Daybreak Friday 12/18/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Well now, that was something, eh? And then today the sun comes up all la-di-dah like nothing happened—on a world that looks completely different. High pressure built in last night in the wake of the storm, bringing us a cold but beautifully clear day today. A few clouds around, but not many, and we'll get highs in the mid-20s, lows overnight dropping toward 0, with very clear skies.Which makes tonight the night you might want to get out to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn. As you've probably heard by now, they'll be at their closest (to our eyes) on Monday, but that forecast is for clouds. It's been 400 years since we've had a spectacle like this and, says NASA, it's been "nearly 800 years since the alignment of Saturn and Jupiter occurred at night." You'll want to get out about an hour after sunset, and look toward the southwest sky. Binoculars might get you a view of Jupiter's moons. (Thanks, TF!)Henry (and Henry) sit on a cliff, study the clouds, get lost in thought... It's week 3 of "Lost Woods," the new cartoon strip by Lebanon's D.B. Johnson, the bestselling author and illustrator of Henry Hikes to Fitchburg. You'll find the link in this space on Fridays—hit it and you get a week's worth of strips at a time. Scroll right for this week, left if you missed weeks 1 or 2.Dartmouth Green menorah vandalized. Sometime between 6 pm Tuesday and 6 pm Wednesday, someone stood at the base of the large menorah in Hanover and shot through seven of the nine glass lights at its top. In an all-campus email yesterday, Dartmouth president Phil Hanlon condemned "this appalling act of anti-Semitism," write The Dartmouth's Abigail Mihaly and Kyle Mullins. "It's sad this happened," says Chabad Rabbi Moshe Gray, who discovered the incident, but adds that in its wake "the outpouring of love and support has been overwhelming."Leb City Council wrestles with police "defunding" and cutting taxes, opts for neither. At its meeting Wednesday night, the council approved a budget that cuts spending slightly but is expected to increase the city’s portion of property taxes by about 2.4 percent, reports the Valley News's Tim Camerato. Councillors preserved the energy and facilities manager position that had been on the chopping block, but rebuffed efforts to shift funds from the police department to other services and to cut the municipal tax rate by 20 percent over the next five years.SPONSORED: Stressed out by short days and dark news?  AVA Gallery in Lebanon has a beautiful bright new shop where you can see works by dozens of top local artists, poke around its breathtaking Holiday Exhibition, and check out the 2021 desk calendar featuring twelve paintings by Coralea Wennberg, at $20. Its calm beauty offers a promise of better things to come in the new year, and proceeds from its sale benefit AVA.  Visit AVA at 11 Bank Street in Lebanon or shop online. Sponsored by AVA Gallery & friends.    “This is not typical. Six-inch-per-hour rates? That’s ridiculous." Okay, I know you've been waiting: Yes, it was a lot of snow. Yesterday's storm had pretty much everyone out there grasping for adjectives. 44 inches in Croydon. 43 in Claremont. 40 in Cornish, according to WMUR. VT State Police responded to at least 80 crashes or slideoffs, mostly in southern VT; no one was injured. Same in towns around the Upper Valley. The VN's Anna Merriman has the local roundup.Of all the cars you don't want to slide into during a snowstorm... One of those slideoffs happened on I-89 in Hartford, where a Sharon man driving a pickup came into whiteout conditions and noticed flashing blue lights ahead—where state police Sergeant Eric Hudson had stopped to investigate a minor crash. The pickup driver braked...and lost control, hitting Hudson's cruiser. Both vehicles were driven from the scene, according to the VSP release.Birds, meanwhile, seemed nonchalant. Quechee photographer Lisa Lacasse was out during the storm and put together an album of what she saw. This takes you to my favorite, and the little left and right arrows will get you to more.And finally, though it barely needs saying, the ski areas are pretty darn happy. Okemo reported over 40 inches, Bromley 33, there were 25 inches at Killington and Mt. Snow, and even more northern mountains picked up enough to lighten hearts, reports the Rutland Herald's James Biggam. XC areas are starting grooming—even Craftsbury, up north, got 4 inches, enough to get a few kilometers of trails open. Biggam talks to Adam White, communications director for the VT Ski Areas Association about the storm and the days ahead.Hiking close to home: The Hazen Trail. The Upper Valley Trails Alliance's "under-the-radar" suggestion this week is a two-mile point-to-point (or four-mile out-and-back) walk. It's along a forested ridge that follows the Connecticut River between Norwich and Wilder. It has some ups and downs, but mostly follows a wooded ridge with good views above the Connecticut River. You can get to it just off Route 5 in Wilder (0.2 miles south of the I-91 overpass) or off Montshire Road in Norwich. Might want to wait a bit for other people to track it first, though.