Look, it’s pretty impressive – at least, I’m impressed – that very intelligent people have mapped out the structure of Uranus’s upper atmosphere. I adore finding out more about our local system.
BUT…
Several pop-sci and pop-gen news services have gone for a slightly more tongue-in-cheek article title:
…and I also adore that.
Especially when the graphic just oh so slightly does not help.
I had another bout of reading-induced insomnia last night and so when my alarm went off at 06:00, I slapped the snooze button with a mix of despair and elation. The former for the fact today is going to be a snoozy mess and the latter because that was 06:15 Doug’s problem.
Then Kaz, in bed, asked me to get up so I could help them take care of a spider.
“It’s big,” they said.
To put this in perspective, this is a rough depiction of what happened next…
For a less silly depiction, keep these measurements in mind. There is a carafe that we use to bring water up to refill a cat fountain. I have not measured it but I would assume the top to be around 8cm wide. The spider, aka Shelob the Ancient Terror, was big enough that she maybe had 0,5cm clearance on either side when I aimed the carafe to capture her.
After summoning enough energy to actually capture and not outright kill the foul hell beast, I finally – with only one instance of the spider trying to bolt – got it in the carafe and then the spider actively leapt to the back of the carafe like she was trying to eat my hand. Sure, sure, I appreciate she was probably just going for something she could hide in, but it made me think really hard about this scene:
I grabbed an index card to act as a temporary lid and then had to semi-gently hold it down to trap the demon, who preceded to charge the lid as the obvious weakpoint in her containment.
Kaz, who has pretty notable arachnophobia, had to take point at this, um…point…because my legs are not stable enough to go down stairs while holding a paper lid to a glass carafe with the fifth horsewoman trapped inside.
Kaz got it downstairs and then set it outside by the hedges and fled the area to a minimum safe distance.
While it is not freezing here in Grimbergen, it is cold, and I realized that if the spider was unable to get out of the glass carafe then it could be in a bit of trouble and I felt bad for it. I got on enough clothes to go outside and see if I needed to tip the carafe over and it was like a scene from a horror movie where the clearly dead monster is now gone.
There was the glass carafe, empty, and the paper lid on top had been knocked over and was a few cm over right at the edge of the hedges, like it had been dragged with force, with no spider in sight. You could practically hear the John Carpenter soundtrack playing. The spider you don’t see, and all that…
I picked up the carafe, and brought it inside, a single strand of thick web on the lip of it the only sign it had been used for that purpose.
It was only around fifteen minutes later that I realized what the index card had on it and that I was going to have to go back outside and reach into the edges of a hedge bush that statistically now had more giant spiders than it had before, and had to get it.
Why?
Because this was what was on the index card…
![can you figr out who this is from? I love you Kaz and Douge. you two are the best parints in the world. [then there is a heart with K+D = B and an explanation of K = Kaz, D = Douge, and B = Barbara...which maybe negates the secret love letter angle a *tad*]](https://dickens.wyrmis.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/SpiderQueen-1024x576.jpg)
…and I wasn’t going to allow her to keep it.
Anyhow, I’ll accept my Dad of the Year Award, now.
BONUS HORROR MOVIE VIBE: Right as I was finishing this post I reached up to brush at the side of my face where I could feel something, and there was a long, thick strand of spiderweb in my hair, because I guess I had brushed my head against the hedges.
Once again, cue John Carpenter music.
First off, and last in the title, I am still recovering from the two-fer. The cold feels in retreat but we’ll see. The ankle is still a problem. Here’s hoping tomorrow continues to improve both.
Second in the title, and second in the post, today (2025-12-05, een vrijdag), is a Bandcamp Friday. Those are days where (at least supposedly) 100% of the proceeds go directly to the artist. They are nice moments and another reason I like Bandcamp as my central hub for acquiring music. Some musicians time releases to show up on them, or have other promotions.
