Man, His Wife, And His Dog Fight Bear So Their Goat Won’t Be Lunch: Weird News & Oddities

Joe Reda, his wife, and his dog have moxie, even fearlessness. A black bear had their pet goat, Cole, clenched in its mouth. A bear family would be eating well if they didn’t act.

When Reda spotted a bear at his rural Bethlehem, Connecticut, home, it had already snatched Cole.

Reda grabbed a shovel and fought the bear for 40 minutes. He was clawed in the process, but he persevered. His bulldog Heavy gave an assist. His wife shot a rifle in the air a couple of times.

Cole survived. So did the Redas and their dog. The bear got away. But it’s out there, underscoring the growing threat of black bears to their pets, livestock and property.

Human-bear conflicts are growing in Connecticut, where wildlife officials have responded to 110 nuisance calls since Jan. 1, 96 of them since April 1. In 20 of those encounters, bears broke into homes.

• Read more: Man Battles Bear For 40 Minutes So It Won’t Eat His Pet Goat

Joe Snitch Wants To Help

Florida banned anonymous code-enforcement complaints, so Chaz Stevens found a workaround with a name that sounds like it should come with a trench coat: Joe Snitch.

Stevens is a known provocateur as the activist behind “malicious compliance” stunts involving Festivus poles, Satanic prayers and other legal needle-threading. He launched his code-compliance service after a 2021 Florida law required people filing complaints to identify themselves.

Through Joe Snitch, renters can submit complaints to him, and he files them under his own name and address — a setup he says follows the law while shielding tenants who fear retaliation.

Now Stevens wants to use the service to help low-income renters report serious housing problems for free, including mold, faulty plumbing and unsafe stairwells.

Substandard housing is a serious problem nationwide, but the wrinkle is pure Florida: a professional button-pusher with a made-for-the-internet name using the letter of the law to get around a law that made it harder to complain anonymously.

• Read more: Joe Snitch Takes On Bad Landlords

Purple Reign At Año Nuevo

A bright purple elephant seal at Año Nuevo State Park looked like she had gotten into the grape Kool-Aid, but California State Parks says the explanation was less alarming and more coastal: Red algae temporarily dyed her fur while she rested at Bight Beach in San Mateo County.

That did not stop the internet from doing what the internet does. People wondered if the seal had eaten sea urchins, was bleeding internally or had otherwise become the marine mammal version of a medical mystery. Instead, park experts said she was healthy, molting and wearing a temporary makeover that will wash off when she returns to the ocean.

The purple seal showed up during elephant seal molting season, when thousands of the animals haul out at Año Nuevo between April and August to shed skin and fur.

So, no, this was not a crisis. It was just nature being weird, photogenic and a little bit fabulous.

• Read more: Why An Elephant Seal Turned Bright Purple

Is UFO Day A Coincidence?

World UFO Day arrived July 2, but Southern California got its saucer-shaped sky show a couple of weeks early when lenticular clouds, often called “UFO clouds,” formed over parts of Southern California.

These neat lens-shaped clouds form when stable, moist air is forced up and over mountains or mountain ranges. As the air swoops downward after passing the peak, it can create stationary clouds that look like flying saucers.

While they primarily form in the troposphere — the lowest region of Earth’s atmosphere — they can also occasionally form in non-mountainous locations. Often referred to as “standing wave clouds,” these formations serve as a visible signal of atmospheric instability.

Multiple Patch readers submitted photos of the clouds, which are also sometimes called “pancake clouds” because they can stack in smooth, flattened layers, like pancakes on a plate.

• See more photos: ‘UFO’ Clouds You Won’t See Just Anywhere

E-Bike Havoc In Aisle 12

Reckless rider behavior is just one of the issues driving a nationwide reckoning over e-bikes and e-scooters. “Exhibit A” could be what happened recently at a California Walmart.

Two boys, thought to be about 14 or 15 years old, were captured on store video riding their e-bikes down store aisles, nearly striking some customers, Orange County officials said.

The incident is the latest in e-bike-related havoc in Orange County. In May, video of an attack on a man by a mob of teenagers on e-bikes near the Huntington Beach pier drew nationwide attention. In March, a group of teens on e-bikes tried to run down a Black student at the University of California, Irvine, police said.

• Read more: Teens On E-Bikes Menace Customers In Walmart Grocery Aisles

The World Waits For Libby

Libby is a lost golden retriever in the middle of rural America, but at this point, her story belongs to the world a little bit, too.

For more than three years, she has lived just beyond reach — close enough for trail cameras to catch her, close enough for volunteers to feed her, close enough for hope to keep refilling itself. Along the way, hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have started following the effort by Paws of Hope Animal Rescue to bring home a dog most of them will never meet.

That is the strange magic of Libby’s story. A dog disappeared into the Iowa countryside, and people refused to stop looking. Three years later, people around the world are still following along — not just because they want Libby home, but because they see what it means when ordinary people keep showing up for lost animals.

• Read more: Meet Libby And The Ordinary People Trying To Bring Lost Dog Home

Blue Gets The Blues

Blue has always been the oddball of the M&M’s bowl, and now it has a new distinction: It may be the toughest color to make without artificial dye. Mars is rolling out dye-free versions of some classic candies as part of the broader “Make America Healthy Again” push, but blue is apparently the candy-coated problem child. Brown gets pulled into it, too, because blue helps give brown its depth.

That tracks, because blue has never really been a normal food color. Red can come from beets. Yellow can come from turmeric. Blue gives you spirulina, manufacturing headaches and a lot of people suddenly remembering they have strong feelings about a candy color they mostly eat by the handful without looking.

The regular M&M’s aren’t disappearing, and blue and brown are not being banished from the candy aisle. For now, they’re just benched in the new dye-free bags, expected in August, while Mars works toward naturally coloring all six signature colors by 2028.

Still, for a candy color that won America’s vote in 1995, blue has a right to feel blue.

• Read more: It’s Not Easy Being Blue In M&M’s Makeover