Daybreak Friday 11/20/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Breezy, milder. High pressure continues to build in, and it looks like today will be warmer than both the last few days and the days to come. That's despite a lot of high clouds, though they may start moving out at the end of the day. High today in the low 50s, breezes from the south, and down to the high 30s tonight.Sununu issues NH mask mandate. New cases topped 500 yesterday for the first time, prompting the governor to join the rest of New England in ordering mask-wearing as of today. "All persons over the age of 5," the executive order reads, "shall wear a mask or cloth face covering over their noses and mouths any time they are in public spaces, indoors or outdoors, where they are unable to or do not consistently maintain a physical distance of at least six feet from persons outside their own households." There are exceptions for schools, eating/drinking, exercise...Dartmouth freshman dies at 18. Beau Dubray, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe from South Dakota, was found by police and a medical examiner responding to a call yesterday morning to a residence hall along Mass Row on campus. Hanover Police Chief Charlie Dennis told The Dartmouth there were no signs of suspicious activity at the scene. "While he was at Dartmouth for just one term, Beau had formed close friendships," President Phil Hanlon wrote in a campus-wide email yesterday.Community rallies to Lou's waitress. Becky Schneider has been a mainstay there for over four decades, cheerfully and unflappably navigating crowded tables and every imaginable customer mood. Now her daughter Sarah has broken the news, through a GoFundMe page, that she has Stage 3 lung cancer. "She is the glue of our family, the most selfless and loving person I have ever known. She is going to need support as she takes on what may be her most serious battle yet," Sarah wrote. The outpouring was immediate: By this morning, over 650 people had donated nearly $33,000.Proposal to shift Lebanon funds from police draws support, opposition. And some of that opposition seemed to come from city council members at its meeting Wednesday night, the Valley News's Tim Camerato reports. They recognized the issues identified by backers of the proposal, which would boost funding for social needs by cutting the police budget, but argued that the money should come from elsewhere. "We are, in many ways, unfortunate to live in a state where there is no regional support or very little regional support for a lot of the issues that were identified tonight,” said Mayor Tim McNamara.Does anybody know these people? Back in July, Windsor's Krystle Wells bought an old camera at the Vermont Antique Mall in Quechee Gorge Village. When she got the Carlton Reflex twin lens camera home, she discovered it still had film in it. So she sent the film off to be developed and got back photos of three generations of a family...somewhere in America in the black-and-white era. "You can tell that they’re close in the photos and I know I would love to get the photos back if they were mine," Wells tells WCAX. So she's on the hunt.SPONSORED: A great escape at Northern Stage. Treat yourself to a double feature of two “funny and heartwarming” plays, streaming through 11/29. In The Naked Librarian, Upper Valley playwright Marisa Smith brings us a world premiere cycle of monologues on love, regret, family, and how things change (or don’t) from generation to generation. On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco stars Emmy-winner Gordon Clapp bringing to life one of Chekhov’s heartbreakingly comic characters. Clapp lays bare his failed dreams as we laugh together about the ridiculousness of life. Sponsored by Northern Stage.Hiking close to home: the Faulkner Trail. The Upper Valley Trails Alliance checks in with a suggestion for a nearby, under-the-radar outing: a three-mile, family-friendly out-and-back trek in Woodstock. It starts as an easy climb on a wooded switchback trail with a flat, walkable surface, then gets a little rougher halfway in. It's a more challenging climb at the end, but just for 100 yards, which get you to the south peak of Mount Tom. And then you get stunning views and a chance to link to the Carriage Road coming up from Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller and its miles of beautiful trails. NH nursing homes lead country in percentage of Covid deaths, but lag in federal funding. In fact, only VT and ME get less per home. The problem, explains the Monitor's Teddy Rosenbluth, is that the latest round of grants favors nursing homes that kept infection and mortality rates below that of their surrounding county. But because NH's infection rate was low compared to the rest of the country, nursing homes struggled to keep theirs even lower. “Nobody has invited this virus into their facility,” says the head of the state Health Care Association. “It is not a function of carelessness that this virus gets in.”NH inching closer to pre-pandemic unemployment rate. There were 20,000 back then, and in the most recent state report, 22,227 people were still collecting benefits. Also, fewer people lost their jobs last week than the week before, reports NH Business Review's Bob Sanders. But as he notes, the rate of improvement is shrinking with each passing week.One key to VT's relative Covid success: social distancing. But not how you think. Vox's Julia Belluz has an intriguing look at the state's emphasis on designing policies "with the needs of high-risk groups in mind"—like its contracts with motels that made it possible for The Haven to reduce crowding. When governments focus on those for whom distancing is an unaffordable luxury and “tailor responses to the needs of our most vulnerable populations,” says Anne Sosin, who directs Dartmouth's Center for Global Health Equity, “we can stop the virus and save lives.” "What's VT doing to improve broadband access?" That's the question VPR's Brave Little State got asked. It's vital to the state's future, but the short answer? Don't hold your breath. There's actually a fair amount going on, but it's orders of magnitude less than the state needs. John Dillon and Angela Evancie talk it all over: the challenges with the $17 million in CARES Act funding the state's using; what's going on with Starlink (a low-orbit satellite network Dillon tried to sign up for and never heard back from); and Matt Dunne's belief that the only solution is a federal effort akin to rural electrification.VT officials propose health system overhaul. The state's all-payer model, run by OneCare VT, "creates a structure to pay hospitals in monthly fixed payments, rather than for each patient procedure," explains VTDigger's Katie Jickling. But as human services secretary Mike Smith said at a press conference yesterday, the state needs "fundamental changes to how we provide care." Officials want to renegotiate care targets, streamline the bureaucracy for both hospitals and doctors, and see changes in how OneCare—the joint venture between UVM Medical Center and DHMC—operates.“Usually you’re trying to get as many skiers up here as you can, and we’re going to be turning them away." That's Bolton Valley's Lindsay DesLauriers, talking to VTDigger's Anne Wallace Allen about the impact of the new quarantine rules on the upcoming ski season. Out-of-staters—including some who bought season passes earlier—are cancelling, and some areas are refunding or giving them credit for the 2021-22 season. "It’s going to be a tough season for operators,” says Magic Mountain's owner. Or as the NYT puts it, "Vermont's Ski Season, on the Brink.""Harry Bliss turned out to be the ideal partner. We rarely speak to each other, and we live in separate states." Bliss is the New Yorker cartoonist who splits his time between Cornish NH and Burlington VT. The guy writing that line? Steve Martin. For the last two years, the two have been riffing back and forth on hundreds of cartoons: Martin sends Bliss an idea, or Bliss sends Martin a cartoon awaiting a caption—"as if in his own personal New Yorker caption contest," writes Seven Days' Dan Bolles. The result is a new book, A Wealth of Pigeons, and Bolles talks to the two men about their collaboration.What happens when you let ancient woods grow wild? Wistman's Wood is on Dartmoor, England. It's protected both by law and by its terrain: large, moss-covered boulders that make it hard for man or animal to get around. And for reasons that will be obvious, it's generated all sorts of tales of ghosts and haunting... though you could also think of it as Mirkwood made real. Fine art photographer Neil Burnell's spent some time there, to extremely good effect. 10,000 pictures of mushrooms. Thankfully, though, it's not a gallery. It's a two-minute time-lapse video put together by Owen Reiser, a bio student at Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville, who with his brother built a light-controlled box for decaying logs, leaves, and other organic material that fungi like. Then Reiser set to work, over months, taking a pic every 8 minutes for the fast growers and every 16 for the slower ones. The result... well, you don't get to see this any other way. 

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