In this case, it wasn’t one of those I was interested in, but I had been eying Fabo Music for a minute and saving it up for one. Lots of albums which are unofficial soundtracks to Dungeons & Dragons adventures and the like. Kind of stuff I like to play while engaged in solo roleplay. One slight wrinkle is that Fabo Music often includes one-hour loops of their songs which makes sense in the context of playing as background music for RPG scenes. The downside being that it makes the zip files of the albums bigger so it is taking some time.
While fiber ever approaches (at least is showing up on the streets near us), we are still under the auspices of the older Belgisch internet. These downloads will possibly be an all morning task. I even gave up on my usual Snag-the-FLAC habit because some of them were in the 6gig range. AAC, only, for now.
And now to first part of the title. I have been using Duolingo to help learn Dutch, though it has been the, well, Netherland flavor of Nederlands. Last night, something happened where not only did my Duolingo lessons jump several degrees of difficulty but also started including more stuff about Brussels, Bruges, Leuven. Etc.
I think in technical terms I got added to some AB testing or whatnot. Who knows? It is kind of fun, though. The speaking and listening exercises are now less “De eend draagt geen schoenen” (the duck is not wearing shoes) and more, well…
This means they are less about listening and saying words and phrases I know and more about parsing sentences I do not know. The kind of thing where you jump straight from “Mijn naam is Doug” to “Je speelde als een poffertje zonder suiker!” I am very rapidly learning a lot of edge cases of the Dutch language.
At the same time, I have no idea if these are anything like actual phrases but I like them. “There’s no polder without a leevee.” “I am playing like a poffertje without sugar.” The third one is from some sort of Amsterdam noir.
“It was a quarter to eight and I was waiting at the canal…”
This means the practice rounds went from taking me around a minute to taking me more like 8-10 minutes each, but so it goes.
In the middle of this I have learned some things. Like how to say “the boys wear dresses” and “no pants, please” in Dutch. My favorite so far is: Vanwege het weer hebben wij een bakje troost nodig.
Because of the weather, we need a cup of comfort.
We are are at the time of year where the forecast in Grimbergen is permanent stuck on two alerts: “It may rain in a few hours” and “Rain may cease in a few hours.” With apologies to Mitch Hedberg, it used to be raining. It still is, but it used to, too.
Brandon Jamar Scott’s new song [Part of his Trailer Park Alien Universe], I feel, encapsulates this.
NOTE: if the “69 News” and the title of the song being wet doesn’t give you a heads up, let me just say the humor is raunchy. A wee bit. Beetje. Etc etc.
It’s a catchy song. And maybe one day we will get justice and get the missing piece of the Universe back, which was struck on grounds of Nintendo declaring it…canon.
Kaz and I both enjoy playing New York Times’s Connections. It is a nice puzzle for me to solve each morning. However, I have been a bit irked at how much it obviously borrows from Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall.”
While I appreciate you cannot copyright gameplay algorithms and mechanics [we’ll leave the idea of Nintendo having a patent on fall damage for a later date], the fact that a “homage” to Only Connect‘s “Connecting Wall” was called Connections is perhaps a bit on the nose. When the style of gameplay and three of the four colors are obviously in line (an image of a potentially actual (?) Connecting Wall , found on Wikipedia):
I had a bit of a smirk this morning when today (2025-10-27)’s Connections puzzle started with the following in-joke [it is semi frequent that a few fun messages like this are embedded]:
JUSTICE!
Obviously, I am being a bit cheeky but I found it very nice.
And to shout to the Connections team, I appreciate they have found a way to take the format and make the puzzles mostly approachable. Only Connect is the only game show I have ever seen that regularly leaves me feeling like a complete idiot. It’s that good.
I would not thrive in a Connecting Wall environment.
The image from Only Connect was taken from the Wikipedia article linked above and is credited as by Wdcf – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22950288.
The screenshot from Connections was taken by me. Featuring content from October 27, 2025’s Connections #869 by Wyna Liu.
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