Strange BUT TRUE

• Believe it or not, cows can be potty trained — and, it is said, with less trouble than toddlers. It’s called MooLoo training, and involves not a toilet, but a special pen with artificial grass. But why bother? The practice helps the environment by reducing air and water pollution and even planet warming.

• The J.W. Westcott II is a boat that delivers mail to ships at sea. Operating out of Detroit, it’s the only floating zip code in America.

• In 1931, German engineer Richter Raketenrad built a bike with 12 rockets mounted to its back wheel and reached a speed of 90 kph before his invention exploded and threw him off. While that was, sadly, the end of the rocket bike, Raketenrad himself suffered only a few scrapes.

• Kintsugi is the Japanese art of putting broken pottery pieces back together with gold.

• For over a year in the mid2000s, members of the group Untergunther broke into the French Pantheon to repair a clock that had been broken for four decades. They later received court time for the effort but were somewhat vindicated when member Jean-Baptiste Viot, a clock restorer, was hired to repair it in 2018 after further neglect.

• Researchers have found that approximately 97% of people are keeping a secret at any given time, with the average person keeping around 13.

• In 2008, a former high school star athlete escaped a crime scene by using Craigslist to hire a dozen identically dressed (and unwitting) civilians to stand at the exact place and time of the arrival of the armored car that he planned to rob.

••• Thought for the Day: “Challenges are gifts that force us to search for a new center of gravity. Don’t fight them. Just find a new way to stand.” — Oprah Winfrey

(c) 2023 King Features Synd., Inc.