Tombstone, Ariz., which was the site of the legendary 1881 Gunfight at the O.K. Corral (made into a 1957 movie), is about 70 miles from the Tucson shopping center where a U.S. congresswoman, a federal judge and others were shot in January. A Los Angeles Times dispatch later that month noted that the "Wild West" of 1881 Tombstone had far stricter gun control than present-day Arizona. The historic gunfight occurred when the marshal (Virgil Earp, brother of Wyatt) tried to enforce the town's no-carry law against local thugs. Today, however, with few restrictions and no licenses required, virtually any Arizonan 18 or older can carry a handgun openly, and those 21 or older can carry one concealed.

The government of Romania, attempting both to make amends for historical persecution of fortune-telling "witches" and to collect more tax revenue, amended its labor law recently to legalize the profession. However, "queen witch" Bratara Buzea, apparently speaking for many in the soothsaying business, told the Associated Press in February that official recognition might make witches legally responsible for future events that are beyond their control. Already, witches are said to be fighting back against the government with curses -- hurling poisonous mandrake plants into the Danube River and casting a special spell involving cat dung and a dead dog.

-- British loyalist Michael Stone still claims it was all a misunderstanding -- that he did not intend to assassinate Irish Republican Army political leaders in 2006, despite being arrested at the Northern Ireland legislature carrying knives, an ax, a garotte, and a bag of explosives that included flammable liquids, gas canisters and fuses. He was later convicted, based on his having detonated one explosive in the foyer and then carrying the other devices into the hall to confront the leaders, but he continued to insist that he was merely engaged in "performance art." (In January 2011, the Northern Ireland court of appeal rejected his claim.)

-- Phyllis Stevens, 59, said she had no idea she had embezzled nearly $6 million until her employer, Aviva USA, of Des Moines, Iowa, showed her the evidence. She said it must have been done by the "hundreds" of personalities created by her dissociative identity disorder (including "Robin," who was caught trying to spend Stevens' remaining money in Las Vegas just hours after the showdown with Aviva). Stevens and her spouse had been spending lavishly, buying properties, and contributing generously to political causes. As the "core person," Stevens said she will accept responsibility but asked a federal judge for leniency. (The prosecutor said Stevens is simply a thief.)

-- Thomas Walkley, a lawyer from Norton, Ohio, was charged in January with indecent exposure for pulling his pants down in front of two 19-year-old males, but Walkley said he was merely "mentoring" at-risk boys. He said it is a technique he had used with other troubled youths, especially the most difficult cases, by getting them "to think differently." Said Walkley, "Radical times call for radical measures."

-- U.S. News & World Report magazine, and the National Council on Teacher Quality, announced plans recently to issue grades (A, B, C, D and F) on how well each of the U.S.'s 1,000-plus teachers' colleges develop future educators, but the teachers of teachers appear to be sharply opposed to the very idea of being issued "grades." The project's supporters cited school principals' complaints about the quality of teachers applying for jobs, but the teachers' college representatives criticized the project's measurement criteria as overly simplistic.

-- Police were out in force in September as schools opened in Toronto, writing 25 school-zone speeding tickets in the first two hours. One of the 25 was issued to the driver of a school bus, caught speeding through a school zone trying to avoid being late at a pickup point farther down the road.

Paul Mason, 50, an ex-letter-carrier in Ipswich, England, told reporters in January he would file a lawsuit against Britain's National Health Service for negligence -- because it allowed him to "grow" in recent years to a weight of nearly 900 pounds. Mason said he "begged" for NHS's help in 1996 when he weighed 420, but was merely told to "ride your bike more." Last year, he was finally allowed gastric surgery, which reduced him to his current 518. At his heaviest, Mason estimates he was consuming 20,000 calories a day.

