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Weird Wonders and Facts, Mondovi, WI (2026)

08/28/2026

In early 2014, Welsh-based singer-songwriter Amy Wadge was in real financial trouble.

Her publishing advance had run dry, and she was struggling to cover her mortgage and bills. So she drove to the house of an old songwriting partner: Ed Sheeran, whom she'd first written with when he was just 17.

Sheeran's second album, x, was nearly finished. Amy's ask was modest: could he tuck one of their old songs onto the deluxe edition, just enough to bring in a small royalty check?

The visit wasn't even meant to be a writing session.

While Sheeran was in the shower, Amy sat with a guitar and started playing a few chords. He came out, caught by the melody, and the two of them sat down together right there and wrote "Thinking Out Loud" on the spot.

Instead of a token bonus, Sheeran gave her equal songwriting credit on the finished track.

The song became his second UK number one within six months, and by October 2015 had already sold more than a million copies in the UK alone. In October of that year, it became the first song ever streamed over 500 million times on Spotify.

At the 2016 Grammy Awards, "Thinking Out Loud" won Song of the Year, presented by Stevie Wonder, who read the winner's card in braille before announcing it.

In 2017, the song was certified Diamond by the RIAA, becoming just the 15th song in the certification's history to surpass 10 million units sold and streamed in the US. It has since been upgraded further, now standing at 18x Platinum, among the highest-certified singles ever recorded.

Sheeran later put it simply: "Now she never has to worry about money again."

A woman who drove to a friend's house hoping for a few hundred dollars in royalties walked away as co-owner of one of the most successful songs of the decade.

08/28/2026

Andrew was six years old when his parents' rights were terminated and he entered foster care.

His four siblings were all adopted quickly. Andrew wasn't. He stayed in the system for years while families read his case file and, according to his eventual mother, "got scared away."

At 10, he was placed with Dominique and Kevin Gill in Nashville, in 2018. For his first week in their home, he barely spoke. He kept his door closed and sat alone, looking through old photographs.

Soon after, the quiet gave way to something harder. He'd shout, "Just let me move out!" — testing, it seemed, whether this family would give up on him too.

Dominique refused. "I was like, 'We are going to get you together,'" she later said.

The real turning point came from the Gills' son, Joc, who didn't try to talk Andrew through his feelings. He just asked if Andrew wanted to play video games.

They played for hours, and somewhere in there discovered they both loved Pop-Tarts. It wasn't much. It was enough.

Over the next two years, Andrew slowly opened up. At one point, another family had actually started the process to adopt him, before it fell apart. Dominique later said she believed that was so Andrew could come back to them.

In the spring of 2020, a caseworker from Youth Villages invited Andrew out for what he thought was just a walk.

Instead, he found the Gills and family friends waiting in a park with balloons and handmade signs. Joc stood among them wearing a shirt that read, "Will you be my brother?"

Andrew said "yeah," and the family handed him a shirt of his own. It read "YES."

The adoption took six to seven months to finalize, slowed by COVID-19 restrictions that pushed much of the legal process online. It became official in July 2020.

"From the beginning, Andrew has always said, 'Thank you for accepting me,' 'Thank you for not giving up on me,'" Dominique told TODAY Parents.

A closed door and a video game controller turned into a brother, a family, and a home Andrew had waited years to find.

08/28/2026

Myles Roman is four years old, and his birthday guest list wasn't the usual mix of preschool friends.

He wanted police officers there. So a month before his party, he walked into the Scarborough Police Department in Maine and dropped off an invitation addressed to the entire department.

What Myles didn't know was that his mom, Alyssa, had already been talking with officers about the idea. Months earlier, she'd thanked the department in a Facebook comment after Myles met them at a National Night Out event, and that small exchange had already put the wheels in motion.

"Myles had asked if we could invite the police station, not knowing that I had already been speaking with them," Alyssa said.

Sgt. Andrew Flynn worked directly with the family to plan the visit, and Myles even got a tour of the police station the day he dropped off his invitation.

When the big day came, the department made sure not to let him down. Sgt. Flynn, Officer Greenleaf, Officer Murphy, and K9 Tucker showed up, along with several members of the Scarborough Fire Department.

Myles and his friends got a close-up look at police cars, fire trucks, and an ambulance, with Tucker stealing plenty of attention along the way.

Sgt. Flynn brought Myles PAW Patrol gifts, and Officer Greenleaf handed out Scarborough PD gear for Myles and his friends to keep. Myles held up a handmade sign that read, "It's not a party until the cops show up."

