Divertimento

How to make Google forget your embarrassing searches.

"Rowdy wanted to make the boom, and the boom got him." A fifteen-year old boy got reckless with Fourth-of-July sparklers.  "A friend of Rowdy’s was also injured in the blast, which blew a four-foot hole in the ground and was heard four miles away."

America's first known serial killers were the Harpe brothers.

Because of the effects of gravity, the core of the earth is younger (by two years) than the crust of the earth.

This video of a child interacting (unsuccessfully) with a basketball hoop is a prime example of resistentialism ("the belief that inanimate objects are out to get us").

A hypothesis that Mary Todd Lincoln's bizarre behavior was a result of Pernicious Anemia (B12 deficiency).

"I was playing Fritz Kreisler's "Tambourin Chinois" in a concert, and it all went on very well, but suddenly all my bow hair broke and fell off..."

A gruesome account of a "truck stop killer."  Sobering reading to share with any young women who are contemplating hitchhiking cross-country alone.

"Why Has It Taken the Menstrual Cup So Long to Go Mainstream?"

Netflix (and other companies) will know your new credit card account number even if you don't tell them (because of the Visa Account Updater Program).

Another indictment of Big Pharma: "The doctor began prescribing the opioid painkiller OxyContin – in extraordinary quantities. In a single week in September, she issued orders for 1,500 pills, more than entire pharmacies sold in a month. In October, it was 11,000 pills. By December, she had prescribed more than 73,000, with a street value of nearly $6 million... Purdue [Pharma] did not shut off the supply of highly addictive OxyContin and did not tell authorities what it knew about Lake Medical until several years later when the clinic was out of business and its leaders indicted. By that time, 1.1 million pills had spilled into the hands of Armenian mobsters, the Crips gang and other criminals."

OSX/Eleanor-A malware "pretends to be a utility called EasyDoc Converter," but it actually hooks your computer's webcam to the Dark Web.

A bullfighter in Spain has been gored to death on live television.

A new conspiracy theory: "Pokémon Go Is a Government Surveillance Psyop Conspiracy."

"More than 800,000 people turned out Monday in India to plant trees in hopes of breaking a world record."

Video of a bullfrog digging a channel from a drying mudpuddle to the main pond, allowing his offspring to escape death.

"We trace the lifecycle of six popular foodstuffs from farm to fork to get to the root of why so much is wasted."

How to make Mars great again.

A gif shows the traumatic results when a carwash employee is inattentive to the hazards around him.

A 13 year old girl contracted second degree burns from using her cell phone. "Gabbie was using her phone while it was plugged into a wall charger.  The charger touched her necklace, which transmitted an electrical current around her neck, effectively burning her." (photos at the link).

Here are the "long-classified '28 pages' on alleged Saudi ties to 9/11."  Here is the Reddit discussion thread on the subject.

"Single-user restrooms reduce waiting times, relieve social pressure that people with shy bladders feel in public restrooms, solve the problem faced by parents and opposite-sex caregivers waiting for their charges, and eliminate the controversy over where a transgender person should go."

Wedding cakes styled in the fashion of geodes.

"Unambiguous evidence" of Neanderthal cannibalism. "Nearly a third of the bones bore cut marks where they'd been hacked apart or the flesh had been torn away."

How did the Yucatan asteroid impact kill the dinosaurs?  Perhaps by igniting underground oil and releasing 3,000,000,000 tons of soot into the atmosphere.  (Late Cretaceous rocks "bore the molecular fingerprint of crude-oil combustion—a particular hydrocarbon called superbenzene, or coronene, for its six-ring structure.")

"If mountain lions returned to their eastern U.S. range, the study found, they could prevent 708,600 deer-vehicle collisions, 155 human deaths and 21,400 human injuries over 30 years. That would save at least $2.13 billion..."

“A chance observation—that older people have bigger ears—was at first controversial but has been shown to be true.”

Some rather interesting etymologies of words.

It takes about an hour for a snowflake to fall from a cloud.

A girl totally transforms her hair color in 5 seconds.

A mishap on a water slide that predated this weeks decapitation event.

A graph showing the marital status of Americans by age.

A clinic in the suburbs of Minneapolis Minnesota provides pet hospice volunteers.  “It can be very expensive to care for animals that are old, sick and fragile, and a lot of them are dumped at that point,” Mairose explained. “It’s unacceptable to us that they die alone. We as an organization accept the financial burden and cover their doctor visits and medications. The volunteers make sure these dogs live out their lives with dignity.” “We see dogs that are riddled with cancer, but they’re eating, drinking, peeing, pooping and wagging their tails,” said Dr. Susan Miller. “Their quality of life can still be quite good; for some of these animals, this is the first time in their lives they’ve been well cared for.”

A graph shows the "Percentage of Individuals in the United States Without Health Insurance, 1963-2015."  (It's at a new low).

A brief video of underground methane bubbles at Belyy Island off the Yamal peninsula.  You wouldn't want to fall through that turf; it would be an asphyxiant environment underneath.

"How a Guy From a Montana Trailer Park Overturned 150 Years of Biology. Biology textbooks tell us that lichens are alliances between two organisms—a fungus and an alga. They are wrong."

"But according to the Kasich adviser (who spoke only under the condition that he not be named), Donald Jr. wanted to make him an offer nonetheless: Did he have any interest in being the most powerful vice president in history? When Kasich’s adviser asked how this would be the case, Donald Jr. explained that his father’s vice president would be in charge of domestic and foreign policy.

Then what, the adviser asked, would Trump be in charge of? “Making America great again” was the casual reply."

gif of a bear cub meeting a fawn. 

Olympian Mary Carillo explains the difference between backyard badminton and the Olympic version.

The images in today's divertimento are illustrations from Urania's Mirror.