Weapons safety tip: Don’t shoot yourself at a gun demonstration — especially if you’re the instructor.

A retired police officer in Ohio was showing a class of recruits how to use a handgun at a firing range when he missed his target and shot himself in the thigh instead.

***

This garden gnome was a failure from the get-go.

Officials in Iowa trying to break a record for the world’s tallest garden gnome found out halfway through construction that they’d fallen short.

The 15-foot, 3,500-pound concrete gnome set to go up on the Iowa State University campus in Ames will be three feet shy of a fiberglass gnome in Poland.

***

Long marriages kill conversation.

Couples married 50 years or more chat for only three minutes an hour while eating out — many times uttering fewer than 150 words, said a survey by a British dating Web site.

Unmarried lovers gabbed for 50 minutes an hour while dining out. Those wed for 10 years managed 29 minutes of talk and 30-year couples scraped by with 16 minutes of chit-chat.

***

It won’t be hard to walk all over this woman.

It will take 1.5 million tons of soil and clay to create a huge sculpture of a naked woman lying down next to the artificially created lakes at Blagdon Estate in Northumberland, England.

The landscape project is set to open in 2013.

***

This Tiger is a terror.

An aging housecat in Leeds, England, named Tiger has attacked and clawed so many letter carriers that the Royal Mail stopped delivering to the house.

The 19-year-old feline waits by his cat flap and goes postal when the mail arrives.