A self-made millionaire Harris Rosen adopted a Florida neighborhood called Tangelo Park, cut the crime rate in half, and increased the high school graudation rate from 25% to 100% by giving everyone free daycare and all high school graduates scholarships. Rosen, 73, began his philanthropic efforts by paying for day care for parents in Tangelo Park, a community of about 3,000 people. When those children reached high school, he created a scholarship program in which he offered to pay free tuition to Florida state colleges for any students in the neighborhood. In the two decades since starting the programs, Rosen has donated nearly $10 million, and the results have been remarkable. The high school graduation rate is now nearly 100 percent, and some property values have quadrupled. The crime rate has been cut in half, according to a study by the University of Central Florida.

The US Navy has 19 aircraft carriers, compared to 12 for the rest of the world combined. The smallest US carrier is larger and more advanced than the next largest carrier from any other country.

After a waitress at a pizzeria helped a police detective choose the numbers for a winning lottery ticket in 1984, he ‘tipped’ her $3,000,000 – half of his $6,000,000 prize money. On April Fool’s Day Cunningham called Penzo at 9 a.m. to tell her he had just won $6 million dollars and that she was entitled to half of it. “I was still asleep,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Don’t bother me now.’ ” Cunningham convinced her that it was not a joke. She screamed, and woke her husband, Robert, a construction worker, to tell him they were rich. The two families will split the lottery payout of $285,715 a year over 21 years

A Guy Got Screwed Out of a $100,000 Slot Machine Jackpot, Because He Let a Woman Push the Button for Good Luck. Jan Flato was gambling on a high-stakes slot machine at a casino in Fort Lauderdale about a month ago. Each spin was $50, and he hit the jackpot for a HUNDRED GRAND. The Seminole Hard Rock Casino say that slot machine winnings go to the person who presses the button or pull the lever, not the person who puts the money into the machine. So, Jan Flato, the man who was feeding money into the slot machine which paid out $100,000 watched as casino officials awarded his money to Marina Medvedeva Navarro, a female friend of his, who pushed the button that won the jackpot. When the bells and lights go off signaling the $100,000 this man must’ve assumed he was sitting pretty. After all, he’d been feeding all of the money into the machine. But, it was Marina Navarro who walked out of the casino holding $50,000 in cash and a check for an additional $50,000 (flanked by armed security), which left Jan Flato pissed as hell. According to Navarro, she offered to split some portion of the winnings with Flato but rescinded that offer after a series of menacing text messages were sent to her. For his part, Jan Flato’s telling this story because he doesn’t want gamblers to get screwed over like he did. He thought he was just having fun with a friend, but since it was his money going into the machines that he’d be fine if a jackpot came up. Obviously, he was wrong. Jan Flato now wants to prevent you or me from fucking up and letting a six-figure jackpot fall into the wrong hands.

Johnny Cash took only three voice lessons in his childhood before his teacher, enthralled with Cash’s unique singing style, advised him to stop taking lessons and to never deviate from his natural voice. “When I was 17, I had been cutting wood all day with my father and I came in and I was singing a gospel song, “Everybody’s gonna have a wonderful time up there, Glory hallelujah.” Suddenly my voice dropped and I was singing bomm – buh-buh – bomm way down low in the key of E. And my mother said, ‘Who is that singing?’ She came out of the back door and there I was, and I said, ‘That was me, Momma.’ She said, ‘Well keep on singing. So I kept on singing.”

People are training rats to detect landmines. The rats are too light to set the mines off and can smell the explosive compound extremely well. The rats are very fast and can clear an area 3 times faster than use of electronic mine sweepers and with higher accuracy.

A man in Cambodia named Aki Ra has been spending the last 20+ years disarming landmines all over the country, with no pay, and no armor.

In its January 1988 issue, Cosmopolitan ran a feature claiming that women had almost no reason to worry about contracting HIV. The piece claimed that unprotected sex with an HIV-positive man did not put women at risk of infection and went on to state that “most heterosexuals are not at risk”.

In 2012, Jose Alvarenga, a Salvadorian fisherman, survived 438 days on a raft in the Pacific Ocean. With no motor or GPS or food, he survived on raw turtle and fish, rain water, turtle blood, and his own urine. He is believed to be the longest surviving castaway.

Grizzly bears were so feared and respected by Native Americans that hunting them required a company of 4 to 10 warriors and was done with the same preparation and ceremonial as intertribal warfare. Native American tribes whose territories overlapped with those of grizzly bears often viewed them with a mixture of awe and fear. North American brown bears were so feared by the Natives that they were rarely hunted, especially alone. When Natives hunted grizzlies, the act was done with the same preparation and ceremonial as intertribal warfare, and was never done except with a company of 4 to 10 warriors. The tribe members who dealt the killing blow were highly esteemed among their compatriots. Californian Indians actively avoided prime bear habitat, and would not allow their young men to hunt alone, for fear of bear attacks. During the Spanish colonial period, some tribes, instead of hunting grizzlies themselves, would seek aid from European colonists to deal with problem bears. Many authors in the American west wrote of Natives or voyagers with lacerated faces and missing noses or eyes due to attacks from grizzlies.