Daybreak Friday 10/16/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Oh well, at least we had yesterday. That was a pretty great day, wasn't it? Today, a cold front arrives, bringing rain and dropping temps. Start time will depend on where you are, but rain will set in this morning west to east and be steady—and sometimes heavy—pretty much throughout the day. Temps getting into the higher 50s, winds from the northwest. Rain tonight, low around 40.Well, here's a first. Next week, the USPS is issuing a set of "Winter Scenes" stamps. Five of the photos were taken by Lisa Lacasse, the Quechee photographer whose work appears regularly in Daybreak. They're all scenes around here. You can see the much-bigger-than-stamp-size pics on her site.And yes, in case you were wondering: Mink's cubs are getting along famously. Lori, the third of the famous bear's cubs, was reunited with Chief at the Kilham Bear Center on Wednesday. "The brother bears were recognizing each other and feeding together a day after Lori’s arrival," the Valley News reports. Ben Kilham says there are now about 35 orphaned and rescued cubs getting ready to spend the winter there. Leb police warn of "suspicious incident." Yesterday afternoon, a city resident told police she'd gotten a call from someone claiming to be from the IRS, saying they needed information and were on their way. Five minutes later a car pulled up and a man dressed in a suit, who knew her name and date of birth, said she needed to pay $15,000 or would have to go to the police station with him. He demanded her social security number. She rebuffed him. He and a driver were in a white SUV, unknown make or model, the police say."This project is asking us to focus on all the things we have and the kindnesses that surround us every day." That's Julie Kalish a lawyer who teaches writing at Dartmouth, talking about the Norwich Circles Project, in which 175 townspeople painted, wrote on, and otherwise decorated canvas circles. What gives them hope? What are they grateful for right now? On her Artful blog, Susan Apel details the project. A mural made up of the circles goes on display outside Dan & Whit's on Sunday.That new Grafton County "restricted" designation by Vermont? It matters around the edges, reports NHPR's Jordyn Haime. Grafton's shift to the quarantine list for VT's neighbors doesn't affect commuters or people crossing state lines for food or medical care. But UVAC has cut access to Grafton County residents—some of whom are getting Covid tests so they can go swim seven days after a negative result, rather than 14. And Grafton Commissioner Linda Lauer says she hopes it won't affect Vermonters coming for ski season. Lebanon schools to go ahead with plans for full in-person reopening. The school board voted 5-4 last night to stick with its plan to reopen completely on Oct. 26, rejecting a proposal for in-person learning four days a week. The decision came despite last week's positive tests for two students in the city's schools. “I feel like we can’t just keep going back and forth,” Vice Chairwoman Jenica Nelan said. “We’ve got to make a decision and stick to it for the sanity of all of our administrators and teachers.” (VN)Thetford gets new interim town manager. Tom Yennerell, who retired after 5 1/2 years as manager in Springfield, VT, starts Monday, overlapping with outgoing manager Guy Scaife, and takes over in earnest Nov. 1, selectboard chair Nick Clark announced this week. Yennerell has a reputation as "great to work with," he wrote on the listserv. A later poster noted that Springfield last year settled a wrongful-termination suit against Yennerell brought by the town's former police chief. "Feels a little too close to home, given what happened to our own police chief, Mike Evans, not long ago," she wrote. (Listserv, no link.)Grafton's getting famous. Or maybe it's infamous. Former Valley News reporter Matt Hongoltz-Hetling's book about the town's Libertarian experiment, A Libertarian Walks Into A Bear, is starting to get some serious play out there. A few days ago, The New Republic ran a full-on feature, "The Town That Went Feral." That, in turn, got picked up and heavily excerpted by Charlie Pierce, Esquire's entertaining house cynic. How long's it going to be before national reporters start descending on poor Grafton to see for themselves?NH suspends hockey for two weeks. At a press conference yesterday, Gov. Chris Sununu and state health officials said they're pausing all hockey in indoor rinks after 158 people involved in the sport tested positive over the last two months. People who acquired the virus through hockey have potentially exposed others at a couple of dozen K-12 schools throughout the state. "We don't know exactly where the pinpoints are here, whether it's something on the ice or something in the locker rooms," said Sununu.How do you know a voting mailer