Life is improving for some Burmese Kayan women who, fleeing regular assaults by soldiers of the military government of Myanmar, become valuable exhibits at tourist attractions in neighboring Thailand -- because of their tribal custom of wearing heavy metal rings around their necks from an early age. The metal stacks weigh 11 pounds or more and depress girls' clavicles, giving them the appearance of elongated necks, which the tribe (and many tourists) regard as exotic. While human rights activists heap scorn on these Thai "human zoos" of ring-necked women, a Nacogdoches, Texas, poultry plant recently began offering some of the women a more attractive choice -- lose the rings and come work in Texas, de-boning chickens.

Although police in Mount Vernon, Ohio, aren't sure of the motive, they know (according to records made public in February) that the murderer-kidnapper Matthew Hoffman was arrested in November in a living room piled 3 feet high with leaves and a bathroom containing 110 bags of leaves attached to the walls. Hoffman, an unemployed tree-trimmer, later confessed to the kidnap and rape of a 13-year-old girl (whom he kept in a basement on a pallet of leaves) and had stuffed the bodies of his three murder victims in a hollow tree. An expert on serial killers told ABC News that trees might have given Hoffman comfort, but police haven't discounted that the leaves were there merely to help him later torch the house.

Not Ready for Prime Time: (1) Jose Demartinez, 35, was hospitalized in Manchester, N.H., in January. With police in pursuit, he had climbed out a hotel window using tied-together bed sheets, but they came undone, and he fell four stories. (2) Detected burglarizing a house in Summerfield, Fla., in January, Laird Butler fled through a window but not from police. The homeowner's dog had frightened Butler, who crashed through the glass, cut himself badly, and bled to death in a neighbor's yard. (3) Kevin Funderburk, 25, was charged with sexual assault of a 71-year-old woman in her Hutchinson, Kan., home in December. By the time his mug shot was taken, he was in a neck brace -- from the victim's frying-pan-swinging defense.

(1) During an early-January freeze, an 8-year-old boy, standing across the street from Woodward (Okla.) Middle School, apparently fell for the traditional dare from his brother and licked a metal pole. He had to wait on his tiptoes for emergency responders to come unstick him. (2) In January, John Finch, 44, of Wilmington, Del., became the latest alleged burglar to break in (through a window) and be unable either to climb back out or figure out the automatic locks on the doors (and thus be forced to call 911 on himself to be rescued).

The Wall Street Journal reported in March (1996) that New York City photographer (and former Electrolux vacuum cleaner salesman) Eugene Calamari Jr. is a part-time artist who lies on the floor and lets people vacuum him with an upright cleaner, after which he asks the vacuumers to please write down their feelings. According to Calamari, "A lot of people use each other and step on each other's rights." The theme he intends to convey, he said, is "I won't let anyone do this to me."

Getting Old, Young: (1) Jack Smeltzer broke a record in the tractor pull championships in Columbus, Ohio, in January -- doing a "full (track-length) pull" of 692 pounds. Jack is 7 years old. The National Kiddie Tractor Pullers Association (holding 80 events a year for ages 3 through 8) uses bicycles instead of motors. Ms. Brooke Wilker, 5, was the youngest champ, lugging 300 pounds 28 feet. (2) Walmart announced in January that it would soon offer a full line of makeup especially for 8-year-olds (and up), by GeoGirl, including mascara, sheer lip gloss, pink blush and purple eye shadow, all supposedly designed for young skin. (An executive of Aspire cosmetics said her research revealed a potential market of 6-year-olds.)

-- Everyone washes hair, but those who want a license to apply shampoo in Texas need 150 hours of training, with 100 hours in "theory and practice of shampooing," including a study of "neck anatomy." A February Wall Street Journal report on excessiveness of state regulation highlighted California's year-long training to be a barber, Alabama's 750-hour schooling standard for a manicurist's license, and Michigan's 500 practice hours for performing massages. (By contrast, many less-tightly regulated states seem not to suffer. Connecticut, without licensing, fielded only six complaints last year against manicurists -- four of which involved disputes over gift cards.) Next up for licensing, perhaps: cat groomers in Ohio.

