Is This The World’s Ugliest Dog? [Weird News & Oddities] – Patch
ACROSS AMERICA — A Baltimore Orioles fan recently made the catch of a lifetime, snagging a foul ball with his bare hand without dropping his phone or spilling the drink he was holding in the other.
And, no cliché about it, the crowd went wild. So did Orioles TV commentator Kevin Brown.
“Josh Naylor whacks one down the line and way foul. And caught by the one guy out there who’s got a drink and a phone in his hand! What! Got it in the hat? No. He just barehanded it. That’s insane!” he said.
Tim Byer, who was alone in a far-flung section of upper deck of the Orioles Park stadium when he caught the foul ball, is soaking in his newfound fame.
“When you’re good, you’re good,” he said in a TV interview.
Wild Thang isn’t handsome, and that’s the beauty of his selection, finally, as the World’s Ugliest Dog.
Being ugly isn’t pretty. The 8-year-old Pekingese owned by Ann Lewis, of North Bend, Oregon, was passed over four in four other appearances in the contest, held annually at the Sonoma-Marin Fair in Petaluma, California.
His resilience and charm finally paying off, the dog’s publicity blitz is in full swing. He made an appearance Monday on NBC’s “Today” show and his so-ugly-it is-cute face will be featured on limited-edition MUG Root Beer, the sponsor of the contest. Wild Thang gets half of the $10,000 in prizes to the top three finishers.
An animal control officer in Stafford, Virginia, can add snake-charming to his arsenal of skills after getting call from a local Goodwill store about a reptile that had crawled into a box of donated books.
In a cheeky social media post, the Stafford County sheriff’s office said Capt. J.A. Bice used his “powers of persuasion and a bit of Parseltongue” to lure the snake from the box. Authorities think the snake was just trying to beat Virginia’s recent heat wave.
The snake was released back into the wild.
A flat, gray blob of a fish that washed up on Oregon’s northern coast drew crowds of curious gawkers. The 7-foot, 3-inch fish caused quite a stir on social media, prompting New Zealand-based researcher Marianne Nyegaard to take a closer look. She positively identified it as a hoodwinker fish, which is rarer than the more common sunfish, and said it may be the largest such fish ever sampled.
In earlier research, Nyegaard discovered that hoodwinkers are a different species than ocean sunfish and had been “hiding in plain sight,” according to the Seaside Aquarium.
It wasn’t the first time a hoodwinker sunfish washed ashore along the Pacific Coast. It’s happened at least twice in California since 2019 and once in Alaska, challenging the theory that it only lives in the Southern Hemisphere.
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