GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
And welcome to the final week of CoffeeBreak. Daybreak will be back next Monday, Aug. 23.Decent loose-leaf tea is now widely available. So are self-adhesive stamps. Those are just a few of a long list of everyday improvements to life since the 1990s, put together by pseudonymous blogger Gwern Branwen. Among other advancements: You don't have to rewind VHS tapes any more, it's harder to get lost while driving, power tools are increasingly battery-powered, you can get goat cheese and sushi even at mass-market grocery stores... Oh, and "laser pointers are no longer exotic executive toys or for planetariums, they’re things you buy off eBay for $1 for your cat." Argue at will.NH turkey serves as crossing guard. Even though, like, a million people have already seen this, it's worth a re-visit. A turkey in Litchfield, NH, becomes an internet sensation for blocking traffic while his compatriots cross the road.James Joyce came this close to winning American Idol. Okay, not quite... but not far off. The novelist was, apparently, an extraordinary singer, and in 1904 he decided to enter Dublin's Feis Ceoil (Festival of Music)—an annual music competition that still takes place. His friend John McCormack had won the previous year, parlaying the victory into international celebrity. "A victory in that setting," writes music historian Ted Gioia, "could have served as a springboard for a successful performing career, perhaps even more lucrative than writing." He was on the verge of winning the gold medal when...
You don't usually think of early-music and baroque musicians rocking out to Bach, but Emi Ferguson, the principal flautist for Boston's Handel & Haydn Society, and the early-music ensemble Ruckus do just that. This is their arrangement of Bach's "Prelude in G Major" from Book II of The Well-Tempered Clavier, performed a few years ago at Harvard. (Thanks, JD!)
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak and sunsets around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner by Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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