-- What Budget Crunch? The South Florida Sun-Sentinel reported in January that despite an array of pressing problems, the Broward County public school system has paid about $100,000 per year since 2004 to build and maintain special gardens at selected schools in order to lure butterflies for pupils to study.

-- Government That Works: (1) The 2009 federal stimulus program came through just in time with $34,000 for the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Kearneysville, W.Va., laboratory. Work on the recent dangerous increase in Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs was in jeopardy because money had run out for design of a workable air distribution system for the offices. (2) The City Commission of San Antonio, Fla. (population 1,052), passed an ordinance in January restricting, to a tiny portion of town, where registered sex offenders could live. However, San Antonio has only one sex offender, and that man is exempt from the law because he already lives there.

-- David Morice, of Iowa City, Iowa, a teacher at Kirkwood Community College, was best known for a series of "Poetry Comics" until he decided last year to write 100-page poems every day for 100 days, until he had a book totaling 10,000 pages (actually, 10,119). For some reason, the University of Iowa Libraries has published the finished poem, online and in a 2-foot-high hardcopy stack. (Strangely, in a 480-word article describing Morice's feat, the Iowa City Press-Citizen included not even a hint about the poems' subject matter.)

-- In January, Toronto sculptor-photographer Lisa Murphy added to her reputation for devising "porn for the blind" by producing four more hand-molded erotic figures generated by using clay to replicate photographic scenes of nude and lingerie-clad models (accompanied by descriptions in Braille). "The butt was the hardest to sculpt," she said. "I wanted to get it nice and even, and give it a feminine softness so it would actually feel like a woman's butt." Her first book, "Tactile Mind," with 17 such raised erotic works, sells for $225 (Cdn).

-- Ripley's Believe It or Not! museum is already home to an artist's rendition of da Vinci's "The Last Supper" made from burned toast, and now comes a recent version by Laura Bell of Roscommon, Mich.: da Vinci's masterpiece made with clothes-dryer lint. Bell said she did about 800 hours of laundry of various-colored towels to obtain lint of the proper hues, and then worked 200 more hours to construct the 14-foot-long, 4-foot-high mural.

Surprise! (1) New Zealand traffic officer Andy Flitton cited an unnamed speeder recently for the second time in two years -- 11,000 miles from the spot of the first ticket. Flitton had moved from the U.K. to New Zealand, and unknown to him, the motorist himself had relocated to New Zealand last year. When Flitton stopped the man in Wellington in December 2010, the motorist recognized Flitton as the one who had ticketed him on the A5 highway near London. (2) Rap singer Trevell Coleman, trying to bring "closure" and "get right with God" for having shot a man in 1993 (since he was never caught), confessed the assault to New York City police in December, hoping that his humility might impress a judge. However, police checked and then booked Coleman -- for murder. Said Coleman, "(F)or some reason, I really didn't think that (the victim had) died."

-- "That Was Easy!": (1) Several students at Texas' Carrizo Springs High School were suspended in December, and a teacher placed on leave, after a parent complained that her son had been grabbed by the shirt and stapled to a classroom wall. She said it was at least the second time that it had happened. (2) Jodi Gilbert was arrested in Jamestown, N.Y., in January and charged with domestic violence -- stapling her boyfriend in the head several times with a Stanley Hammer Tacker.

-- In November, a Taiwanese factory owner accidentally dropped 200 $1,000 bills (worth about $6,600 in U.S. dollars) into an industrial shredder, turning them into confetti. Luckily, Taiwan's Justice Ministry employs a forensic handwriting analyst who excels at jigsaw puzzles on the side. Ms. Liu Hui-fen worked almost around the clock for seven days to piece together the 75 percent of each bill sufficient to make them legally exchangeable.