His fascination with police started at that National Night Out event the year before. Since then, his mom said, he stops to talk to officers whenever he sees them and tells his family he wants to be one himself someday.

Not everyone in the department made it that Saturday. But enough did to prove to a four-year-old that the people he looked up to were paying attention right back.

08/28/2026

Every weekday morning, Ryder Kilam's parents wheel him down the driveway to wait for the school bus.

He was born with spina bifida and can't walk, so there's no running out the door when the bus rounds the corner. It's about 75 feet from his front step to the curb, and someone has to cover that distance for him, rain or shine.

For a while, the Kilams tied an old patio umbrella to the fence to keep him dry. It held up fine on calm days. The second the wind picked up, it was useless.

So in September, Ryder's dad Tim posted on Facebook, hoping a neighbor had a spare shelter lying around.

A local guidance counselor saw the post and had a better idea. She told Tim to email Dan McKena, who'd spent 27 years teaching Construction Technology at Westerly High School.

The timing was almost absurd. McKena was sitting with a senior named Mason Heald, trying to nail down Mason's final project for the year, when Tim's email hit his inbox.

McKena turned to him and said, "You're designing a bus stop."

Mason had never built anything like it. "I watched videos on how studs make things hollow," he admitted later. "I didn't really know too much about what I was doing." He learned fast.

Fourteen classmates from three of McKena's classes signed on. One of them was Ryder's own older brother, who made sure the design met Americans with Disabilities Act standards so his little brother — and anyone riding along with him — could fit inside without a squeeze.

They built a ramp Ryder could roll straight up without help. Two windows sat low enough for a boy in a wheelchair to watch the bus coming from his seat. There was a light for dark mornings, and enough space for a parent to wait beside him instead of hovering outside.

Mason didn't stop at the frame — he designed and built a sign for the shelter too, the kind of detail nobody assigns you to do.

Home Depot donated roughly $300 in wood. The Kilams paid for the rest of the materials themselves. Every hour of labor came free, from teenagers who mostly just wanted Ryder off an open driveway before winter hit.

"We've had snow on Thanksgiving before," McKena said. He kept picturing Ryder sitting under that flapping umbrella in a storm, and it kept the crew moving through weeks of afternoons after school.

When the shelter was framed, sided, and finished, a former student of McKena's named Ryan Perrin drove it over to the Kilams' house and helped set it in place.

The family sent McKena a photo not long after — Ryder inside his new bus stop, grinning at the camera.

McKena's reply was one word: "Priceless."

Mason shrugged off the attention when a camera crew asked him about it. "It's nothing," he said. "Just a shed. I'm helping out somebody."

It was his last project before graduation. It's also the thing Ryder now runs — well, rolls — outside for every single morning, rain, wind, or shine.

08/27/2026

Emma Schols was alone with her six children in Edsbyn, Sweden, in the early hours of September 3, 2019. Her husband was working a night shift, and at 31 years old, she was the only adult in the house when the television room downstairs caught fire.

Her two youngest sons had gone down to play and started calling out. Schols ran barefoot toward the sound, found both boys in a playroom already filling with smoke, and shielded them with her own body as she pushed toward the door.

She got them outside, then locked the front door behind her from the inside. She didn't want them following her back into the fire that was about to consume the rest of the house.

Four more children were still upstairs, and the staircase was already burning. She climbed it anyway. "For each step I thought that this is not possible," she later said, "but then I thought that it must go for four of my children who are still up there."

One by one, she reached them. One of her daughters, Nellie, had to jump from a balcony to escape the flames before Schols could get everyone the rest of the way out.

By the time all six children, ranging in age from 3 to 12, were safe outside, Schols had burns covering 93% of her body. She was placed on a ventilator and kept sedated for three weeks while doctors worked through dozens of surgeries just to keep her alive.

When she finally woke, she didn't ask about herself. She asked one question: "Are the children alive?"

All six had survived. In December 2020, Sweden honored her at the nationally televised Svenska Hjältar Gala, naming her "Årets Livräddare," Lifesaver of the Year. Her eldest son, William, then 12, stood in front of the audience and said the words that summed up the whole ordeal: "Sometimes I think I will never see Mum again. But now we see Mum almost every day, and that makes me happy."

Schols rebuilt her life alongside her rebuilt home in Edsbyn. In 2022, she published a memoir with journalist Frida Funemyr titled "Ärren bär jag med stolthet," "I Carry My Scars with Pride," and told her story again on the Swedish radio program Sommar i P1.