“It's frightening to think about." That's S. Royalton's Jim Abbott talking to VTDigger reporter Ellie French about the reaction around town to news that Vermont Law School is studying whether to move to Burlington. But law prof Pat Parenteau tells French, "I think too much is being made of it right now. I’m sorry people are getting worked up about it. I don’t think it’s a real threat right now.” The school needs to increase enrollment and a move is one option—but so is staying and restructuring, though Parenteau wouldn't go into details on what that would mean.So when you just have to have a soft pretzel... It used to be that you'd find Jed Sanchez's Pretzel Village pretzels only at farmers markets. But now, Susan Apel writes, the Sharon baker is doing "curbside" on Thursday afternoons at the Dairy Twirl parking lot in Lebanon, across from the Hanover Inn, at Mac’s Market in Woodstock, and at his own bakery. Regular salt are still his top seller, he tells Susan, “followed by Market Street Maple and Cheddar & Smoked Paprika which are about tied, followed by Blue Cheese & Chive, which is catching up fast.”“We really shouldn’t be relying on the hard drive on a given prosecutor’s computer in a county." That's former Windsor County VT prosecutor David Cahill, talking to VTDigger's Alan J. Keays for his series on the so-called "Brady letters" that prosecutors write when police officers behave dishonestly or unethically. Standards vary from prosecutor to prosecutor: A few, Keays writes, have a low bar, because they don't want officers who could be impugned as witnesses in court. Others have never issued a letter. And without a central clearinghouse, Cahill argues, problem officers can just move county to county."It was a little bit of a shock." Yes, indeed. That's VT Foodbank CEO John Sayles explaining his reaction when he learned that Mackenzie Scott, Jeff Bezos's ex-wife, had just given the food bank a $9 million gift, part of a $4.2 billion charitable spending spree she unveiled in a blog post Tuesday. The gift is about equal to the organization's 2019 budget; Sayles tells Seven Days' Kevin McCallum it's "transformational," offering his group a chance "to do things that certainly we would dream about doing but really wouldn’t have realistic expectations of executing.” "Who would have thunk we'd have a global pandemic that would make everyone want to ski in a way that wouldn't force them to sit next to each other in a gondola?" If you backcountry ski anywhere in the Northeast, you know David Goodman. And if you've never done it but are thinking about it, you should know him. The latest once-a-decade update to his classic backcountry guide is out, and Seven Days' Chelsea Edgar talks to him about how he got into it (he embarrassed himself on an icy downhill run in front of his wife, Sue Minter) and about how the sport has evolved.How a librarian keeps a community together during a pandemic, in one easy page. This cartoon by Seven Days writer Margaret Grayson and cartoonist Glynnis Fawkes (on the faculty at the Center for Cartoon Studies) is about Bree Drape, the sole library employee and "wearer of many hats" in Westford, VT. But it could be about pretty much any small-town librarian (and many of their big-town counterparts) in VT and NH over the last nine months who's become an instant tech guru, boundless supplier of creativity for stretched-thin parents and homebound adults, and YouTube read-aloud star. “The world’s turned upside down, nothing makes sense any more, and here’s a sports commentator having to commentate on his dogs.” No, that's not a critic of Andrew Cotter, who with his dogs Olive and Mabel has become a global breakout star of the pandemic. That's Cotter himself, talking to The Guardian about the unlikely-yet-utterly-befitting success of his videos. “You get messages saying ‘When’s the next one, hurry up’, and then you’re panicking slightly and bullying your dogs into situations," he says. If he ever stops talking to the press, maybe there'll be another video. (Thanks, CJ!)If a friend hasn't emailed this to you yet, they will. But you'll have gotten there first! There's some interesting tech behind Blob Opera, a Google experiment with artist David Li: Four opera singers recorded 16 hours of singing, which was used to create algorithms that produce notes and harmonies. But what you get is a highly diverting chance to play with pitch and sound with a quartet of...well, singing blobs. That little tree icon at the bottom right gets you to Christmas carols if you're not in the mood to create your own opera. (Thanks, FB!)

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Let's just float into the weekend with the Penguin Cafe Orchestra (back when founder Simon Jeffes was still alive). Partly because it's before-the-day-really-starts toe-tapping music, and partly because how could you not go for a piece called

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Get out there and have a fine weekend! See you Monday.

Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Banner by Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                             About Michael

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