There’s news that makes you go “Hmmm…” And then there’s news that makes you go “Whaaa?” These are the second kind.

We asked Boston.com readers which weird, wacky, and offbeat Boston-area stories garnered their attention most during 2024, and they didn’t hold back. We received about 400 responses mentioning any number of local developments that you’d be tempted to think somebody made up, if you didn’t know they were true.

Below we count down the top five, along with some others readers found worthy of note. And meanwhile, who knows: 2025 might be even weirder.

5. The great North End dining reservation battle (9%)

Restaurateurs everywhere must wish they had the faccia tosta of Jen Royle, the Boston restaurant owner who doesn’t take guff from anybody — especially customers who try to get out of their reservations. When a tourist (from New York!) did an end-run around Royle’s reservation policy at her North End TABLE restaurant in February, using his credit card insurance to avoid paying a $250 cancellation fee, she allegedly tracked him down on social media and let him have it. “I just wanted to personally thank you for screwing over my restaurant and my staff when you disputed your cancellation fee,” she wrote in a message that the man screen-shotted and shared on social media, where it was viewed by tens of millions. “Pathetic,” Royle added, for good measure.

Tracking down would-be customers to give them a flogging may not be the best business decision, but anybody who’s ever dealt with a tough customer in their line of work has got to appreciate Royle’s gumption. “Heroine archetype that you ultimately cannot help but root for,” wrote Mink S. from Dorchester, citing both Royle and a certain other 2024 standout you’ll see mentioned in No. 1, below. “Flawed but fascinating!” We concur, Mink.

4. Dave Portnoy, in general (10%)

Is it just us, or is Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy suddenly, well, everywhere? The man gets within whiffing distance of a pizza place and the entire world stops turning as people await his latest “One Bite” review. (Even if he doesn’t always get them right, once the New York Times has dubbed you a “pizza influencer” you can basically say whatever you want.) 

As if that weren’t enough, back in July he had to go and get himself stranded at sea off the coast of Nantucket when his boat’s engine and breakers died, necessitating a Coast Guard rescue. He chronicled the whole ordeal (where else?) on TikTok, declaring that “Captain Dave lives to tell another tale.” Not everybody is a fan — “Only follow the Portnoy stories to see what moronic thing he’s said lately,” wrote Mark M. from Danvers — but there’s no denying that the lucky owner of a new $42 million Nantucket mansion is riding pretty high.

3. The Boston topless protest (11%)

“It’s not about the top; it’s about oppression,” Katrina Brees, the co-organizer of a topless protest in Boston last August, told Boston.com. And now that we’ve cleared that up you can all get your minds out of the gutter, the 11% of you who mentioned this as your favorite off-beat story of the year. We know you’re mostly men, because a subsequent survey we did showed that men overwhelmingly wanted women to be able to take their shirts off in public. Women, on the other hand, tended to be more in favor of men keeping their own shirts ON, because they’ve been to a beach and have seen things. Enough said.

And in case you were wondering, about six women wound up going topless at the protest, and about 100 people showed up to ogle them. We’re not sure if that’s progress, but we do know that it proved a challenge for news photographers.

2. The Tom Brady Roast (20%)

Tom Brady may have long since moved on from the Patriots to greener pastures — i.e. a Super Bowl win with Tampa Bay and a zillion-dollar contract with Fox Sports — but that didn’t stop Bostonites from lapping up every minute of Netlfix’s roast of the quarterback last May. (And there were a lot of minutes — the thing actually hit the three-hour mark.) 

“I’m still aghast at the Brady roast,” wrote Bob from Stoughton, but just because people were aghast (or perhaps even agog), that didn’t mean they could turn away. This outlet alone did close to a dozen stories on it, and you just kept reading them! Never let it be said we don’t give the people what they want. 

For Brady’s part, it became increasingly obvious over the course of the evening that he may not have really understood what a roast was — that’s one of those things you might miss if you spend every waking moment of your life for two decades studying play calls and eating kale. And he said afterwards he wouldn’t do it again, mainly so his kids wouldn’t have to hear people quoting Nikki Glaser lines back to them. That’s not good for anybody.

1. Author’s racy Market Basket parody prompts cease-and-desist (22%)

The world has a new folk hero, and no, we don’t mean Luigi Mangione. We’re talking about Madison Murray: When her spoof of the Market Basket logo to promote her erotic art and poetry book prompted a cease-and-desist from the beloved local supermarket, she wound up ceasing-and-desisting her way right into our hearts.

