Hair

The horses at Tom Johnson and Jim Hoff's place once had tails that hung down to their hooves. Shampooed and combed, they gleamed, flaxen-colored, when the Belgian draft horses drew wagons for children and pranced in parades. But a significant portion of their tails disappeared one recent night when a knife- or scissors-wielding intruder hopped the fence into their pasture and hacked away, leaving half a dozen horses and ponies with shredded stubs. "It's a dang shame is what it is.

When it comes to beauty products, sometimes ignorance is bliss. Snake venom, bird droppings, snail serum, cow dung and whale vomit are but a few of the industry's extreme and off-putting ingredients that one might be shocked to know can be slathered about your body. Hair products are no exception to this somewhat creepy phenomenon. Consumers hoping for a hair miracle are willing to pay extra for deep conditioners and conditioning "treatments" that promise an enviable crowning glory -- even when they contain rather odd-seeming ingredients such as placenta, caviar and hemp.

What type of hair does the ocean have? Wavy! Raquel, 6 Oakmont Elementary, Claremont What is a porcupine's favorite dance? The "hokey pokey"! Andrew, 9 Shenandoah Street School, Los Angeles Kids, send us your funny jokes and puzzling riddles.

Poufed, permed or punctuated with pink and purple spikes, the hair styles of the 1980s exemplified the decade of excess. "It was all about big and extreme," says Snooky Bellomo, who with her sister Tish owns the Manic Panic stores. Now, with miniskirts, leggings and neon fabrics once again wardrobe staples, ready your Aqua Net: Teases, crimps and other stiff coifs are rising up like "Thriller" zombies. You won't see reinterpretations of the decade's ubiquitous and unisex perms or Michael Jackson-esque Jheri curls -- today's style savants don't want anything so "rigid," says Redken creative consultant Guido, who styled Marc Jacobs' fall 2009 neon runway show.

That he used crystal methamphetamine during the 1997 tennis season isn't the only hair-raising admission Andre Agassi makes in his new autobiography. He also reveals that the long hair he wore through much of his professional career was a wig. An early victim of male pattern baldness, Agassi said he was aghast that "every morning I would get up and find another piece of my identity on the pillow, in the wash basin, down the plughole. "I asked myself: you want to wear a toupee?

A love for the horror films of the late 1970s and early 1980s fueled writer-director Ti West's precise re-creation of the period in his film "The House of the Devil." But he started with a very odd detail. "The first thing [production designer Jade Healy and I] planned on was using the Coke cups that say Coke really big on the side," he said. The memory of the Coke cups played large in West's self-professed photographic memory of the era, which he bolstered by making extensive lists of items he remembered from his youth.

Hair is nothing if not a powerful subject for African Americans. In Chris Rock's new documentary "Good Hair," which opened Friday, he sets out to explore the complexities of living with black hair. He visits beauty salons, hairstyling competitions, science labs and Indian temples. He interviews a cavalcade of celebrities, salon owners and their clients in multiple cities. Through the ages, people of all ethnicities have obsessed about hair. Ancient Romans, Assyrians, Greeks and Egyptians wore wigs; so did Marie Antoinette and Thomas Jefferson.

Once the poor country cousin to narrative films, feature documentaries have grown in influence and popularity over the last couple decades thanks in large part to Michael Moore's controversial exposés "Roger & Me" and "Bowling for Columbine" and other critical and commercial hits such as Morgan Spurlock's "Super Size Me." There's a bumper crop of documentaries coming out this fall, including Moore's latest and a comedic look at how "good" hair brings self-esteem. "Good Hair" (Oct.