As traditionally domineering husbands reach retirement age in Japan, the wives of as many as half of them may suffer some degree of Retired Husband Syndrome (rashes, ulcers, other stress symptoms), according to an October Washington Post dispatch. Said one morose, 63-year-old woman, "I had developed my own life, my own way of doing things, in the years when he was (working long hours)," but, she told the Post, she now can't stand even to look at her husband across the dinner table and sits at an angle so she can stare out a window instead. According to psychiatrists treating RHS, the numbers may soon explode further unless husbands lower their expectations of spousal servitude.

-- Among the extraordinary exhibits constructed especially for this year's Burning Man festival in late August in Nevada's Black Rock Desert was Don Bruce's and Tracy Feldstein's "The Disgusting Spectacle," a 23-foot-tall human head designed with a pulley and large hamster-type wheel that lets it pick its own nose. In a July interview in the San Francisco Chronicle, Bruce admitted that theirs wasn't the typical artsy Burning Man project: "Ours is stupid. That's stupid with three O's."

-- The museum at Cherepovets, Russia (about 400 miles north of Moscow), recently introduced a collection of items actually used by students for successfully cheating in school, including a pair of women's panties on which logarithms and math formulas had been written upside down in black ink. Also on display: a sports jacket with (according to a September dispatch in the Chronicle of Higher Education) "enough secret mechanisms to keep a cardshark flush for decades" and a jeans skirt with 70 numbered pockets for cheat sheets.

-- Notorious performance artist Zhang Huan gave a live show of his books-themed photo installation "My Boston" at the city's Museum of Fine Arts in September, including burying himself under a pile of volumes, eating pages, and shimmying up a flagpole while weighted down with books. Zhang's previous notable works include "Seeds of Hamburg," in which he coated himself with birdseed and honey and sat in a cage with 28 doves. According to a Boston Globe reporter, some people "outside" the performance-art world might call Zhang a "crackpot."

-- All four of the Seminole County, Fla. (suburban Orlando), judges who hear drunk-driving cases have routinely tossed out all challenged breath-alcohol readings since January (a total of more than 700), according to a September Orlando Sentinel story, because the judges believe the defendants should be given access to the machines' computer code. (Without the readings as evidence, about half the DUI defendants go free.) The Florida Department of Law Enforcement says the machines are accurate and that, anyway, manufacturers protect the codes as trade secrets.

-- An Associated Press investigation revealed in September that $5 billion in Small Business Administration loans authorized in the wake of Sept. 11 was so poorly managed that businesses close to New York City's Ground Zero went begging for money while thousands of businesses throughout the country got emergency loans by creatively describing how they were hurt by the Islamist-terrorist attacks. More than 130 franchised fast-food shops; dentists and chiropractors; a South Dakota radio station; a Utah dog boutique; and a Virgin Islands perfume shop were among those who got the mostly guaranteed loans. SBA admitted that it assigned some ordinary loans to the 9-11 fund on its own and generously accepted others' 9-11 "qualifications."

Probably the most notorious example of the Federal Emergency Management Agency's under-preparation for Hurricane Katrina was the over-ordering of 91,000 tons of ice cubes intended to cool the victims and their food and medicine. One now-famous truck, for example, picked up 20 tons of ice in Greenville, Pa., drove to a Carthage, Mo., FEMA facility, then to Montgomery, Ala., for a day and a half, then to Camp Shelby in Mississippi, then to Selma, Ala., then to Emporia, Va. (where it idled for a week to keep the ice frozen), and finally to Fremont, Neb., where the ice was put up for storage. (Update: On the day that Hurricane Wilma hit Florida in October, FEMA acting director David Paulison proudly noted that because of the over-ordering for Katrina, plenty of ice was on hand after Wilma.)

In Homosassa, Fla., near Tampa, Ralph Padgett, 73, was arrested in October and charged with running down (on his riding lawn mower) estranged neighbor David Ervin, who was also on a riding lawn mower. And in nearby Zephyrhills, in October, retiree Bryan Toll became the third person this year to pay more than $200,000 for a manufactured home at the Betmar Village Mobile Home Park. (Well, it is an 1,800-square-foot double-wide, located next to a golf course clubhouse.)

In September, after law enforcement officers in North Carolina spotted a reportedly stolen ambulance and chased it through three counties until forcing it into a ditch north of Greensboro, they found the driver to be mohawk-hairstyled Leon Hollimon Jr., 37, who is not a medical professional but was wearing a stethoscope and with latex gloves in his pocket. Strapped to a gurney in the back was a dead six-point deer, and according to witnesses cited by the Florida Times-Union newspaper (Hollimon is from Jacksonville, Fla.), an intravenous line was attached to it and a defibrillator had been used.

