Rabbit Hash, Ky., has been governed by dogs since 1998. The hamlet’s first elected mayor was a dog “of unknown parentage” named Goofy Borneman-Calhoun, who was inaugurated in 1998 and died in office in July 2001. He was succeeded by Junior Cochran, a black Labrador elected in 2004. When Junior also died in office, a special election installed Lucy Lou, a border collie and the town’s first female mayor, who was named Best Elected Official in 2013 by Cincinnati CityBeat magazine and reportedly considered a presidential run in 2015.

The 2016 election went to a pit bull named Brynneth “Brynn” Pawltro, and the town’s historical society also recognized the runners-up, an Australian shepherd and a border collie, as ambassadors who might step in if Brynn were unable to make an appearance.

The current mayor, a French bulldog named Wilbur Beast, took office last year, with a beagle and a golden retriever joining the border collie as ambassadors.

Wilbur’s human, Amy Noland, told NBC News that she ran his campaign because of “all of the negative media that’s out there surrounding America, and the election, and COVID-19, so I guess I wanted Wilbur to be something positive in the news. … He’s done a lot of interviews locally, he’s had a lot of pets, a lot of belly scratches and a lot of ear rubs.”

When the local council removed a bus shelter near the village of Baltasound, on the isle of Unst, Shetland, Scotland, in 1996, 7-year-old Bobby Macaulay wrote to the Shetland Times asking them to replace it — he and his friends had been meeting there to wait for their school bus.

When a new shelter appeared, an anonymous donor added a wicker table and a sofa, and a tradition was born. In time a television appeared, as well as a heater and a carpet. Eventually Bobby’s shelter was named the best shelter in Britain, and now it’s redecorated regularly according to chosen themes (2018 marked 100 years of women’s suffrage in the United Kingdom, for example).

It has its own website.

Memory feats of chess master Harry Nelson Pillsbury:

• On April 28, 1900, he played 20 opponents blindfold (sitting alone in a room without board or pieces while the moves were announced to him), playing 600 moves in six and a half hours. Afterward he corrected several mistakes that his opponents had made in recording their moves. Two opponents had not kept a record at all, but Pillsbury gave the moves of those games “without any serious effort.”
• In tour spanning 1900 and 1901, he gave about 150 simultaneous displays, many blindfold. In one 16-game blindfold exhibition in Buffalo, in which he won 84.4 percent of the games, he correctly announced mate in eight in one of the games.
• In Toledo, Ohio, he simultaneously played 12 games of chess and four games of checkers without sight of any board, while at the same time playing duplicate whist with other people.
• He was prepared to interrupt a blindfold display at any point, have a portion of a deck of cards read out to him, name all the remaining cards, and then resume play.
• Before one blindfold display in Philadelphia he studied a list of 29 unfamiliar words and phrases; after the exhibition and again the next day he recited the list, first forward and then backward.
• Two and a half hours into one 12-board blindfold display he suggested a rest for the players. During this time he invited them as a group to compose a numbered list of 30 words and to read them to him. He was then asked, in jumbled fashion, to give the number of a given word or the word of a given number. All his responses were correct. Afterward he recited the whole list backward and then resumed the blindfold display.

“Philadelphia master and organizer William Ruth told Dale Brandreth that he once sat with Pillsbury at a railroad crossing and wrote down the fairly long and different numbers on each of a large group of passing boxcars while Pillsbury attempted to memorize them. Ruth reported to Brandreth that Pillsbury’s memory for the numbers was incredibly accurate and in the correct order.”

(Eliot Hearst and John Knott, Blindfold Chess: History, Psychology, Techniques, Champions, World Records, and Important Games, 2009.)