News Of The Weird - Feb. 22, 2005

Bizarre but true stories about real people collected by syndicated columnist Chuck Shepherd.

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.”
(Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or [email protected]  or go to www.NewsoftheWeird.com.) NEWS OF THE WEIRD