Good morning.
Halloween in Whitewater will offer mostly sunny skies with a high of forty-five. During trick or treating, from 4 to 7 PM in the city, temperatures are likely to begin at 45 and fall to about 40 degrees.
- The Indian town of Sadiya was overrun with spiders — venomous ones that weren’t known to be native to the area. Out of dozens of reported bites, two people died — but the deaths might have been caused by inept medical treatments. [url]
- An invasive snake killed off a significant population of forest birds in Guam, causing the spider population to grow to forty times that of nearby islands.Normally, birds compete with spiders over eating insects, so when the birds died out, the spiders had an all-you-can-eat insect buffet. [url]
- Flooding in Wagga Wagga (Australia) forced spiders to seek higher ground to avoid drowning. The standing water caused an increase in the insect population and also resulted in vast blankets of spider webs covering fields like snow. [url]
The French, by the way, think spiders as bad luck in the morning, and good luck in the evening (‘araignée du matin, chagrin, araignée du soir, espoir’). I’ll go for good luck all the time, as they eat insect pests.
Google’s daily puzzle greets the day with a geography question: “To whom is the NOLA park at 901 North Rampart Street dedicated?”