AfrikaansI listened to an episode of the science Q&A podcast
Hoe verklaar jy dit (dated 5/Apr/2020 on the
site). Someone had sent a video of a caterpillar (
ruspe) they had found with white specks (
witstippels) on its skin. According to the invited entomologist, either some fly (
vlieg) or wasp (
wesp) had laid eggs on the caterpillar's soft inter-segmental skin, and the specks seen were the resulting maggots (
maaiers), or else cocoons spun by the wasp larvae (
perdebytjies). It seems such larvae can bore into the living caterpillar and gradually consume its fat reserves and internal organs.
Ancient GreekI finished reading the final passages of book 1 of Lucian's
True Stories. Here a sea battle is fought between giants that row islands as if they were warships, using trees for oars. Hundreds of these island-ships ram into each other. Enormous octopuses are tossed between islands as grappling hooks. Huge oysters and sponges also get mentioned. We witness the whole scene from inside a whale's mouth.
LatinFor the third year running I attempted to write a novel in Latin for NaNoWriMo. Yet again my final word count was nowhere near the 50,000 winning target. I just managed to creep past the 10k mark on the final day:
daily-word-count.png
The story itself starts off in a remote mountainous town, reputedly the site of a long-abandoned gold mine. The last scene I wrote was set in a dark corner of an inn in Rome, where a plot was being prepared to poison the remaining townspeople and rediscover the entrance to the mine.
But as I am not interested in continuing the story, I will likely never find out what happened next.
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