Chuck Shepherd

Samuel West announced in April that his Museum of Failure will open in Helsingborg, Sweden, in June, to commemorate innovation missteps that might serve as inspiration for future successes. Among the initial exhibits: coffee-infused Coca-Cola; the Bic "For Her" pen (because women's handwriting needs are surely unique); the Twitter Peek (a 2009 device that does nothing except send and receive tweets — and with a screen only 25 characters wide); and Harley-Davidson's 1990s line of colognes (in retrospect as appealing, said West, as "oil and gas fumes"). West's is only the latest attempt to immortalize failure with a "museum." Previous attempts, such as those in 2007 and 2014, apparently failed.

Pretensions

• The Columbia Room bar in Washington, D.C., recently introduced the "In Search of Time Past" cocktail — splashed with a tincture of old, musty books. Management vacuum-sealed pages with grapeseed oil, then "fat-washed" them with a "neutral high-proof" spirit, and added a vintage sherry, mushroom cordial and eucalyptus.

• The telephone "area" code in the tony English city of Bath (01225) is different from that of adjacent Radstock (01761) and probably better explained by landline telephone infrastructure than a legal boundary. However, a Bath councilwoman said in April that she is dealing with complaints by 10 new residents who paid high-end prices for their homes only to find that they came with the 01761 code. Admitted one Bath resident, "I do consider my phone number to be part of my identity."

Weird science

• While 80 percent of Americans age 45 or older have calcium-cluttered blood veins (atherosclerosis), about 80 percent of Bolivian Tsimane hunter-gatherers in the Amazon have clean veins, according to an April report in the Lancet. Keys for having "the healthiest hearts in the world": walk a lot and eat monkey, wild pig and piranha.

• Biologists at Switzerland's University of Basel writing in the journal Science of Nature in March calculated that the global population of spiders consumes at least 400 million tons of prey yearly — about as much, by weight, as the total of meat and fish consumed by all humans.

• University of Utah researchers trained surveillance cameras on dead animals in a local desert to study scavenger behavior and were apparently astonished to witness the disappearances of two bait cows. Over the course of five days, according to the biologists' recent journal article, two different badgers, working around the clock for days, had dug adjacent holes and completely buried the cows (for storage and/or to keep the carcasses from competitors).

Redneck chronicles

• Dennis Smith, 65, was arrested in Senoia, Ga., and charged with stealing dirt from the elderly widow of the man Smith said had given him permission to take it. Smith, a "dirt broker," had taken more than 180 dump-truck loads.

• New for Valentine's Day from the SayItWithBeef.com company: a bouquet of beef jerky slices, formed to resemble a dozen full-petaled roses ($59). Also available: daisies. Chief selling point: Flowers die quickly, but jerky is forever.

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