is legit? In the past week, report Casey McDermott and Tat Bellamy-Walker on NHPR, the NH AG's office has issued three different alerts about misleading mailers and text messages, including the Lyme/Hanover Democrats' sample ballot. So how do you know what you're dealing with? They offer lots of good advice, including: don't trust anything asking you to update your voter registration online; if it's an absentee ballot request form, make sure the sender's identified; and don't treat sample ballots like the real thing.VT's Network Against Domestic and Sexual Violence weighs in on the Barre homicide. "When a member of law enforcement is involved in a domestic violence homicide, it requires questions and reflection," they write in a statement issued in the wake of police officer Jeffrey Strock's murder of his ex-girlfriend and subsequent suicide on Monday. "It is also an opportunity for leaders in our state to examine the complex relationship between domestic violence and law enforcement response and center the voices of victims and survivors in their actions."Surprise! Visitors to VT don't tell the truth about quarantining. They're required to certify they've self-quarantined for 14 days before arriving, which Vermont's counting on to try to keep cases low. “At the front desk they’ll say, ‘Yes, we quarantined. We drove,’ and then they’ll get a massage and tell their massage therapist they just flew in from New York City,” a Stowe resort staffer tells Jen Rose Smith in The Washington Post. “The massage therapists have a lot of anxieties.” Smith details the state's bind: It needs tourists back, but as one official says, "Travel is one of the biggest susceptibility points any state has." "Covid shows if you have any inefficiencies, you are in trouble when the economy goes down.” That's Ted Brady, deputy secretary of VT's Agency of Commerce and Community Development, talking to VTDigger's Anne Wallace Allen about an effort aimed at helping small businesses adapt to the pandemic era. Five groups around the state are sharing $2.5 million in funding so they can offer technical assistance to businesses—everything from learning basic accounting to advice on changing floor plans—to help them survive.“When they’re at home, there’s so many other distractions...that you can’t engage them in the same way." Randolph Union HS English teacher Angela Bauer talks to VTDigger's Lola Duffort about the difficulties of teaching hybrid classes. In general, teachers feel they're doing twice as much work—"Planning a single lesson often feels like planning two separate units, one for those at home, one for those in class," Duffort writes—but worry they're not reaching the kids at home. And even at school, classes are less lively with fewer students."Inside the Fall of the CDC." Local journalist James Bandler is lead writer on a new ProPublica exposé detailing how political interference turned an agency "that was once the global gold standard of public health [into] a target of anger, scorn and even pity." The story dives deep into the tensions and "pained discussions" within the CDC and the position many of its scientists and officials found themselves in: the fear that leaving and speaking out would free the White House to push through even more dangerous policies. “The cowardice and the caving are disgusting to me," says one scientist.Quick! You're on a hike and a thunderstorm rolls in. What do you do? Or let's say a blizzard suddenly overtakes you. Or you're out in the desert and see a wall of sand heading toward you at freight-train speed. Okay, that last one's unlikely around here, but still: Outside mag's Graham Averill has advice on how to survive those and two other (tornado, flash flood) severe weather hazards. On lightning: the stuff you know (stay away from lone trees), plus minimize contact with the ground and keep your hands close to your sides."Beware not to leave open books at night where cats can come." So... you know how cats love walking across your keyboard or your newspaper or your book or... well, whatever you've got in front of you? Turns out they've been doing it for millennia. This guy, Daniel Holland, has put together a fantastic Twitter thread "showing how cats have been walking over our stuff for 4000 years." Medieval manuscripts with muddy paw prints, a Roman roof tile with a cat's paw print, a 12th-century copy of Isidore of Seville’s Etymologies... Nothing on dogs and ancient Roman tennis balls, though.

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Yesterday, there was a Beatles cover in this space. Which means that today, it has to be the Beatles themselves—though not quite like you've heard them before.

It takes a moment to get used to, but with just their voices, the ballad's harmonies take on their full sweetness.

(Thanks, RW!)

See you Monday.

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