Part-time Devon, England vicar Gavin Tyte, who serves churches in Uplyme and Axmouth, recently produced a rap video of the Nativity, in which he plays a shepherd, an angel and the narrator.

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.

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

Those ingenious Western spies! In January, Saudi officials detained a vulture from Tel Aviv University (part of endangered-species research), calling it a spy and alarming its Israeli handlers that the bird might face a gruesome execution as an espionage agent.

Biologists studying rare species have to be quick: Researchers learned from reports in early 2010 of a new monkey species in Myanmar, with a nose so recessed that it habitually collects rainfall and constantly sneezes. However, according to an October National Geographic dispatch, by the time scientists arrived to investigate, natives had eaten the monkey.

The collapse of the economy in 2008 might have reached the far corners of Earth, but evidently not to Planet Calypso, the make-believe asteroid containing make-believe real estate in the multi-player online game Entropia Universe, where resort...

Bolivia's president Evo Morales, the former union leader and coca farmer known for hard-nosed political combat, is also a fanatical soccer player and drew worldwide video attention in October for an incident during a supposedly friendly match between his pals and a team headed by the mayor of La Paz.

Surreal estate: Sixty- two percent of the 12 million people of Mumbai, India live in slums, but the city is also home to Mukesh Ambani's 27-story private residence (37,000 square feet, 600 employees serving a family of five), reported to cost about $1 billion.