Love that Beagle

The crowd favorite won.

I spent way too much time in front of a television on two consecutive nights watching the big dog show.

My sentimental favorites were the dogs in the herding group. And the winner of that group was a beautiful creature indeed, an Australian shepherd named Deuce,
celebrating here.

But the crowd favorite was the winner of the Hound group, the beagle Uno. A Beagle had never before won Best in Show, and even the hound group as a whole, seldom wins. Perhaps it is fair to say they are a less photogenic group than some of the others.

Nonetheless, the beagle, Uno, won this year. It is a year of firsts. A good portent for the breaking of barriers everywhere.

One neat coda to this story. There was a technical glitch near the end of the NBC Nightly news yesterday and they couldn't show their final commercial. This meant that the anchorman, Brian Williams, had to prattle on for an extra unscripted minute to fill the time.

Uno gave him something to prattle about, and he went on a riff about beagles, their howl, and Snoopy. I thought for a second he was going to start discussing the ship that took Charles Darwin to the Galapagos.