Lawyer Cindy Baker's client, Mike Koster, was charged with methamphetamine and marijuana possession and set for trial in October in Berryville, Ark., but he was also charged with possession of a bomb. Baker's trial strategy was to downplay the latter charge by bringing the actual bomb into the courtroom as evidence, but the horrified judge cleared the building and put out a call for the nearest bomb squad, and according to a source for the Carroll County News, the bomb was taken away and detonated. The judge also declared a mistrial and set a contempt of court hearing for Baker.

The following people accidentally shot themselves recently: a Fond du Lac, Wis., man, in the abdomen, while using a screwdriver to dislodge a round from his pistol (August); a Nacogdoches, Texas, woman, in the foot while trying to kill a snake on her property (September) (and the same woman, again trying to kill a snake, shot herself in the other foot the next day); a Tennessee Highway Patrolman, in the leg as he holstered his pistol while chasing a fleeing suspect near Maryville (August); a teenage boy, in the leg while fleeing after robbing a food store in New Caney, Texas (August); a 33-year-old Milwaukee man, in the leg while fleeing after robbing a man on the street (October). And Danny Walden, Taylorsville, Ky., was shot by the rifle he had set up in his home as a booby trap to protect his 115 marijuana plants (October).

-- In August, U.S. District Judge Thomas Hogan placed ads in Colombian newspapers and magazines "ordering" certain leaders of the revolutionary group FARC to come to America and appear in his courtroom in Washington, D.C., to answer charges of kidnapping U.S. citizens. Hogan's assistant said the law requires notification and that no one seems to have the secretive FARC's address.

-- Italy's highest appeals court ruled in March that a divorcing man would have to pay alimony to his ex-wife because he had refused to have sex with her for seven years as punishment for challenging him in a family argument. (Whatever point the husband was trying to make was not disclosed.)

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

Student Sarah Sevick filed a formal complaint in September with the U.S. Department of Justice, accusing Our Lady of the Lake University in San Antonio, Texas, of violating the Americans With Disabilities Act by not letting her keep her "assistance animal," which is Lilly, her ferret. Sevick says that she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder, including panic attacks, and that Lilly "soothes" her, but the school said it was concerned with other students' safety. (In other ferret news, the British upscale clothing firm Burberry threatened to sue a pet-accessories shop in Dudley, England, in October, for selling outfits in the familiar Burberry "check" pattern, including a cap and cape designed for ferrets.)

-- From the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "(Carver County) Aug. 24: Hostility. A door-to-door salesman complained about the attitude of the people in the neighborhood in the 100 block of W. Shasta Circle." And from the Union Democrat (Sonora, Calif.): "(Tuolumne County, Oct. 13) 1:13 p.m., Sonora, A man came to the Sheriff's Department to 'find out how to legally kill' a person who was harassing him."

-- From the University of Utah Department of Public Safety report for October (2005-22280): "Unwanted Guest. A security officer from Primary Children's Medical Center called to report a man in that hospital who had no legitimate business there and wouldn't leave. University Police responded and were told by the man that he comes to Primary because he can find longer cigarette butts there because the doctors and nurses at Primary don't smoke their cigarettes all the way down like everyone else does. The man left when ordered to do so by the police."

-- Adam Taylor, a quite-proper executive at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, was charged with illegally (and apparently motivelessly) firing several shots from an air rifle in a city park, but swears that he has no recollection of the incident and is totally baffled by the apparently accurate witness-reports of his guilt. Said his lawyer in September, "There is absolutely no reason on Earth why a 38-year-old man with his background would suddenly take an air rifle and fire it in the park ..."

-- Tyler Ing, 20, told the London (Ontario) Free Press in October that his parents "looked at me real weird for a few minutes" but that now "they're proud. My mom shows the (Guinness Book of World Records) to all her friends." The entry that she shows is her son's honor, recently achieved, for having the world's longest nipple hair, certified at 8.89 cm (3.5 inches).

In a September rape trial in New York City, witness Roberto Suarez testified that he saw two men in the room with a waitress just before she told him that she had been raped, and then when asked by the prosecutor to identify the two men, Suarez looked past the defendants and pointed to, respectively, Juror No. 8 and Alternate Juror No. 3. The New York Daily News reported that some jurors laughed so hard that they cried.

-- (1) Transsexual convicted prostitute Monica Renee Champion, 37, was finally picked up by police in Richmond, Va., in August; there had been arrest warrants for indecent exposure against her in the city's South Side as a male and in the city's North Side as a female. (2) Tyrone D. McMillian, 33, who was arrested after a high-speed chase through three New York towns in August, told the arresting officers: "I've been playing a lot of Grand Theft Auto and NASCAR on PlayStation. I thought I could get away."

