Probably not an odd occurrence for y'all, but its a first for me. Let's see if I can explain this.
I was digging out more space for my metal bars down by my magma forges, and I stepped away from my computer for a few minutes. I come back to a message saying that the circus had come to town, and I contemplated savescumming but got over it and decided to let it ride. I thought that was the end, but fortunately, the clowns arrived at the wrong address, at the bottom of a different candy cane than the one we broke, and almost all of the clowns got discouraged and scattered to the edges of the map. Unfortunately, the only ones that were clever enough to path over to the correct candy cane were the only ones that could fling webs. There were only four of those, but my army couldn't crush them without insane casualties because my army met them at the one juncture those clowns were strongest: a horizontal portion of my grand staircase (I have a sneaking suspicion that web creatures don't have it in their brain to shoot directly above or below them). There were 70 soldiers, and only 17 survived. Fortunately, they were a steel bulwark against that handful of clowns, and all my civilians were saved by their sacrifice. Only two of the surviving 14 soldiers have clown kills to their name, and all four of those clowns acquired names from the carnage. So yeah, not how I was expecting to survive a visit from the circus, but the hole was sealed and the dwarves were buried. All's well that ends well.