some areas of the world the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster is recognized as a legit religion. So why not vampirism?

That’s what burglar Robert Paul Rice tried to establish when he sued over religious freedom. As Deseret News reports, Rice was serving up to 15 years in prison for a felony weapons charge when he filed his lawsuit. Rice claimed that when he was processed into prison, he’d informed officials that he was a “druid.” More specifically, he was a member of the druidic “order of the Vampire.” Shortly after entering prison, Rice claimed he became a Wiccan, which resulted in a change to his “vampiric dietary needs.” It should be noted that as the Kahane Law Office notes, those “vampiric dietary needs” involved drinking human blood.

When the prison refused to accommodate his dietary requirements—not to mention his request for conjugal visits with a “vampress”—he filed a civil rights lawsuit. His suit was laughed out of court, as the prison noted it supported five specific diets (soft diets for medical conditions, liquid diets, vegetarian diets, Kosher diets, and Muslim diets) and served 11,000 meals every day, making Rice’s requests unreasonable.

There was a time when the U.S. dollar, along with most other currencies in the world, was backed by precious metals—gold and silver. If you had a dollar bill, technically you could exchange it for a certain amount of gold or silver, and governments had to keep stockpiles of precious metals on hand to back their currency. Since 1971, however, we have what’s known as “fiat money” that isn’t backed by, well, anything aside from our faith in its value.

That didn’t sit well with John Robert Demos Jr., a convicted burglar/sexual assaulter. As the Seattle Times reports, Demos sued because paper money was no longer backed by silver, asserting that this was a violation of his civil rights. In case you’re uncertain if this was a legitimate concern for Demos or not, he’s also sued because he claimed he was personally owed $15 million due to broken Indian treaties dating back to the 1800s, because as a man he suffered reverse sexual discrimination, and because the prison refused to acknowledge a new name he chose for himself.

Demos discovered a real zeal for legal maneuvers—he appealed his various suits to the U.S. Supreme Court no fewer than 32 times, prompting the court to take the extreme step of forcing Demos to actually pay for any future lawsuits. Since filings cost a few hundred bucks and Demos only earned $45 a month as a prisoner, that put an end to his legal career.