Laconic Perps: (1) A female motorist in Kitsap County, Wash., reported in January being motioned by another driver to pull over, but she ignored him. The man then tried to ratchet up his credibility, motioning her over again but this time holding a hand-scrawled sign reading "sheriff." (She remained unimpressed.) Seattle Weekly reported that a similar incident had occurred several months earlier. (2) Robert Michelson was arrested in Farmington, Conn., in February, after calling a 911 operator to inquire about the lawfulness of the marijuana plant he was growing. The operator informed him that it was illegal. (All 911 calls are automatically traced, and Michelson was soon arrested.)

People Who Ran Over Themselves: (1) A transit driver was hospitalized in December after his idling bus slipped out of gear and ran over him as he walked around it in front of Waikato Hospital in New Zealand. (2) A 37-year-old woman in Melbourne, Australia, was hospitalized in November after forgetting to engage her parking brake. The car rolled backward down her driveway, knocking her over, then hitting a fence, thrusting forward and running her down a second time. (3) A 67-year-old golfer died on the Evanston (Ill.) Golf Club course in November, apparently run over by his own electric cart. (He was discovered underneath, and the medical examiner ruled the death accidental.)

Patricia Frankhouser filed a lawsuit in Jeannette, Pa., in November (2004) against the Norfolk Southern railway as a result of being hit by a train 10 months earlier as she walked on the tracks. Most such injuries nowadays involve pedestrians distracted by earphoned music players, but Frankhouser claimed merely that Norfolk Southern was negligent for not posting signs warning that the railroad tracks are sometimes used by trains.

LEAD STORY

The ear has a "G-spot," explained the Santa Clara, Calif., ear-nose-and-throat surgeon, and thus the moans of ecstasy that Vietnamese "ear pickers" reportedly elicit from their clients might well be justified. A San Jose Mercury News reporter, dispatched to Ho Chi Minh City in January to check it out, learned that barber shop technicians could sometimes coax "eargasms" (as they removed wax) by tickling a certain spot next to the ear drum served by multiple nerve endings and paper-thin skin. Said one female client, "Everybody is afraid the first time, but after, it's, 'Oh my God!'" Said one Vietnamese man, returning home after a trip abroad, and who went immediately from the airport to a "hot toc" parlor for a picking, "(This) brings a lot of happiness."

-- Two San Francisco-area counselors recently formed Men of Tears -- a male support group to encourage crying, according to a January San Francisco Chronicle reporter, who observed as nine men recounted touching events in their lives, accompanied by tears that, according to the counselors, make them emotionally stronger and less hostile. One of the counselors praised the recent public cries by Speaker of the House John Boehner and hoped that President Obama (who stopped just short of tears at the memorial service for victims of the recent Tucson, Ariz., shootings) would someday step over that line.

-- Disabled wheelchair user Jim Starr, 36, of Dorchester, England, was recently ordered off of public roads because his "chair" is too big. Authorities told him that his custom-made, motorized chair with caterpillar treads instead of wheels, which moves like a tank, would have to be licensed like one ("Category H" vehicle, one category higher than a "road roller"). Starr said his chair was the only way he could play at the beach with his kids.

-- Beloved Banker: (1) In December, J.P. Morgan Chase abruptly ended a program that had allowed military personnel to defer paying on Chase-owned student loans while on active duty. (2) Three weeks later, NBC News reported that Chase's mortgage division had long been ignoring a federal military protection law by charging 4,000 active-duty personnel higher mortgage-interest rates than permitted (and improperly foreclosing on 14 of them). (3) That same week, Chase was found to be advertising (through an agent) a foreclosed-on, 5-year-old house in Rexburg, Idaho, without adequate notice that it was infested with "thousands" of garter snakes. (In February, Chase reinstated the student-loan deferments and apologized for ignoring the federal law.)

-- Three men visiting Philadelphia in December were charged with a several-store robbery spree, and perhaps luckily for them, they were quickly arrested. The police report noted that one of the victims (who had a gun waved in her face) was Terri Staino, 38, the owner of John Anthony Hair Styling for Men, who is also the husband of Anthony Staino -- reputed to be the No. 2 man in the South Philadelphia mob, according to the Philadelphia Daily News.

