Your government knows best: A 2007 federal energy- independence law required companies that supply motor fuel in the US to blend in a certain cellulose-based ingredient starting in 2011 — even though (as the Environmental Protection Agency well knows) the ingredient simply does not now exist.

Traditional bridge replacement on as prominent a highway as Interstate 15 in Mesquite, Nev. has generally required rerouting traffic for as long as a year, but the new “accelerated� technology in January necessitated detours for less than a week.

Technology has developed a chair frame that authenticates merely by sitting down: a butt-scanner. Professor Shigeomi Koshimizu’s device produces a map of the user’s unique derriere shape, featuring 256 degrees of pressure at 360 different points and...

Don Aslett, 76, recently opened the Museum of Clean in Pocatello, Idaho as the culmination of a lifelong devotion to tidying up. Highlights are several hundred pre-electric vacuum cleaners plus interactive exhibits to encourage kids to clean their rooms.

• Son Theodore Zimmick and two other relatives filed a lawsuit in November against the St. Stanislaus cemetery in Pittsburgh for the unprofessional burial of Theodore’s mother, Agnes, in 2009.

A regional development commission in Michigan, purchasing equipment for 13 counties in May using homeland security grants, bought 13 machines that make snow cones, at a total cost of $11,700 (after rejecting one county’s request for a popcorn machine).

When tattoos aren’t nearly enough: In some primitive cultures, beauty and status are displayed via large holes in the earlobe from which to hang heavy ornaments or to insert jewels or tokens, and BBC News reported in November that an “increasing”...

• Globally (except in Japan), family-run businesses underperform those run by professional managers. Japanese corporations often seem to have a talented son to take over for his father.

Was Moammar Gadhafi the last of the “buffoon dictators,� asked BBC News in October. His legend was earned not merely with his now-famous, dirty-old-man scrapbook of Condoleezza Rice photos. Wrote a BBC reporter, “One day [Gadhafi] was a Motown [backup] vocalist with wet-look permed hair and tight pants.

• An Illinois appeals court finally threw out a lawsuit in August, but not before the twoyear-long battle had created a foot-high pile of legal filings on whether two “children” (now ages 23 and 20) could sue their mother for bad parenting while they were growing up.

At press time, Melinda Arnold, 34, was waiting to hear whether her mother would be accepted as an organ donor for her daughter — with the organ being the mom’s womb.

“You eat meat, so why not blood?� asked the Globe and Mail, which sampled several Toronto restaurants’ sanguinary haute cuisines, including the Italian eatery Buca’s spaghetti with blood-blackened noodles and torta di sanguinaccio (figs, almonds, buffalo-milk creme on a base custard of dark chocolate and slowcooked pig’s blood).

(1) Mohamed Bishr, an Egyptian man bearing a remarkable resemblance to the late Iraqi dictator, claimed in October that he had been briefly kidnapped after spurning an offer to portray Saddam in a porn video. Bishr’s adult sons told the al-Ahram newspaper in Alexandria that their father had been offered the equivalent of $330,000.

“My ultimate dream is to be buried in a deep ocean close to where penguins live,� explained the former Alfred David, 79, otherwise known in his native Belgium as “Monsieur Pingouin� (Mr. Penguin), so named because a 1968 auto accident left him with a waddle in his walk that he decided to embrace with gusto.

London Fashion Week usually brings forth a shock or two from cutting-edge designers, but a September creation by Rachel Freire might have raised the bar: a floor-length dress made from 3,000 cow nipples (designed to resemble roses).

Bureaucrat’s delight: An update of the official index for classifying medical conditions (for research and quality control, and for insurance claims) was released recently, to take effect in October 2013, and replaced the current 18,000 codes with 140,000 much more specific ones.

Tombstone, Ariz., which was the site of the legendary 1881 Gunfight at the OK Corral (made into a 1957 movie), is about 70 miles from the Tucson shopping center where a US congresswoman, a federal judge and others were shot in January. A Los Angeles Times.

(1) Jack Smeltzer broke a record in the tractor pull championships in Columbus, Ohio in January doing a full [tracklength] 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.

The ear has a Gspot, 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

Tall, slim, facial symmetry, good teeth, along with classic makeup and dress and graceful movement, might comprise the inventory list for any beauty contest winner, and they are also the criteria for victors in Nigers traditional Gerewol festival