Good things

• The endless amounts of white, fluffy snow! now that I get to enjoy it from inside)! Reading "A Child's Christmas in Wales" aloud three times must have worked some kind of charm.
• Going to Ikea with N. and coming home with stuff we don't really need. Like this mirror and these covers. I'm thinking about this lamp, too, but I don't like the way you can see the lighbulb and I think I'm going to get a candle instead. Or this one, which is also pretty.
• Föhn mich nicht zulooks like fun - pretty much all of this year's trainees have purchased this book which is apparently a humerous memoir of a bad trainee's exploits.
• Looking forward to baking cookies tomorrow
• The Horrible Histories series which can be found on YouTube. Have some Charles II:
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• This aritcle: 
  «The cultural genome: Google Books reveals traces of fame, censorship and changing languages»

  Abstract: We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of "culturomics", focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. "Culturomics" extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.  Entertaining summary here.
   
  Summary with brief overview here.