Drafting Behind This Car Is Not Advised

Driver Kim Crosby is making a name for herself as a competitor in NASCAR’s Busch Series, but she’s probably better known for the company that sponsors her ride: Boudreaux’s Butt Paste.

No joke. The bright-red lettering is emblazoned on her yellow car and the front of her jacket, which she tries to wear with a straight face.

Apparently, the product is not only legitimate, but it works wonders for such problems as diaper rash, acne, bedsores, poison ivy and even chapped lips. Even so, it has yet to keep a struggling Crosby from bringing up the rear.

Trivia time: Tiger Woods has the lowest winning total at the Masters, an 18-under-par 270 in 1997. What two golfers share the highest winning total, and what were their 72-hole scores?

Beats pumping gas: Aaron Martens, a longtime Castaic resident who recently moved to Alabama, has earned the 2005 Bassmasters angler-of-the-year title and the $100,000 bonus that comes with it. That boosted his career winnings as a bass-fishing pro to more than $1 million.

Martens, 32, is a former gas station attendant.

Not what he expected: Baseball has not been very good to Gabe Ribas, a star at Brunswick High in Maine but for the last four years a minor league nomad who claims to have played in more than 100 cities, usually staying in fleabag motels.

“But there’s one place that stands out as the absolute worst -- the Apache Lodge in Prescott, Ariz.,” Ribas told the Brunswick Times Record. “Ants on the walls, a showerhead with one cold dribble of water. There were three of us for two twin beds and a cot after a 12-hour bus ride, and we had to get up and play the next day.”

Perhaps Ribas ought to try bass fishing.

Wrong Washington: In a Seattle Post-Intelligencer article on Ichiro Suzuki and the Mariners’ being one of Washington’s top draws for visitors from Japan, a Tokyo tourism official said baseball was not always enough and that some prospective tourists were disappointed to hear the answer to one of the most common questions: “How do I get to the White House?”

No thanks: On news that Sony is developing a device that would use ultrasound signals to give television viewers a sense of smell or taste of the programs they watch, Dwight Perry of the Seattle Times wrote, “The thing isn’t even close to hitting the market yet, and Clipper fans are already demanding that the pseudo-sniffer come with a disable switch.”

Trivia answer: Sam Snead and Jack Burke finished with one-over-par totals of 289 in 1954 and 1956, respectively.

And finally: More than 300 hunters at a sportsmen’s dinner in Verona, N.Y., learned after a feast of venison that the white-tail deer they had consumed had been a victim of chronic wasting disease, a fatal neurological ailment.

The disease is believed to be harmless to humans, but the hunters were nonetheless urged to consult their physicians. So far, no animal-rights group has claimed responsibility for donating the deer.