Forty words for snow

It's "well known" that Eskimos have many words for snow.  I seem to recall the number forty but, apparently, the New York Times quoted "one hundred" in a 1984 editorial.  Note that I'm not using the word Inuit because the original context used the word Eskimo and of course that helps generalize the whole notion of snow-words.  In reality, of course, they don't have an unreasonable number of words.  See the Wikipedia entry Eskimo Words for Snow.

I needed a word for the kind of snow that fell overnight.  To describe it, it's like one of Santa's elves just opened a huge packing box and all of the little white styrofoam bits fell out over Carlisle.  You know the type: they're tiny and impossible to pick up because static electricity is so strong compared with our feeble fingers.  The thickness of the layer that fell is essentially one "nugget", that's to say about a millimeter or so.

Pictured with a background of little white snow nuggets, is our latest foster dog, Miley.  She's a sweet little Chihuahua mix (excuse the quality: I had to use my cellphone).  We don't know how old she is but she behaves somewhat like a puppy.  She weighs about 12 pounds.  She was adopted but then returned because she was "too much of a lap dog".  Duh!

While we're on the subject of atmospheric phenomena, what are we to make of Copenhagen?  The world leaders have arrived and of course we, the United States, are as always the bad guys.  We are never going to take responsibility for our overuse of the world's resources and our unequal contribution to global warming.  We are entrenching our position as the world's climate pariah and it is not going to help with our national security one little bit.  Unless we can actually help fix the climate crisis by technology, the rest of the world is going to hate us even more than they do now.  That won't be fun.

Yet, the global warming detractors (I won't dignify them with the term skeptics) are as determined as ever to obfuscate the real situation.  Just look at the email hoopla that they kept up their collective sleeves for ten months before springing it on the world just before the climate talks.