I'm reading the NYTimes online this morning and there is this nice essay about the winter. Even the political bloggers are writing about the weather.

All around us on this small farm we have the makings of a glacier. Every step we take compresses the snow a little more, and the pressure slowly turns the powder that fell a few days ago into ice, just the way it does in a real glacier. When spring comes, the last thing to melt will be the ski tracks along the fence line. When I walk across the pasture with my dog Badger, I can feel the history of this winter underfoot. Sometimes the snow-crust from the Christmas storm bears me up, so that I'm walking only calf-deep through the January snow, and sometimes I break all the way through to November.

There is also an article about a famous study in eugenics - where bad science was used to justify discrimination against the poor (also interesting because I just read some horrifying articles about North Carolina's forced sterilization program). The funny thing about the article was that it revealed some of the actual family names of the "criminals and mental defectives" that were traced in the studies. The name given to all of them was "Jukes" for the sake of confidentiality and the convenient bonus of making it impossible to verify the findings of the study. Now we know that the families listed in this study included "Sloughter, Plough, Miller, DuBois, Clearwater, Bank and Bush. " I am finding this terribly amusing this morning.