Any barber, and even your regular Joe, knows that there are about a million things one can worry about when it comes to their hair and probably a million more after that. Women tend to worry about straightening, curling, coloring, dryness, split ends, frizz, frizz leading to split ends, split frizz, frizzy splits…actually everything. Men, among other things, worry if they’re going bald, whether they’re losing their hair or if they’re experiencing hair loss. The Gotti grandkids’ main concern is whether any of their oil-soaked spikes has deviated from the exact 65 degree back angle required to make them look like bad guys from a crappy Japanese anime, but they really are more the exception than the rule. One thing most of don’t give a second thought to is the possibility that our hair will spontaneously flame up like Clay Aiken at a Cher show. Turns out this is the main concern for a girl in Vietnam whose hair caught fire, without explanation, not once, not twice, but THREE times in the course of two days. The best the doctors could come up with was to tell her not to wear wool. Yep…that explains it. Wool.

UPDATE: Her hair went up a fourth time, but with a new doctor’s brillant advice that she wash her hair, this should be a problem of the past. Saints be praised.

The 60’s were an age defined by social activism, unbridled idealism and the promise that outwardly exhibiting that you were an idealistic activist would finally get you laid. For dudes who dressed like they covered themselves in Krazy Glue and rolled around in a Goodwill donation bin, that was no small promise. Alas, years of shunning baths and haircuts like cheerleaders invited to the math team party got predictably overripe and most hippies finally washed away their patchouli stink in exchange for a Mercedes. The dream, for those not hawking bongs out of their van at Phish shows or selling organic veggie burritos, was dead. Or so you thought. It turns out that for just $50,000 you can restart the heart of that headband-wearing cadaver by buying a box of genuine hippie hair shaved off in 1968. Yep, just $50,000. While it would be nice to think of it going to someone who shared in the ideals of the person to whose head it was once attached, it will most likely be snatched up as a victory trophy by some corporate fat cat who looks like the Monopoly guy. You can just see him clutching it behind an oak desk, cackling and mumbling something about “take that longhairs.”

There’s no tougher racket than show biz and for actors and actresses especially, image is everything. Stars have to walk a fine line between being glamorous and yet still seeming accessible. If they go too far down the untouchable, ‘glamour’ route, people will start to view them as snooty and ungrateful. Those same people will then spend every waking moment monitoring the gossip columns lusting for that actor’s or actress’ downfall. The people always get what they want (See Jennifer Lopez). Then you have the other side of the coin where the actor or actress lets us know they’re just like you or me. Ideally, someone like Brad Pitt tells an interviewer that he gets tired of the “Hollywood scene” and would be happier at home “with a burger and a beer.” You are then supposed to say, “Hey…I like burgers and beer. Brad Pitt is just like me, except for the looks thing…and the wealth…and the women…especially the women…but really just like me.” This strategy, as Britney Spears can attest, also has risks when it is taken too far. Take for instance recently up-and-coming, but now doubtfully coming at all, British actress Billie Piper’s admission to an entertainment mag that she allows her aggressive ‘stache to grow when she’s “on holiday” so she can “twiddle the ends” to help her concentrate. No it is not cold and yes you are shivering. Unless she’s really lobbying for some new, shocking version of Rapunzel, it’s probably pretty safe to say her acting career will stay firmly on the other side of the pond.

There are lows and then there are low lows. There are questionable lows, like screening your buddy’s call because Red Shoe Diaries XVIII is on SkinaMax and you’re weaseling out of meeting up with him to have some “alone time.” That’s low, but he’d do it you if the mood were right. You then have that area of definitive lows like parking in a handicap space, cheating on a significant other or being caught playing Segway Polo (which is clearly worse than the other two combined). Those are all shameful, but they aren’t “low lows.” (Again, the Segway thing is up for debate). No, a true “low low” is doing something like, say, breaking into a local barbershop that had been hosting a Toys for Tots program meant to bring underprivileged children a little bit of joy of the holidays and running off with everything. That’s a “low low” if there ever was one. Worse, the description of the suspect as a bald man with gray hair and a large gray beard put instant suspicion on Kris Kringle himself. Thankfully, the witness noted that he guy was too thin to be Santa, so this slapdash frame-job has been exposed. No mention of whether he had a dog with antlers stapled to its head, but don’t be surprised if that’s the case.

Why is hair all up in baking soda’s grill, you might ask? For too long, baking soda seems to have been the answer to so many of life’s problems. “My fridge stinks because I’m too lazy to remove that pack of turkey that now looks like it belongs in the vegetable drawer.” Baking Soda. “I hate the hassle of stopping by the drugstore to pick up toothpaste so much that I would be willing to rub something that tastes worse than a mixture of raw cauliflower and goat cheese all over my teeth if that would work instead.” Baking Soda. “I slept with Courtney Love.” Baking Soda, Penicillin, Baking Soda. Is there anything it can’t do? Well, can you make furniture out of it? Nope. You need a boat? You can sprinkle that junk on the water all day long and you won’t get so much as canoe. You’d love to drop bombs on your neighbor, but they have radar? Will baking soda make your plane stealthy? Not bloody likely. Turns out where baking soda has shown itself to be next to worthless, a savvy hair stylist/inventor in England has shown that hair can do pretty much anything. He’s already made an entire chair out of it and has plenty of other ideas for this previously wasted and unappreciated resource. Pretty soon, everyone’s going to have a box of hair around. Nice knowing you, baking soda.