“Madison Murray is an amazing artist doing hilarious, wonderful niche work of representing us working class kids on the North Shore,” wrote Desiree D. of Medford, echoing dozens of other readers singing Murray’s praises. “Her feud with Market Basket will be one of my top Boston moments of all time.” Did you hear that? Of all time! 

For her part, Murray says she never meant to offend the grocery chain with her “Wh*** For Your Dollar” merchandise or the pictures of her wearing a bikini made out of Market Basket plastic bags (the old, un-environmentally friendly kind). “Like, I love Market Basket,” she told Boston.com. “I would never, ever try to tarnish their brand. If anything, I created it to try to pay homage and show my love for Market Basket even more.” Meanwhile, Boston.com readers have shown their love for you, Madison! That and 99 cents will get you a bottle of Chelmsford soda. 

Honorable mentions:

The New Hampshire Diaper Spa: Let’s face it, calling your business “The Diaper Spa” — a nursery-like business for adults who role play as children and [checks notes] wear diapers — is probably going to get you into trouble with the neighbors, which is exactly what happened in Atkinson, New Hampshire, this year. Not that we can think of anything better … “Babies R Us,” maybe? (On second thought, never mind.) “The diaper thing was funny, but not my top choice — seems like more of a bottom,” wrote Alison from New Hampshire.

The Bourne Rotary stealth camper: There are probably worse ways to get YouTube famous than by sleeping out in the iconic rotary at the entrance to Cape Cod, cooking up a lobster roll, and waking up covered in pine sap. But there are probably better ways too.

Celebrities take over Boston: We’ve had our share in Boston and the surrounding area this year, including the likes of Jason Momoa, Channing Tatum, Larry David, and Renee Rapp and Ed Sheeran, not to mention local fixtures like Matt Damon and John Krasinski. And most recently, Robert Pattinson and Zendaya sightings have become so common that the TV news doesn’t even notice them anymore. Bonus: Where goeth Zendaya also goeth Tom Holland, and/or his lookalikes. 

Joro spider hits Beacon Hill: The arrival of the Joro spider — you know, that invasive, bright yellow-and-blue arachnid that can grow to about the size of your palm — in Boston in September caused, well, just about the amount of panic you’d expect. “Grab the flamethrowers!” exclaimed Christine M. of Westboro in response to our poll on the matter, which found that 41% of readers classified the spider’s arrival as among their “worst nightmares.”

Ayo Edebiri reveals her favorite dessert: The Boston-born star of “The Bear” told Seth Meyers about The Cool Dog — the frozen treat remembered only by dyed-in-the-wool New Englanders — and the rest was history. “Cool Dogs forever!” wrote Em P. from Cambridge.

Stay tuned for a full list of the most-read stories on Boston.com in 2024 next week.

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.

The people — or at least the people who make up Boston.com’s readership — have spoken. A lot of news happened in 2024, but these are the stories that readers cited as the ones that most intrigued them over the course of the last 12 months.

In total readers sent more than 500 responses to our survey, and below you’ll find a countdown of the five they mentioned most often, followed by six more that bubbled up just underneath. (And how much do you want to bet at least a few of these turn up on the list again next year?)

5. Massachusetts gets (part of) the eclipse (7%)

OK, so Boston wasn’t in the “path of totality.” We’ll get our own total solar eclipse on May 1, 2079 (turns out the waiting is the hardest part), but in the meantime Boston.com readers seemed plenty content with getting our own little slice of the natural phenomenon here last April. Silly glasses were de rigueur, schools and businesses stopped everything to check it out, and plenty of people actually headed north to New Hampshire and Vermont to see the thing in toto. (Although a lot of them seemed to run into a few problems getting back home.)

4. Pro-Palestinian protests on campus (11%)

Greater Boston has a lot of colleges, and a lot of students who aren’t particularly shy about speaking up at them. So it probably made sense that when students started protesting over the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, our schools would be a hotbed of such activity. And sure enough, MIT, Tufts, and Emerson led the way, followed by Harvard, Northeastern, UMass Amherst, Dartmouth, and UNH, among others. Even the Rhode Island School of Design got into the act, occupying part of an administrative building. Protests, encampments, arrests, and resignations seemed to arise basically every day last spring, and readers followed live updates with interest (and probably no small amount of trepidation).