-- Alex Good, 15, practicing tee shots with his high school golf team on a rainy day underneath a golf course awning, had one of his drives hit the metal pole holding the awning up, causing the ball to ricochet into his eye, resulting in likely permanent damage. Despite the fact that the pole was directly in front of the tee, inches away, Good nonetheless charged the Pumpkin Ridge Golf Club (Hillsboro, Ore.) with negligence and filed a $3 million lawsuit in January.

-- How Not to Do a Laser Bronchoscopy: First, according to a case written up in December in the Massachusetts Medical Law Report, do not let the laser set fire to the patient's throat. More importantly, if a spark does ignite, do not use the everyday home remedy for a small flame, i.e., try to blow it out -- because blowing down the "trach" tube might actually extend the fire, as it did here. (The surgeon and hospital were not named; the lawsuit resulting from the patient's death was settled out of court.)

-- Edward Hall III, 24, a Columbia University researcher, was arrested in January for trespassing at JFK airport in New York City after he disobeyed United Airlines personnel and tried an alternative method to board a plane. He told ticket agents he badly needed to be on the flight to San Francisco even though he had forgotten to bring a photo ID. Frustrated, Hall stepped behind the counter and crawled onto the luggage conveyor, where his next stop, minutes later, was the tarmac where bags were being loaded and where he was arrested.

-- A suburban Chicago high school health-class instructor's technique for teaching the names of female reproductive parts caught the ire of the Illinois Family Institute religious organization in January. To some of the kids, teacher Jacqulyn Levin's "game" was nothing more than a mnemonic to facilitate memorizing the anatomy, but others told the institute that Levin's play on words was chantable, could be set to the tune of the "Hokey Pokey," and was referred to by several students as "the vagina dance." Said a complaining parent, "It is disrespectful to women and removes modesty about the reproductive parts."

-- Failed to Think It Through: (1) Kyle Eckman, 22, was charged with theft in Lancaster, Pa., in November after he was stopped leaving a Kohl's department store, mostly still in his own clothes but also wearing the pair of Elle high-heel shoes he was allegedly trying to shoplift. (2) Jimmy Honeycutt, 27, was arrested in Pawtucket, R.I., in October and charged with five recent robberies of liquor stores. Among the items found on Honeycutt was a telephone directory listing of liquor stores, with the ones recently robbed marked off.

-- Recurring Themes: (1) At a traffic stop, once again a passenger climbed into the driver's seat as the officer approached, trying to save a drug-impaired driver from a citation. However, once again it turned out that the passenger was just as drug-impaired as the driver, and both were cited (Gastonia, N.C., December). (2) Once again a woman tried to conceal drugs by stuffing them down her pants into her most private area, and once again, when police found them, the woman immediately denied that the pills were hers (Manatee, Fla., December).

(1) A 26-year-old man died in Chattanooga, Tenn., in January after being accidentally bitten by a copperhead snake. According to police, a friend had caught the snake and taken it to the man's house because, for some reason, he wanted the man to ascertain the snake's gender. (2) A 21-year-old man was stabbed to death at a party in Bristol, Conn., in January (and three others wounded), apparently because they had been making derisive comments about another man's flatulence. The allegedly gaseous Marc Higgins, 21, was charged with the crimes.

Irish director-playwright Paul Walker's production of "Ladies & Gents" opened for a March (2008) run in New York City 29 blocks north of Broadway, in a public restroom. According to an Associated Press report, the entire play takes place among the porcelain in a bathroom in Central Park, portraying "the seedy underside of 1950s Dublin," with the audience of 25 standing beside rows of stalls, near "spiders, foul odors and puddles of questionable origin." Walker proudly admits that he wanted to take his audience "out of their comfort zone." Actor John O'Callaghan recalled that rehearsals were especially difficult: "One man actually came in and had a pee right in front of us."