1. A Teacher Promised His 1978 Class an Eclipse Party in 50 Years–And He Just Hosted It
The year was 1978: Prime Minister Aldo Moro had been kidnapped in Italy, the US Senatorial proceedings were broadcast on the radio for the first time, and Patrick Moriarty was teaching his junior high science class about solar eclipses.
Explaining their trajectories, the path of totality, and other such details, the class took a look at which upcoming eclipses would pass over their hometown of Rochester, New York.
“Hey, circle that one on April 8th, 2024,” Moriarty recalled telling his students. “We’re going to get together on that one.”
Laughing, the class carried on the lesson, and every new group of 17-year-olds that came through his classroom got the same joke, with inevitably the same reaction.
The years went by. The Berlin Wall fell, the Dot Com Bubble crashed the stock market, the US elected a black man to be president, social media embedded itself into our lives; and then suddenly, Moriarty was looking at the calendar and it said ‘2022.’
He always used to tell his students that he’d take out an ad in the newspaper, but since people don’t really do newspapers anymore, he set up a Facebook group to track down some of his old charges and see if his promise meant as much to them as it did to him, but didn’t expect much forty to fifty years on as one might imagine.
2. Dog That Flunked Out of Police Academy Becomes a Hero in Taiwan’s Earthquake Response
To be a drug-sniffing dog you have to be impassionate, which is exactly what this golden retriever was not.
Though Roger flunked out of the Kaohsiung City police academy in Taiwan, his career in public service was not over, and has now captured the hearts of his people with his rescue efforts during Taiwan’s recent earthquake.
Striking the northern part of the island with a magnitude of 7.4, it caused a landslide in a popular national park that destroyed several buildings and claimed a dozen victims. 8-year-old Roger was quickly deployed to the area, where his exuberance and independent streak put him in good stead for locating the body of a 21-year-old victim who hadn’t been found.
Whether Chen Chih-san, captain of the rescue dog unit of the Kaohsiung Fire Department has other dogs that assisted in the rescue efforts, it was only Roger who captured the island nation’s hearts because of his earlier career setback and subsequent redemption arc.
3. British Man Finishes His Run Across Africa: 385 Marathons in 352 days
A red-headed Brit named Ross Cook claims he’s become the first person ever to run across the entire length of Africa after crossing a finishing line in Tunisia.
The feat was immense, filled with danger, and when the self-styled “Hardest Geezer” arrived at the shores of the Mediterranean, he had run just over 385 marathons in 352 days; a total of over 10,000 miles.
More importantly as Cook sees it, his inspirational accomplishment has raised over £650,000, close to a million dollars, for a selection of charities.
His route crossed 16 countries, deserts, rainforests, and mountains, and saw him get entangled in visa issues, muggings, sandstorms, injuries, sickness, and snowstorms. It started in South Africa’s remote southern town of La Agulhas and landed him on a Tunisian beach with a strawberry daiquiri in his hand.
