Divertimento

At farm supply stores you can purchase "artificial insemination gloves."  The non-veterinary uses are limited only  by your imagination.

Moose vs. lawnmower.  Moose wins.

Einstein is a famous talking parrot (5-minute video).

A woman cleverly stole mail from mailboxes by attaching a mousetrap to a segment from a vertical window blind.

Canities subita is the medical term for hair turning white overnight.

"In the hospital, Carter lost control of his right arm, then over his legs and other muscles within a few days. He now can only wiggle a toe and move the left side of his face. He has been diagnosed with a mysterious, polio-like illness called acute flaccid myelitis, a condition that seems to be surging this year."

Karma is well known to be a bitch (gif).

In episode 595 of This American Life ("Deep End of the Pool"), Act One ("If You Cannot Afford an Attorney, Some Random Dude Will Be Appointed to You") is a long listen (29 minutes) but provides amazing insight into the practice of public defenders.  If you're in a hurry, just try the first five minutes...

The benefits of going bald.  "While the bald and balding men were not considered as physically attractive as the other men, one category of scores was far higher. The men were consistently rated as more intelligent, influential, knowledgeable, well-educated, high social status, honest and helpful – traits collectively known as social maturity."  (and there's more...)

A robot wins a game of tic-tac-toe (8-second gif).  You have time for this...

Via Everlasting Blort, the worst of McMansions (scroll down the page).

A movie poster for "Forrest Trump."

There is a new world record for largest pumpkin: 2,261 pounds.  "By focusing on thickness as well as weight, gardeners hope to create structurally sound behemoths. As the younger Dill told Inverse in September 2015, he is cultivating a squash that is “pretty well solid right through to the cavity.”

In September, skeletons of Asian ancestry were discovered in a Roman Britain burial site.

"In early 2009, the seven largest publicly traded college operators were worth a combined $51 billion. Today, they’ve been all but wiped out."  Thanks, Obama.

Disappearing trick.  LOL.  (15-second gif)

NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day offers a zoom into a star cluster.

I heard some numbers on a podcast of No Such Thing as a Fish that I found hard to believe, but I tracked down confirmation at NASA -

When a star dies, its core collapses under the pull of gravity to form an exotic type of star. Average-sized stars like our sun leave behind white dwarfs. These stars contain about as much material as the sun, but gravity squeezes them down to the size of Earth. A teaspoon of white dwarf material would weigh about 15 tons!

If that doesn’t impress you, stars much bigger than our sun leave behind neutron stars. These objects contain even more material than the sun, but they are only about 10 miles across -- the size of a city. A teaspoon of neutron star material would weigh 4 billion tons!

Also via NSTAAF, there IS such a thing as -1 on the Richter Scale.

A deer enjoys a leaf blower.

Is a "juncture" the same as a "junction?"  Grammarist explains.

How hard can it be to get into a tub?

"If I drop food on the floor, I still eat it. I do that because the harm I might get from the floor is not worth my concern compared with many, many other things. You may feel differently. Either way, make an informed judgment based on relative risks, not on any arbitrary span of time that one thing has been touching another."

An interesting read about tsunamis in confined spaces.

"Ladybug, you are cleared for takeoff."

A half-court basketball shot (taken by a proxy) wins a student $10,000.

"When blind writer Trish Vickers failed to notice her pen had run out of ink, Dorset Police made a real impression on her.  The boys in blue came to her rescue and recovered 26 pages of her book."

Juggling flaming torches.  Ta-DAAAA !!  (I really hate to LOL at "fails," but sometimes it's hard not to.)

There is a new drug for severe eczema (a monoclonal antibody interleukin inhibitor).  It's currently in Phase 3 trials.

A map (and discussion thread) of the 14 drill holes in Mars made by Curiosity.

"Lyndel Rhodes listening to Willie Nelson sing a song she wrote."

Footprint of a titanosaur.

"Almost half of a 50-strong herd of cows in western France ate themselves to death after chomping on the equivalent of a whole winter’s rations in just one night."

Forbes Magazine released its annual list of the 400 richest Americans, a record 42 of whom are immigrants.

Opposition to Galileo was not just religious - it was also scientific.

Clever Oktoberfest outfits (gif).

"Bachelor hacks" - several of which are surprisingly clever.

Police have issued an appeal for information about why a chicken was seen crossing the road in Dundee.

"The U.S.’s largest pneumonic plague outbreak in nearly a century has been identified, and it all started with a sick dog... The CDC also found that one of the cases may have resulted from human-to-human transmission, something that hasn’t happened in the States since 1924."

Clever: "Police arrested Logan Pack, 24, for Felony Burglary. They say he collected receipts from the parking lot at Home Depot, then used the receipts like a shopping list to obtain the items from the shelves and return the goods for cash."  I have often wondered why more people don't do this (or perhaps they do).

Where to go when your cruise ship hits rough seas.

Here's the Saturday Night Live spoof of the second presidential debate.

If there is such a thing as a humorous Halloween costume of a suicide vest, this may be it.

Credit for the photos embedded in this week's Divertimento goes to Ásta Henriksen, who teaches English at the Icelandic School of Commerce, and whose hobby is photographing "hearts" in Icelandic nature (via Iceland Monitor).