The gold medal for canine endurance goes to Petey, the junkyard dog who guarded Al’s Auto Salvage in New Bern, N.C., in 1996. Petey was only 10 inches tall, and when Hurricane Fran roared up the North Carolina coast on Sept. 5, he was locked in a building that flooded with 16 inches of water.

Owner Skip Crayton feared the worst, but when he opened the shop the following morning, out came Petey, covered up to his neck in oil and mud. Apparently the dog had swum continuously for six to eight hours in the flooded building, keeping his head just above water to stay alive.

Petey couldn’t tell of the experience, of course, but when Crayton got him home he slept for two days.

See also The Dog of Pompeii.

In 1984, philosopher William Lycan published a paper with this statement:

The probability of the title of this paper, given itself (and the fact of its being a generalization), is less than 1/2. Yet the probability of any contingent statement given itself is 1. So 1 is less than 1/2.

The title of the paper was “Most Generalizations Are False.”

In other words, the chance that any statement is true, given itself, is 1. But the chance that Lycan’s title is true, given itself, is less than 1/2. Thus 1 is less than 1/2.

What is it with poets and doppelgängers? From a letter from Lord Byron to John Murray, Oct. 6, 1820:

In the latter end of 1811, I met one evening at Alfred my old school and form-fellow, … Peel, the Irish secretary. He told me, that, in 1810, he met me, as he thought, in St. James’-street, but we passed without speaking. He mentioned this, and it was denied as impossible; I being then in Turkey. A day or two afterwards, he pointed out to his brother a person on the opposite side of the way: ‘There,’ said he ‘is the man whom I took for Byron.’ His brother instantly answered, ‘Why it is Byron, and no one else.’ But this is not all:– I was seen by somebody to write down my name among the inquirers after the king’s health, then attacked by insanity. Now, at this very period, as nearly as I could make out, I was ill of a strong fever at Patras, caught in the marshes near Olympia, from the malaria. If I had died there, this would have been a new ghost story for you.

Similar experiences befell Shelley, Goethe, John Donne, and Wilfred Owen.

On Aug. 10, 1741, explorer Georg Wilhelm Steller reported spotting “a very unusual and new animal” in the waters off southern Alaska. It was about 5 feet long, he said, with the head of a dog and the tail of a shark, and was covered with gray hair. It had long whiskers, large eyes, and erect ears. When it rose out the water to observe his ship, Steller saw that it had no flippers.

For two hours Steller and the animal watched each other. It passed some 30 times under the ship, he said, apparently in order to view it from both sides. At one point it juggled a bit of kelp in its mouth, occasionally biting off and swallowing pieces. An assistant finally shot at it twice with a musket, missing both times, and the animal disappeared.

In 250 years, no one has ever seen another “sea ape.” The consensus among biologists is that Steller saw a young northern fur seal, but he had observed these creatures on the same voyage and presumably would have recognized one. So what was it?