A French Prisoner in Norman Cross Barracks, had recourse to the following stratagem to obtain his liberty:–He made himself a complete uniform of the Hertfordshire Militia, and a wooden gun, stained, surmounted by a tin bayonet. Thus equipped, he mixed with the guard, (consisting of men from the Hertford Regiment,) and when they were ordered to march out, having been relieved, Monsieur fell in and marched out too. Thus far he was fortunate, but when arrived at the guard-room, lo! what befel him. His new comrades ranged their muskets on the rack, and he endeavoured to follow their example; but as his wooden piece was unfortunately a few inches too long, he was unable to place it properly. This was observed, and the unfortunate captive obliged to forego the hopes of that liberty for which he had so anxiously and so ingeniously laboured.

— The Soldier’s Companion; or, Martial Recorder, 1824

The first escape from [Dartmoor Prison] took place five days after the first draft arrived. Sevegran, a naval surgeon, and Auvray, a naval officer, having observed that a guard of fifty men marched into the prison every evening to assist in getting the prisoners into their respective halls if required, made themselves glengarries and overcoats, and strips of tin looking like bayonets at a distance, and fell in at the rear of the detachment as it marched out. Favoured by the rain which was falling heavily at the time they passed all the gates unquestioned, and as the company wheeled towards the barracks, they left it, and went on through the village towards Plymouth. Speaking English fluently and being well provided with money, they had no difficulty in booking seats for London on the coach.

— Basil Thomson, The Story of Dartmoor Prison, 1907

By 1910, Valentine Tapley was claiming to have the longest beard in the world, at 12 feet. His congressman in Missouri would even boast about the achievement and defend Tapley against other claimants. (It’s sometimes said that Tapley was a Democrat and had vowed never to shave again if Abraham Lincoln won the election.)

But it appears that the real record was held by a contemporary, North Dakota farmer Hans Langseth, who’d begun growing his beard in 1865 as part of a contest. By the time of his death in 1927, it measured 17.5 feet, and it’s now held by the Smithsonian Institution.

I can’t find any record that these two even knew of one another.

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.)

When [Sir Richard Francis Burton] was in India he at one time got rather tired of the daily Mess, and living with men, and he thought he should like to learn the manners, customs, and habits of monkeys, so he collected forty monkeys of all kinds of ages, races, species, and he lived with them, and he used to call them by different offices. He had his doctor, his chaplain, his secretary, his aide-de-camp, his agent, and one tiny one, a very pretty, small, silky-looking monkey, he used to call his wife, and put pearls in her ears. His great amusement was to keep a kind of refectory for them, where they all sat down on chairs at meals, and the servants waited on them, and each had its bowl and plate, with the food and drinks proper for them. He sat at the head of the table, and the pretty little monkey sat by him in a high baby’s chair, with a little bar before it. He had a little whip on the table, with which he used to keep them in order when they had bad manners, which did sometimes occur, as they frequently used to get jealous of the little monkey, and try to claw her.

That’s from Isabel Burton’s Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton, 1898. In her own biography of Burton, A Rage to Live, Mary S. Lovell says that Burton learned to imitate the monkeys’ sounds and believed that they understood some of them. He compiled a list of 60 words, but it was lost an 1860 fire that destroyed nearly all his papers.