The modern day, high school principal usually doesn’t hold up to our old ideas about them. The old principal spending his every, waking moment out to get the crazy misfit that just refuses to live by his rules, a la Rooney from Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, has been replaced by a group of highly educated and highly boring people that have far better things to do than wait for the talented and popular, yet reckless, kid to slip up. Or so they would have you believe. That lie was exposed this past week when a New Mexico principal took one particular, zany ne’er-do-well out of class for having his local area code styled on the back of his head and then straight to the barber…WITHOUT PARENTAL PERMISSION. Dunh dunh dunh dunh! Just when it seemed no one could stop this madman in his quest to have his teen nemesis shorn into conformity, a heroic barber stepped up and asked to see the paperwork. When he realized the principal was without the goods, he said no dice. As if anyone didn’t know whose side barbers were on, this guy settled it once and for all. Take that Rooney.

It seems like a lot of the hair related happenings you read about throughout the world involve people using theirs to make or break world records. It’s not hard to figure out why so many people flock to hair for their 15 minutes in the spotlight like New Jersey youths to a boy band concert at the mall. The other records, at least those concerned with the body, are either ones the people had no choice over or never intended. It probably wasn’t a glass of milk too many that put the tallest guy over the top and, unless he had a death wish, you can be pretty sure whoever the fattest guy is ended up that way without realizing he was on the path to dubious fame. No, hair is for the dreamers. Anyone can set out to break a record with their hair. Most of us have it and, if we have the time and ability to ignore the pleading of our loved ones and judgment by strangers, we can take a shot at the title…whatever that might be. All that said, Jon Sanford recently exposed us to his dream of breaking a record and it is now in fact our nightmare. He has cultivated a 4.1 inch arm hair, thus unofficially breaking the inexplicably existing record of 3.96 inches by a Toronto man. Make a very concrete note to yourself never to eat nachos with this dude.

There are different types of crazy. There’s ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend crazy that pretty much consists of calling you thirteen times in twelve minutes at 4am, standing outside your window holding up a boom box playing over-the-top romantic pop songs or asking if they can just smell your sheets one last time. That’s crazy, but it’s a familiar crazy. Then there’s celebrity crazy, which runs the gamut from your run-of-the-mill breakdown to virtually anything that comes out of Anne Heche’s mouth. Again…familiar. What usually strikes us as more than crazy, but rather “Kaaa-razy,” is when someone does something so inexplicable you just have to understand that there is no way to understand. For instance, James White of Illinois recently showed himself to be more nuts than a Planter’s factory when he went on a rampage using shaving cream as a weapon. It ended in him being taken down by two cops that he also attempted to maliciously lather. Yeah, your girlfriend might be crazy, but is she “attempted a shaving cream massacre” crazy? Thought so.

You can pretty much dye your hair any color imaginable these days: pee yellow, hooker metallic purple, Trump-toupee red. If it’s your head you’re talking about, the world is your impulsive, “maybe this was a mistake” oyster. While the advances for coloring your noggin have been moving ahead at light speed, the progress made in terms of neglected nether regions has been moving along like Jessica Simpson trying to put together a Mars landing. Not to be covered up by the thong and jeans of denial any longer, the curly stepchild of the industry finally has its Neil Armstrong in the form of Betty Beauty’s new coloring for “the hair down there.” They’ve brought together some of the finest scientists and perverts in the world to come up with a formula that won’t have women running for a fire extinguisher or a clinic. It comes in all the expected colors, along with a hot pink called “Fun Betty” that is sure to encourage raver-chicks everywhere to burn to their underpants.

Everyone who watches sports knows that sometimes athletes have to endure excruciating pain in order to keep playing. Pitchers tear their shoulders to shreds; running backs play on bum knees; curling teams are forced to play sober when the keg tap is broken (making it truly unbearable). It goes with the territory. If you’re going to play among the best, you can’t go down quicker than Paris Hilton on a Greek shipping heir because of a little boo-boo. That said, the Sumo wrestlers of Japan should officially be forced to wear actual diapers after forcing one of their competitors to shave because his stubble was getting too scratchy. You’re a four-hundred pound millionaire who can, completely inexplicably, still bed the most beautiful women in Japan and you’re going to punk yourself by admitting that you can’t play through some slight stubble irritation? Do you know how many fat people over here would gladly give their chunky left arm and take a Brillo to the eye weekly just to have your lives? It’s amazing you can sleep at night next to your model girlfriend on your piles of yen.