She has since taken up marathon running and speaks publicly about recovering from severe trauma. Asked whether she considers herself a hero, she gives an answer simpler than the label: if she gave birth to six children, she was going to get all six out.

08/27/2026

In February 2026, Johns Hopkins Hospital's flagship trauma and acute care surgery team, known as the Halsted Service, was led entirely by Black doctors for the first time in the program's history. The team wasn't made up of veteran department chairs, but of residents and fellows still working through training, five people who happened to be running one of the hospital's most demanding rotations at the same time.

The five doctors were Valentine S. Alia, a second-year resident; Lawrence B. Brown, a seventh-year resident with a PhD and a master's in public health; Ivy Mannoh, a third-year resident; Zachary Obinna Enumah, a ninth-year resident and critical care fellow with his own PhD; and Ifeoluwa Shoyombo, a third-year resident. Between them, they held five MDs, two PhDs, and six master's degrees.

The Hopkins Surgery Instagram account called it plainly: "A historic moment for our program." ABC News picked up the story that same month, running a feature on the team during Black History Month.

The numbers behind the moment explain why it mattered. Black Americans make up about 13.4% of the U.S. population, but only 5.6% of surgeons in training nationwide are Black, according to National Institutes of Health data.

For Brown, the milestone carried personal weight beyond the statistics. He's the first physician in his own family, and he told ABC News that equity has to stay central to how patients are treated, how research gets done, and how programs grow inside the healthcare system.

Enumah's path started earlier than most. Growing up in Columbus, Georgia, in the 1990s, he watched both of his parents practice medicine, his mother in family medicine and his father as a general surgeon, long before he chose the same field himself.

Shoyombo focused on the day-to-day reward of the job, telling ABC News that getting to help save lives is what matters most to her, every single day. Alia and Brown put their own spin on it in a joint Instagram post: "We are our ancestors' wildest dreams. And we're just getting started."

Their names now sit alongside a much older one in Johns Hopkins history. In 1941, Vivien Thomas became the first Black person to wear a white coat inside the hospital's halls, developing techniques that helped found modern cardiac surgery long before he received formal recognition for it.

More than eight decades later, five doctors walked into those same hallways carrying that history forward, this time with their names on the service they lead.

08/27/2026

Sgt. J.T. Mann has spent 28 years working emergency calls in Prince George County, Virginia, but one call late last year stuck with him differently than the rest. Dispatchers sent him out to search for a missing child on the autism spectrum. Hours later, they found the boy safe, hiding under a grill cover on a back porch.

At the scene, Mann didn't have a sensory kit or a trained protocol handy. He pulled out his own phone and played a familiar kids' show, the kind of small, ordinary comfort that helped the boy settle down until his family arrived.

That night, Mann came home and told his 9-year-old son, Ledger, what happened. Ledger is on the spectrum too, diagnosed at age two, and he listened to the whole story without interrupting.

Then he asked one question: what did his dad have on him to help that boy feel safe. Mann didn't have a good answer, and he didn't try to fake one.

Ledger did what most adults wouldn't. He reached into his own piggy bank, pulled out $100, and built five backpacks by hand: noise-canceling headphones, fidget toys, flash cards, communication boards, comfort items, everything a first responder might need in the sixty seconds when a scared kid can't explain what's wrong.

He named them LGM Bags, for his own initials, Ledger Greyson Mann. The first five went straight into his father's department, no fanfare attached.

The press found it anyway. A local CBS affiliate picked up the story, and it spread until more than 5 million people had seen it on social media.

Donations followed fast. The Fraternal Order of Police, the American Legion, and the Veterans of Foreign Wars all chipped in early, and a station meteorologist later surprised Ledger on air with a gift card and two Snoopy stuffed animals from his own desk.

Then Laurie Elkins, who owns a tactical bag company in Texas, flew to Virginia herself. She handed Ledger about 100 clear backpacks, the single most expensive part of any kit, and told a reporter she just showed up because the idea deserved it.

By spring, the program had grown to 61 bags in the field. By summer, that number had climbed past 432, spread across police cars, fire trucks, ambulances, hospitals, and schools in four states: Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida.

Henrico Fire Department adopted the bags next, brought in by a firefighter with her own ties to the special needs community. Louisa County's sheriff's office built an entire festival around the idea, where volunteers assembled another 100 backpacks by hand.

Ledger's story has since made its way into People Magazine, but he never asked for any of that. He didn't start a fundraiser. He didn't wait for someone else to solve it.

