The fun that was Rocky Mountain Race Week is over. The awards were handed out and the cars and drivers are heading back home. It’s been a lot of fun tracking the amount of shattered parts and scared pre-cooked venison that the racers have encountered, but that came at the expense of missing out on the backlog of random news blurbs. Not to worry, we have an overstuffed in-box filled with plenty of things to choose from, so we dusted off a few and bring them to you here in this bit we call Scrapple. Enjoy!

1. The kind of undead we can get behind.

As far as Land Rover is concerned, the old Defender is dead as a doornail. But there is a rumor floating around that a British billionaire named James Ratcliffe has engaged with Jaguar Land Rover about a deal that involves Defender production. It’s too early to know if he’s buying intellectual property, tooling, or what, but with the low-volume vehicle law being a thing and the Defender’s body and layout well over 25 years old, it’s possible…

2. Your weekly Volkswagen woes, right here…

Hey, guess what? There is a good chance that Volkswagen didn’t just mess with the four-cylinder diesel engines, but that the 3.0L TDI V6 might have had a problem as well! California won’t even accept a VW plan to clean up the engine, either…so that could be another round of vehicle buybacks for the company. Just wondering…has anyone jumped out of a window in Germany yet?

3. That’s like handing a teenager $10 to wipe the viruses off of the home computer.

Say you are an automotive manufacturer who has discovered that their vehicles can be hacked into rather easily. How much would you pay a white-hat hacker who could locate exploitable issues in your software? According to FCA, about $1,500 per electronic whoopsie. The auto manufacturer has partnered up with Bugcrowd, a “crowdsourced application security testing company” that works similar to Local Motors’ crowdsourcing plan: individuals submit their findings to Bugcrowd, and once verified, get a check.

4. Mazda and Isuzu hook up after both divorce from their American partners…

General Motors and Isuzu, Ford and Mazda. When it came to trucks, that was they way it worked for decades, but apparently, that’s been thrown out of the window. Mazda, which recently found itself divorced from Ford, has teamed up with Isuzu for a world-market pickup to replace the current BT-50 pickup. Don’t expect to see it in the North American market, though. That will come from Ford’s next updated Ranger, set to return sometime around 2019 or 2020.

5. It’s not the traffic that stinks…

You ever hear the phrase, “making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear”? Ever thought that phrase could be applied to the tons upon tons of swine waste that accumulates? Apparently pig crap has oils in it that can be used to create an asphalt binding material, which would take the place of petroleum products. A team in North Carolina is testing out their compound with promising results. Check out the video at the National Science Foundation to see just how you can turn a turd into a turnpike.