Goosey the hero goose

0:03 Boy, the fall's closing in on your pal Johnny Mac. I had to teach a college class this morning. Luckily, it's not Labor Day yet, so it's pseudo-summer still. Hi, I'm Johnny Mac with five good news stories. Good news for an Italian lottery player. Well, the good news, he won a million dollars. The problem, he threw away the ticket. Oopsie! But more good news, a garbage company found it. The winning ticket had been purchased in the town of Betonto for a million-day drawing. The player used the same set of numbers he normally played, 2, 4, 8, 10, and 51. After the drawing, they scanned the ticket at a store.

0:44 The machine said, yeah, that ticket's non-payable. So he threw it out. Only later did the family realize what non-payable means. Not that it's worthless. It means it was too large to ask the guy at the store, like, hey, I won. Give me a million dollars. Stores don't have a million dollars sitting around. The numbers had hit. The ticket was worth around $ 1. 15 million. So they went rushing back to the store, but the garbage had already been collected. What a nightmare. Can you imagine? So they called the local garbage company. Employees figured out which truck had picked up the store's trash. But now there was another problem. The truck couldn't just be dumped because of contamination concerns. So they had to contact another facility where the load could be safely sorted. Then employees started digging through the garbage. Eventually, they found a torn bag containing discarded lottery tickets. Most of them were damaged, but the winning ticket was still intact.

1:35 I'm stressed reading you this story. Good news for a sea turtle. The sea turtle is returning home after somehow finding itself 5,000 miles away from where it belongs. The story starts in December of 2023. A dog walker found a tiny sea turtle in Stranded on a beach in Wales, the turtle, about nine inches long, was a juvenile Kemp's Ridley sea turtle, normally found in the Gulf of Mexico. Experts believe the turtle had been swept far off course, you think, and eventually became cold stunned, basically suffering severe hypothermia. The team at the Angsley Sea Zoo took him in, named him Rosie, after the area where he was found. Rosie recovered. But how do you get them home? Returning an endangered animal across international borders requires permits, government approvals, transportation agreements, and a lot of coordination. It took two and a half years. They finally figured it out, and the turtle is going back to Texas. A special temperature-controlled crate is being built for the turtle. Volunteer helicopter pilot Darren is going to fly the turtle from Angsley to an airport near Heathrow. From there, the turtle will travel by road to Heathrow. and then aboard a British Airways cargo flight to Houston. Then, sea turtle vet Dr. Joe will grab the turtle while the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service figures out the paperwork. There's some urgency. The zoo wants to get the turtle home while it's still small enough to travel safely in the crate. I'm stressed reading you that story, too. This is a very stressful episode of the show. All right. What's story number three, John?

3:04 A boot company in Spokane, Washington, turned its HQ into a refuge for firefighters battling devastating wildfires, and they're giving away brand new work boots to crews who need them. Nice job by JK Boots, a local manufacturer that's been making wildland firefighting boots for about 20 years. When a major fire broke out around Spokane, the company decided to use what it had. The building became a place where firefighters could stop for food, coffee, cold drinks, showers, and a place to rest. They posted on social, a place to wash up, cool off, and rest. Our break room is yours. Then they started giving away boots. At first, the goal was 50 pairs of boots. They blew past that. Tim, the owner, said, we're just going to keep going. I don't know when it's going to stop. Local residents have also donated food and supplies. Volunteers helped distribute everything. Brad is an expert on firefighters and boots. He says to buy a set of boots like that today is like 600 bucks for some of these kids. That's half a month's wages. We're overwhelmed by the fact that everybody's lost.

3:57 They've lost everything and they're still rallying around a firefighters here. It's really something. In Texas, a pet goose is being hailed as a hero after alerting his sleeping family to a fire and they're born. The goose's name is Goosey. And apparently Goosey takes neighborhood watch very seriously. Bert said he had fallen asleep in front of the TV, suddenly heard Goosey honking outside. Now, if that's me, I would have been like, shut up, trying to sleep. However, security cameras showed that Goosey wasn't being annoying. Goosey had noticed flames were breaking out in the barn behind the house. Bert said, I just casually came outside and saw a fire billowing out there. I grabbed a water hose and ran over there. He was able to put out the fire before it spread further. All the animals inside the barn, including Goosey, escaped safely. Bert's wife Chelsea said, we're beyond grateful everyone is safe and we couldn't be more proud of Goosey. He truly is our little hero. And we've got another message in a bottle for you. This one, a bottle tossed in the ocean by a nine-year-old girl in 1973, has turned up half a century later. John was cleaning wetlands in Upper Township, New Jersey. He spotted a sealed bottle containing a note. The note reads, This bottle was adrift on August 20th, 1973 on 2nd Street Beach, Ocean City. As my captors were transporting me to an island off the shore in the Atlantic, please notify my family that a band of ruthless sponge fishermen are forcing me to dive for them in shark-infested waters. Please return this note to my home, and you may have saved my life. Thank you, Lori Blair. Hmm. Well, John posted

5:31 a picture of the note online, hoping to find Lori. Lori's sister Allison saw it. Now, what do you know? Laurie had invented the whole thing. There were no pirates forcing her to dive in shark-infested waters when she was nine years old. Laurie had invented the whole story when she was nine and dictated the letter to 16-year-old Allison, who had better handwriting. They launched the bottle from Ocean City. There is a bittersweet part of the story. Laurie the note writer passed away from cancer in 2019. But interestingly, John, who found the bottle, and Laurie shared the same birthday. John mailed the note to the sister who plans to frame it in a shadow box and keep it in her home. He says Lori would have reacted to the news that her bottle had been found. She was really confident at the time that we wrote it was going to be found, so I think she would say, I told you so. Nice story there. And those are your five good news stories for today. If you enjoy my comedy, I host another podcast called Daily Comedy News. We talk about comedy and comedians and gossip and have a lot of fun. And that comes out seven days a week if you want to check that out. Have a great day.