3. Bill Belichick says bye-bye (13%)

One of two sports stories to make our top five, a sizable number of readers pointed to the departure of Bill Belichick from the Patriots team he had led to six Super Bowl championships. Even though it happened way back in early January, readers reported his leaving as having taken up big chunks of their sports headspace throughout 2024 — maybe because he kept making headlines, whether it was his opinions about the team he left behind, reports about his love life (couples Halloween costume, anyone?), or his eventual landing as coach at North Carolina.

2. Celtics are national champs (19%)

While they might not have had the juice of our omnipresent No. 1 story mentioned below, readers named our Boston Celtics the second most intriguing story of the year, with their decisive championship victory over the Dallas Mavericks in June dispelling any doubt that this was — arguably by far — the best team in the NBA. It almost makes you feel bad for all those other teams that didn’t have Jayson Tatum and Jaylen Brown, a roster of stellar complementary players, and Coach Joe Mazzulla churning out quotes-of-the-day like an Internet-era Yogi Berra. Oh, and their parade was pretty good too. 

1. The Karen Read saga (28%)

In a year that saw the continuation of more than a few disturbing ongoing murder stories — the Brian Walshe and Lindsay Clancy cases come to mind — one captured people’s attention the most, by far. The trial of Karen Read made headlines and spurred water-cooler talk far beyond Boston, leading to the logical assumption among basically everybody that it would eventually be a Netflix documentary. Which of course it will be.

As you’ll probably recall, prosecutors allege that Read was driving drunk and deliberately backed her SUV into her boyfriend, Boston Police Officer John O’Keefe, while dropping him off at a house party in January of 2022. And Read’s lawyers allege that O’Keefe was actually beaten by people inside the house (and attacked by the family dog). It’s a case that has everything, including a Turtleboy. And since her first trial ended in a mistrial, we get to do it all again next April. 

Honorable mentions:

Trump makes headway in Mass: People of the MAGA persuasion probably shouldn’t get too excited — Massachusetts remained solidly blue in November’s presidential election, with Kamala Harris earning about 61% of the vote. But Donald Trump took the whole shebang, and readers (well, about half of them) pointed to his gains even in liberal Mass. as part and parcel of his booming comeback — he flipped 10 Massachusetts towns that had voted for Biden in 2020 and shrunk the gap in a lot of others. Meanwhile, the anti-Trump contigent immediately began hand-wringing over how his policies might affect things in the Bay State. 

The Mass. migrant crisis: Thanks to the state’s “right to shelter” law, migrants were everywhere — at Logan Airport, in repurposed community centers, at hotels and in a shuttered prison. And despite Gov. Maura Healey’s ever-tightening guidelines for shelter stays, the issue remains a thorn in her political side. 

Crime in Downtown Boston: A shoplifting surge and violence on the Common — which many blamed on problems that spread from the former encampments of homeless and addicted individuals at Mass. & Cass — meant much consternation among the city crowd. Mayor Michelle Wu, though, assures us Boston remains the safest big city in America.

Ballot questions: There were five of them! And three — approval of a legislative audit, the elimination of the MCAS as a graduation requirement, and allowing rideshare drivers to unionize — actually passed. Sorry, psychedelics and increased tipped minimum wage.

The arrest of Tania Fernandes Anderson: It just happened a few weeks ago, but Boston City Councilor Fernandes Anderson’s federal public corruption arrest — charges involved a $7,000 cash payment in a City Hall bathroom — immediately caused a stir on Boston’s political scene. (One reader even suggested that outgoing President Joe Biden should pardon her.)

State police troubles: As if the classless texts from State Trooper Michael Proctor revealed during the Read trial weren’t enough, the mysterious training death of recruit Enrique Delgado Garcia cast a further pall over the organization. Plus all the fraud. (Not that your run-of-the-mill municipal police departments got off easy either. Case in point: the Sara Birchmore case in Stoughton.)

Stay tuned for a full list of the most-read stories on Boston.com in 2024 next week.

Peter Chianca

General Assignment Editor

Peter Chianca, Boston.com’s general assignment editor since 2019, is a longtime news editor, columnist, and music writer in the Greater Boston area.