-- (1) Paris Satine, 46, the madame of a legal brothel in Maroochydore, Australia (north of Brisbane), who was a nominee at an awards banquet for Excellence in Business (which was being held at a local hotel), was arrested for soliciting clients during the event. (2) London's Sunday Telegraph reported in July that, because of the shortage of military supplies caused by troops deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq, British Army soldiers on training exercises were ordered simply to shout "bang bang" rather than fire practice rounds.

In August, convicted child murderer Mark Allen Harris was awarded $50,000 by a jury in his lawsuit against Kanawha County, W.Va., jail officials after he fell out of the back of a van transporting prisoners, breaking bones in his face and knocking out some teeth. Also in August, in Albuquerque, N.M., a filthy and disheveled John Hyde, 48, being arraigned in the murders of four people, including two policemen, complained to the judge about police behavior, "Your honor ... I have been put in a red jump suit like Elvis Presley ... My hair looks ridiculous ... I was not allowed to groom myself."

In July, police in Lawrence, Kan., gave Ezekiel Rubottom's foot back to him, convinced that, contrary to a neighbor's inquiry, it wasn't evidence of a crime. Rubottom, 21, had tried to explain that he'd had his clubbed left foot amputated and merely wanted to keep it as a memento in a bucket of formaldehyde on his front porch. A spokesman for Lawrence Memorial Hospital told the Journal-World newspaper that there have been "women that want their uterus ... people take (home) tonsils ... they take (home) appendixes." Rubottom added a porcelain horse and a can of beer to his bucket to make it what he called "a collage of myself."

In September, Anthony R. Martin, 52, of Belleville, Ill., became the latest person to call the police and complain that someone had stolen his illegal drugs. But there was more: Martin told the investigating officer that a hostile neighbor had taken his marijuana plants, but when he showed the officer the room where he usually kept them, the plants were actually still there. Martin then said whoever took them must have returned them. He was charged with growing marijuana. (He also admitted that he had been drinking that night.)

Arrested recently and charged with murder: Kenneth Wayne Keller, Denton, Texas (August); Ronald Wayne Lail, Burke County, N.C. (September); Timothy Wayne Condrey, Caroleen, N.C. (September). Sentenced for murder: Tyler Wayne Justice, Alice, Texas (September). Committed suicide while suspected of murder: Michael Wayne Baxter, Edgewater, Md. (October). And in February, convicted double-murderer Russell Wayne Wagner was found dead in his cell in Jessup, Md., of an apparent heroin overdose, but in July, at the request of a sister, he received an official military burial at Arlington National Cemetery because he had been honorably discharged after his Army service in Vietnam. (Current law blocks from national cemeteries only criminals with death sentences.)

(1) Maria Julia Mantilla, recently crowned Miss World, denied a plastic surgeon's boast that he had given her buttock implants and trimmed her ears, protesting that "I'm not the creation of a surgeon. He just did my bust and my nose." (2) Wailing loudly and apparently incredulous at being ordered to jail, a scantily dressed Natalia McLennan, 25, was taken directly to a lockup from a New York City courtroom in September, after being charged with prostitution; McLennan had recently posed for the cover of New York magazine, proclaiming herself to be the city's top-grossing "escort" and acknowledging that she provided sex for clients.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)

The Ohio High School Athletic Association apologized to football player Bobby Martin of Colonel White High in Dayton after the referees barred him from a September game because he was not wearing the required shoes and knee pads. Martin was born without legs and plays on the punt return team, moving quickly around the field with his arms. An OHSAA official said the referees were just being overly cautious, but Martin said, "That's the first time in 17 years" that someone had made him feel disabled. (At halftime, Martin briefly considered tying some shoes around his chest and attempting again to play.)

-- Inmate Scott Bolton filed a lawsuit in September against the Luzerne County, Pa., prison and a slew of corrections officials, blaming them for the severe injuries he suffered in a 2003 alleged escape attempt, claiming that tighter security would have foiled his breakout. Bolton suffered spinal cord injuries (which have permanently confined him to a wheelchair) when fellow inmate-conspirator Hugo Selenski pushed Bolton out of a window, several floors up, apparently to speed their leaping exit. Asked a corrections commissioner, incredulously, "(An inmate) is dumb enough to act as a human mattress for Hugo, and (we're) responsible?"

-- Reba Schappell, of Reading, Pa., a professional country music singer who is also a conjoined twin with sister Lori, was profiled in a September segment of the BBC radio series "Who Runs Your World." Said Reba, "When I am singing, Lori is like any other fan, except she's up on the stage with me (covered in a blanket to reduce the distraction)." Said Lori: "I do not ask for anything from Reba. I don't get in to her concerts free just because she's a conjoined twin. I have to pay, just like every other fan that comes to the concert."

