This unusually tall duck went viral and got a bronze statue
In 2021 a Reddit post wrongly billed him as the tallest mallard ever, at over a meter, and he went viral anyway. James Corden showed a doctored photo of him in a trench coat on late-night TV and joked that he looked "like two ducks trying to get into an R-rated movie." His Instagram account, run by a York biology student, gained thousands of followers in a single day. Long Boi vanished from campus in the spring of 2023, and after nearly two months without a sighting the university concluded he had died.
- ▪In 2021 a Reddit post wrongly billed him as the tallest mallard ever, at over a meter, and he went viral anyway.
- ▪James Corden showed a doctored photo of him in a trench coat on late-night TV and joked that he looked "like two ducks trying to get into an R-rated movie." His Instagram account, run by a York biology student, gained thousands of followers
- ▪Long Boi vanished from campus in the spring of 2023, and after nearly two months without a sighting the university concluded he had died.
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| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/07/28/long-boi.html |
| Publication time | Tue, 28 Jul 2026 13:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-28T13:24:55.718Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-28T13:24:55.718Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | TsHxtW5fHW2R · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
This unusually tall duck went viral and got a bronze statue Ellsworth Toohey 6:00 am Tue Jul 28, 2026 Long Boi duck — DS Pugh / CC BY-SA 2.0 (via Wikipedia) Long Boi was a duck who lived by the University of York's Derwent College and stood noticeably taller than every other bird on the pond — an Indian Runner–mallard cross about 70 centimeters high. In 2021 a Reddit post wrongly billed him as the tallest mallard ever, at over a meter, and he went viral anyway. James Corden showed a doctored photo of him in a trench coat on late-night TV and joked that he looked "like two ducks trying to get into an R-rated movie." His Instagram account, run by a York biology student, gained thousands of followers in a single day.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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