Fun Facts That Are

Since 1966, the Swedish city of Gavle has built a giant straw Christmas goat in the town square. Arsonists have burned it down 43 out of 60 years. The city tried guards, CCTV, fences, and fireproofing. In 2005, attackers dressed as Santa and a Gingerbread Man shot it with flaming arrows. In 1976, an American tourist burned it down and told police he thought it was a tradition.

Jeff Bezos has one of the tallest residential fences in America at his Beverly Hills estate. It violates local height ordinances. Instead of taking it down, he pays roughly $1,000 in fines every month. The fine is pocket change for a man worth over $200 billion - so the fence stays.

A secretary in Dallas kept making typing errors, so she started painting over them with white tempera paint. She offered the idea to IBM - they said no. She built Liquid Paper into a company doing $38 million a year. Gillette bought it for $47.5 million. Her son was in The Monkees.

A dolphin named Kelly was trained to trade litter for fish. She started tearing paper into tiny pieces and trading each scrap separately for maximum fish. Then she lured a seagull into the pool, caught it, and traded that for even more fish. She taught her calf. Her calf taught others. She was training them.

Nancy Carlson bought a plain bag at a government surplus auction for $995. It turned out to be Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 lunar sample bag - still containing actual moon dust from the first landing. NASA demanded it back. A federal judge ruled Carlson was the legal owner. She sold it at Sotheby's for $1.8 million. The moon was in the clearance bin.

A retired gardener borrowed a metal detector in 1992 to find a lost hammer in a Suffolk field. Instead, he uncovered 14,865 Roman coins and 200 pieces of ancient jewelry - the largest late Roman treasure hoard ever found in Britain, valued at £1.75 million. They found the hammer too. It's in the British Museum.

Workers at a Scottish nuclear facility were decommissioning a plutonium plant, but the expensive industrial cleaners were not working. Then one worker remembered a Cillit Bang TV ad for a £1.99 bathroom cleaner. They tried it. It worked so well that other UK nuclear sites called to ask about it.

A B-25 bomber slammed into the Empire State Building in heavy fog. Elevator operator Betty Lou Oliver was burned on the 80th floor. Rescuers placed her in an elevator to get her down - but the crash had severed the cables. She plummeted 75 stories to the basement. She survived. She still holds the Guinness World Record 80 years later.

In 1995, Patrick Combs got a promotional check for $95,093.35 in junk mail. He endorsed it with a smiley face and deposited it at an ATM as a joke. The bank cleared the full amount. It turned out the fake check accidentally met every legal requirement of a real one. Six lawyers told him the money was legally his. He returned it anyway.

Dale Schroeder worked as a carpenter at the same Iowa company for 67 years. He never married. He drove a rusty old Chevrolet. When he died in 2005, nobody could believe he had secretly saved $3 million. He left it all to send 33 complete strangers to college. They call themselves "Dale's kids."

A scrap dealer paid $13,302 for a gold egg at a flea market, planning to melt it for profit. Nobody wanted it. It sat in his kitchen for years. Then he Googled the name engraved inside. It was a lost Imperial Faberge egg made for Tsar Alexander III. Estimated value: $33 million.

In 1814, a giant vat of beer ruptured at a London brewery, unleashing 135,000 gallons of porter through the streets. It demolished two homes, collapsed a pub wall, and killed eight people. The brewery went to court. The jury ruled it an Act of God. Nobody paid a penny.