-- (1) Stephen Sodones, 62, was hospitalized in critical condition in August but ultimately recovered after being bitten three times on the hand by a copperhead snake, which he was helpfully carrying to safety across Route 23 near Jefferson, N.J.; according to a neighbor interviewed by the Newark Star-Ledger, animal-lover Sodones stops traffic to let ducks cross roads and once tried to revive a bumblebee by warming it in his hands. (2) Delshawn Prejean, 35, was arrested in Jacksonville, Fla., in June after a Starbuck's waitress squealed on him for leaving a small pile of marijuana as a tip.

-- At the Weavers School in Wellingborough, England, teachers were told in August to tolerate 15- and 16-year-old students' cussing, even the "f word," at least up to five times per class. According to London's Daily Mail, the teachers were to merely keep a count of the words on the board, which the school believes shows tolerance for occasional bad language, but which more cynical teachers and parents believe will encourage the students to max out usage in each class.

(1) Ismael Velasquez, 47, was convicted of drug possession in Round Rock, Texas, in September because he failed at flushing his baggie of cocaine down the toilet of a Shell station; police attributed their evidence-recovery success to the station's new, low-flow toilet, which caused the baggie just to swirl around. (2) Among the latest citizens to (as per the First Amendment) "peaceably assemble" and "petition government for a redress of grievances" were "hundreds" of sex offenders who gathered in September in Palm Bay, Fla., to protest the town's severe restrictions on where they can live and travel.

(1) Hungry Howie's Pizza deliveryman Thomas Stefanelli, 37, was shot in the leg during a June robbery in Tampa, Fla., as he made his rounds, but he fought the robbers off and, not really aware that the pain in his leg was from a gunshot, dutifully delivered his other four pizzas before returning to the store and examining his wound. (2) In London, in July, an unnamed teenager was rescued from a construction site at 4 a.m., about 10 stories up on the arm of a crane, which she had climbed during an apparent sleepwalking episode; she had to be brought down on a hydraulic lift.

(1) Pastor Marshall Wedderburn was given a "conditional" sentence and probation by a court in Kitchener, Ontario, in June after he admitted that he had whipped his 11-year-old daughter in church with a microphone cord because she appeared not to be paying attention to his sermon. (2) Elaine Walker became the latest parent to decide to relocate without letting her child know about it. She moved out of their home in Redmire, England, in July, leaving the equivalent of about $40 to her 15-year-old daughter, along with a note announcing that she and an older daughter had moved to Turkey (where she had recently met a man).

(1) Toru Nagasawa, 29, a construction worker in Kawasaki, Japan, was arrested in July after allegedly forcing a man to give up his contact lenses; at his home, police later recovered 124 pairs of eyeglasses and 30 pairs of contacts, stored in plastic bags. (2) Stephen Schroeder, 60, was arrested in Wilmington, N.C., in August, as the man who has been stealing teenage boys' clothes for 25 years, with an inventory of 137 pairs of shoes and enough other items to fill a van and a truck. According to police, Schroeder said he had a need to "hold" and "possess" the clothes.

Kim Bedwell, 52, and Gladys Bedwell, 50, were arrested for alleged marijuana manufacturing in Clarkston, Wash., in September, discovered when police happened to chase a black bear through their neighborhood and into the Bedwells' back yard. Apparently, frightened that the commotion was a drug raid, Kim tried to toss a marijuana plant over a high fence, but it landed on one of the officers. And in San Jacinto, Texas, in May, William Bluder, 21, was arrested for armed robbery but attempted to escape by diving head-first through some bushes outside a convenience store. However, unknown to Bluder, the bushes obscured a brick wall, which he hit with full force.

-- Royalty by Opportunistic Encounter: After a lifelong search, Marty Johnson, a Minnesota mortgage broker, finally located and visited his birth father this year, according to an ABC News report. Dad is John Ogike, who was an exchange student from Nigeria when he had a brief affair with Marty's mother, who gave Marty up for adoption, but today John Ogike is chief of the Aboh village in Nigeria, and Marty will be accepted as the new chief upon his dad's death (but Marty is unsure whether to accept).

-- Human Rights in Action: The Sri Lankan Daily News reported in September that the government's cabinet has decided to lower the age of consent for sex from 16 to 13 because, according to Minister Nimal Siripala de Silva, too many men were being arrested under the old law. Also in September, Nepal's Supreme Court ordered the government to ban the traditional practice of confining women to cow sheds during their menstrual periods.

A 49-year-old woman and her 30-year-old daughter were accidentally run over and killed in August in Indianapolis as they scuffled with each other just after midnight and rolled into the street, in front of an oncoming car. And a 38-year-old man whose family owns the Catacombs Extreme Scream Halloween attraction in Kansas City, Mo., was killed while working on the exhibit when the horror house's elevator malfunctioned.

(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNewsTips@yahoo.com or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.)