Fun Facts That Are

The Bobcat is the loader on every job site. Louis and Cyril Keller, two welders in Rothsay, Minnesota, built it for a turkey farmer who needed his barn cleaned - from junkyard scrap, in six weeks. Neither brother went past 8th grade. The manure fork was bars off the old Rothsay jail. A farm-equipment maker, Melroe, saw it at the state fair and named it Bobcat. Louis's son Joe says it replaced the pitchfork and the wheelbarrow.

Metallica has spent years quietly paying for trade school. Their All Within My Hands foundation funds welding and other skilled trades. The Metallica Scholars Initiative now covers 93 community colleges in all 50 states, plus Guam. Thousands of students have gone through the program, and most fans have never heard of it.

A lost sheep named Chris wandered the Australian bush near Canberra for more than five years without being shorn. When RSPCA workers found him in 2015, his fleece had grown to more than 40 kilograms - enough wool for 30 sweaters. Champion shearer Ian Elkins needed 42 minutes to remove it. Chris survived, broke a Guinness World Record, and lived four more years.

Randy Savage spent four seasons chasing a baseball career before he became Macho Man. He caught for the Cardinals and Reds organizations, playing 289 games. A collision at home plate wrecked his throwing shoulder. So he taught himself to throw left-handed. He hurled a ball against a wall up to a thousand times a day. Released in 1975, he turned to wrestling and became a legend.

Darryl "DMC" McDaniels of Run-DMC did not learn he was adopted until he was 35. He had spent his first months in foster care before being adopted. After learning the truth, DMC co-founded Camp Felix in 2006, a summer camp built just for foster kids. Twenty years later, it still gives kids canoe trips and campfires they might not otherwise get.

A small group of retirees in Bangor, Maine has met every troop flight through the airport since 1991. It started with one homecoming during Desert Storm. Volunteers give each soldier a handshake, a cookie, and a free phone call home. Some flights land in the middle of the night. Someone is always there. More than a million troops have walked through that line. Thirty-five years on, they are still waiting at the gate.

Fly Geyser looks like something from another planet, its mounds streaked bright red and green in the Nevada desert. Nobody designed it. In 1964, engineers drilling a geothermal test well left it uncapped, and scalding mineral water has erupted nonstop ever since. The rainbow colors come from algae that thrive in the hot mineral runoff, and the mound is still growing today.

Lucca was a Marine Corps bomb dog who worked Iraq and Afghanistan for six years. In more than 400 missions, no Marine on her patrols was ever hurt. On March 23, 2012, a bomb took her front leg. Her handler carried her out. She was walking again within ten days, and in 2016 became the first US Marine Corps dog awarded Britain's Dickin Medal for bravery. She retired to the Marine who had been her very first handler.

The yellow barrels at every highway exit were invented by John Fitch, a Le Mans driver who once shot down a German jet in WWII. After his co-driver died at Le Mans in 1955, Fitch filled liquor barrels with sand and crashed into them at up to 70 mph in his own driveway. He climbed out grinning every time. Highways adopted them in the late 1960s. An estimated 17,000 lives saved. Every one started in his driveway.

Winnipeg was about to disappear under floodwater in the spring of 1997. Tens of thousands of volunteers, including students bused from their classrooms, filled more than 8 million sandbags by hand. Crews then raced to build a 26-mile wall of earth and sandbags across open farmland in just four days. The wall held, and the city stayed dry.

Nek Chand was an Indian roads inspector who began secretly building a garden in a forbidden forest gorge around 1965. He hid thousands of sculptures there for about a decade, made from broken bangles, tiles and factory waste. Officials discovered it in 1975 and could have torn it down. Instead they gave him a salary and 50 workers. The Rock Garden now covers 40 acres with over 5,000 statues.

Pamukkale in southwestern Turkey means Cotton Castle, and it looks like snow that never melts. Hot spring water loaded with calcium carbonate has crept down this hillside for hundreds of thousands of years, hardening into blinding white terraced pools. People have bathed in them since Roman times. The ancient spa city of Hierapolis was built right on top, and the whole site is now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.