A 9-year-old heard about a scared kid hiding under a grill cover, and he spent his own savings making sure the next one wouldn't have to feel quite so alone.

08/27/2026

They meet in 1964, outside the Wishy Washy Laundromat in Nashville, on Dolly's very first day in the city. She is 18. Two years later, on May 30, 1966, they marry in a small ceremony at a church in Ringgold, Georgia.

Early in the marriage, they imagine a family. They wonder what their kids might look like, whether they'd be tall like Carl or "little squats" like Dolly. If they'd had a daughter, they already know her name.

Carla.

It never happens. Dolly later admits she still wonders, sometimes, what that other life would have looked like.

But she doesn't carry it as a loss. Over the years, in interview after interview, she offers a different way to see it: that she wasn't meant to have kids of her own so that everybody's kids could be hers instead.

In 1995, she turns that idea into action. Inspired by her own father, who never learned to read, she launches the Imagination Library in her home county in Tennessee, mailing free books to children from birth until kindergarten.

The program spreads far beyond Tennessee. It crosses into Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and Ireland. By 2025, it has gifted more than 200 million books to children around the world.

In 2020, speaking with Oprah Winfrey, Dolly explains something rarely said out loud in the same breath as regret: that not having children gave her freedom. With no kids at home and a husband content to stay out of the spotlight, she was free to tour, free to write, free to build an empire most working mothers could never have chased.

Here's what makes it land differently now: Carl Dean, her husband of nearly 60 years, dies on March 3, 2025, at age 82. Just over a year later, on August 25, 2026, Dolly dies in Nashville at 80, following a brief battle with cancer.

The daughter named Carla never existed. But by the time Dolly is gone, millions of children have grown up with a book in their hands because a woman without kids of her own decided that didn't mean she couldn't be somebody's mother anyway.

She once said she'd have been a good mother, and that everything would have changed if she'd had children. She also said she was glad, in the end, that it happened the way it did.

Both things were true at once. That's rarely how these stories get told, but it's how she told it.

A woman who never raised a child of her own ended up remembered as one of the most maternal figures in the world.

08/26/2026

Laura and Brayden Faganello were introduced in 2015 by Brayden's cousins, who went to school with Laura at the University of Victoria.

At the time, Brayden was doing mission work in South Africa, and Laura was studying abroad in Brussels, Belgium, where her father, a lieutenant-colonel, was stationed. For most of the next year, they got to know each other through handwritten letters and emails, sent across continents.

When they both made it back to Canada, they fell for each other in person, bonding over a shared love of photography. They married on July 15, 2016, at the Vancouver British Columbia Temple.

Nine months later, on April 27, 2017, Laura was setting up for a work event in Langford, B.C., when a steel pole fell and struck the back of her head.

The injury damaged more than her memory. It hurt her spine too, leaving her with spasms and severe headaches, and she had to relearn how to read, write, and speak.

When her memory cleared enough to take stock, years of it were simply gone. She woke up believing she was 17, living in Belgium, three years in the past. She had no memory of meeting Brayden, falling in love with him, or marrying him.

She panicked the first time she saw him in bed beside her. To her, he was a total stranger.

Laura, 23, told Brayden, 25, that she wanted to try falling in love with him again. He drove her back to the places that had mattered to them and told her their story over and over, in as much detail as he could, trying to make it feel real to her.

"I knew I would take care of her," he said. "I knew I loved her. I was willing to put that effort in."

Slowly, something started building between them again, not memory, just the day-to-day experience of his patience and care.

In August 2019, Brayden proposed to her a second time. She said yes.

"I've learned that love is a choice," Laura said, "and I am choosing to love Brayden."

On July 15, 2020, exactly four years after a wedding day she still can't remember, they married again.

She lost their love story completely. Between the two of them, they simply wrote a new one.

08/26/2026

Outside a Los Angeles hotel, after one of her concerts, Lady Gaga noticed a homeless man standing at the edge of a crowd that had gathered to see her.

She walked over to him.

He seemed embarrassed. "But I smell," he told her.

She didn't hesitate. "Don't worry," she said, "I smell too." Then she leaned in for the photo anyway, like it was nothing at all.

She gave him one of the flowers she was holding and some cash from her pocket. He gave her a ring in return, and she put it on right there, wearing it like it meant something.

The photo spread fast, not because of anything dramatic, but because of how ordinary she made the whole moment look.

Whether every detail happened exactly as told, nobody's ever been able to fully confirm. What's kept people sharing it for over a decade is simpler: the idea that kindness doesn't need an audience to still be worth doing.

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