Sergeant Stubby

John Robert Conroy may have regretted bringing his bull terrier to France in World War I — the dog became the star of his unit. It won:

  • 3 Service Stripes
  • Yankee Division YD Patch
  • French Medal, Battle of Verdun
  • 1st Annual American Legion Convention Medal, Minneapolis
  • New Haven World War I Veterans Medal
  • Republic of France Grande War Medal
  • St. Mihiel Campaign Medal
  • Purple Heart (retroactive)
  • Chateau Thierry Campaign Medal
  • 6th Annual American Legion Convention
  • Humane Education Society Gold Medal

I’m not making any of that up. “Sergeant Stubby” fought in the trenches for a year and a half, warning of poison gas attacks, finding wounded soldiers, and listening for incoming shells. He met Woodrow Wilson and John Pershing, was wounded several times, and even learned to salute. His remains are on display at the Smithsonian.

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Showoff

In 1996, Göran Kropp rode a bicycle from his home in Sweden to Mount Everest, scaled it alone without oxygen tanks, and cycled back home.

“It is not the mountain we conquer,” wrote Edmund Hillary, “but ourselves.”

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A Double Mystery

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:USS_Cyclops_(1810).jpg

A Navy collier during World War I, the U.S.S. Cyclops put to sea from Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 16, 1918, touched at Barbados on March 3 and 4, and was never heard from again. She took 306 crew and passengers with her.

In 1968, a diver off Norfolk, Va., reported finding the wreck of an old ship in about 300 feet of water. When shown a picture of the Cyclops he said he was convinced it was the same ship. But, strangely, even that wreck disappeared — further expeditions failed to find anything.

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Zuiyo Maru

On April 25, 1977, the Japanese trawler Zuiyo Maru was working off the coast of New Zealand when its nets caught a foul-smelling, decomposing corpse that measured about 10 meters long and weighed two tons.

To avoid spoiling the fish catch, the captain decided to dump the carcass back into the ocean, but the crew first took some photos and measurements. The creature had a neck 1.5 meters long, four large, reddish fins, and a tail about 2 meters long, and it lacked a dorsal fin.

The story made a sensation in Japan, and the shipping company belatedly ordered all its boats back to relocate the dumped corpse, without success.

Some scientists declared the creature to be a prehistoric plesiosaur; others thought it might have been an oversized basking shark. Fujiro Yasuda of Tokyo University said, “We can’t find any known species of fish that correspond with the animal caught outside New Zealand. If it is a shark, it is a species unknown to science.” We’ll never know.

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Bright Idea

When Thomas Edison died in 1931, his last breath was caught in a test tube by his son Charles.

He was convinced to do it by Henry Ford, who believed that a person’s dying breath contained his soul.

You can see it for yourself — the test tube is on display at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich.

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Dorothy Arnold

On the morning of Dec. 12, 1910, American socialite Dorothy Arnold left her parents’ home in Manhattan to go shopping for a dress for a party. She met some friends on Fifth Avenue, who later described her as cheerful. She visited Park & Tilford’s store at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 27th Street and charged a pound of candy to her account, then went to Brentano’s on 26th Street, where she bought a book of epigrams and met a friend, who later reported that Dorothy had intended to walk home through Central Park.

That’s all anybody knows. She never came home that night, and her disappearance has never been explained. Friends searched hospitals, morgues and jails in New York, Boston, and Philadelphia for three weeks but found nothing. Police and Pinkerton detectives fared no better. Arnold’s fiance, George Griscom Jr., spent thousands of dollars searching for her and bought ads in major newspapers, without result.

When her father died in 1922, he had spent more than $100,000 trying to find Dorothy. In his will he stated that he had come to believe his daughter was dead, but no one knows what became of her.

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“The Man With the Seven-Second Memory”

Excerpt from Clive Wearing’s diary:

8:31 AM: Now I am really, completely awake.
9:06 AM: Now I am perfectly, overwhelmingly awake.
9:34 AM: Now I am superlatively, actually awake.

Due to a herpes simplex virus, the former BBC music expert is unable to encode new memories. He “wakes up” every few minutes and greets his wife joyously over and over again.

The diary entries are crossed out as “untrue” because he doesn’t remember writing them.

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