Daybreak Friday 2/19/21

NICE OF YOU TO DROP BY, FRIDAY!

A little fluffiness. There's significant winter weather to the south of us today. Here? Not so much. We've got a chance of light snow all day and all night, but whatever falls isn't likely to amount to much. Otherwise, cloudy all day, highs reaching toward 30, winds from the southeast. High teens tonight.And here's daybreak...

"I can't fly. I can't fly. I can't fly." It's "Lost Woods," Week 12 (hard to believe!), in which we meet Auk. As you know by now, each Friday Lebanon author and illustrator D.B. Johnson (Henry Builds a Cabin and other classics) lends his new comic strip to this spot, a week's worth at a time. Scroll right to see what happens, left to catch up on previous weeks.Leb City Council opts to keep historic roads across Patch land open. You may remember that a committee studying the city's Class VI roads had recommended that the old public rights-of-way should be turned into public trails, but the Patch family, expanding its maple sugaring operations, wanted them closed. In a series of 8-0 votes Wednesday, reports the Valley News's Tim Camerato, the council sided with the committee, maintaining access for hikers, mountain bikers, equestrians and snowmobilers and requiring the Patches either to raise the sap lines or take them down. This will likely end up in court.More town meeting previews. The Valley News continues its town-by-town review for VT, laying out major topics for debate, noteworthy warrant articles, contested races, logistics, etc. Here's their look ahead at: 

Want to check out how your police department's proposed budget compares? Using an analysis by UVM's Center for Research on Vermont, VTDigger's Erin Petenko has a chart showing that on average, police budget requests are flat this year. One notable outlier: Thetford, which on the chart has the second-biggest jump in the state. This, explains selectboard chair Nick Clark by email, is because last year's baseline budget numbers "were grossly misleading" and salted police spending into other departments' line-items. When all are accounted for, the budget request is actually a cut, not a boost.Hiking close to home: the Ottauquechee River Trail. The Upper Valley Trails Alliance checks in with a new family-friendly hiking trail in Woodstock, built by volunteers this past summer. The 2.5-mile path follows the riverbank, farm fields, and a historic railroad bed, providing several river viewpoints before returning through wooded areas and fields. While it is relatively flat and easy, the walk still rewards hikers with views of the hills surrounding Woodstock. There's a parking area near the trailhead in East End Park, just off Rte 4. “You can see it on their faces that they’re just drained.” Working the front lines of the pandemic has taken a toll over the past year, writes the Monitor's Teddy Rosenbluth—not just on the workers themselves but, says Manchester Fire Chief Dan Goonan, on their families. The NH health department has rolled out a hotline for stressed frontline workers, but the problem is sweeping. "I don't think a shift goes by that I don't hear a colleague share some real concerns and burdens of their emotional burnout and fatigue of what they're dealing with," says Marsha Davidson, a psychiatric nurse at DHMC.NH House committee sets aside school voucher bill for now. On a 20-0 vote, the Education Committee opted yesterday to hold until next year a measure to let parents pull their kids from public school and take state funding with them. "There are many policy considerations going into this and there is still room for further discussion and to clarify some of the issues raised yesterday,” said Republican chair Dick Ladd. If the House agrees, it's expected to go before the House next January, reports InDepthNH's Garry Rayno.Sununu to require schools open for in-person learning at least two days a week. In an executive order signed yesterday, NH's governor gave schools until March 8 to make the move, citing the "behavioral mental health well-being” of students. But, reports InDepthNH's Paula Tracy, teachers union president Megan Tuttle contends he's late to the game. "Educators and districts have already worked together to reopen more than 80 percent of New Hampshire schools for at least two to three days a week of in-person instruction," she says.The move also comes as some schools are turning to Child Protective Services to track down absent kids. It's a growing resort for schools worried about students who repeatedly fail to log on for class. Their concern is about "education neglect," reports NHPR's Sarah Gibson, but what Demetrios Tsaros, a DCYF investigator, often finds is "the typical pitfalls of remote learning. Bad Wifi connection. Chromebooks in disrepair. Grandparents and older siblings overseeing younger students’ online learning, while parents go to work."92 percent of VT's electric supply is "carbon-free"—mostly from hydro and nuclear power. That arresting stat is in a deeply researched VTDigger piece by Amanda Gokee looking at charges that the state's reliance on hydro in particular to meet its clean energy goals amounts to greenwashing. She talks to MIT prof Brad Hager, who contends that the carbon emitted by decomposing trees flooded by huge dam projects makes their carbon emissions "nowhere close to zero." And she delves into indigenous Canadians' ongoing dispute with HydroQuebec over its environmental and social impact. Border patrol proposes 120-foot video surveillance towers for northern border in VT. The towers, with cameras able to capture both infrared and regular images, would go up at eight sites across VT and in NY, reports VTDigger's Justin Trombly. The federal agency contends it needs them to cut down on illegal crossings, and so far, local officials say they're comfortable with the idea—unless they're "in any way observing citizens, or if they were on the interstate watching speeding cars," as one puts it. He also notes citizens may react differently: “We know how people feel about towers,” he says."I still remember my first night. It was B.B. King and Janis Joplin, and Janis got arrested for obscenity." You probably know Rick Norcross best as the front man for Rick & the All-Star Ramblers. What you might not know is that the E. Hardwick native, who'd moved to Florida in 1963 "because I wasn't going to have another goddamn winter in Vermont," spent five years photographing and writing about the bands that came through Tampa. He's assembled those photos—Elvis, Tina Turner, Pink Floyd and lots of others—into a digital collection. Seven Days' Chris Farnsworth talks to him about it all. Mount Everest. Twice. That's the vertical gain that Ben Eck and Jerimy Arnold managed earlier this month after skinning up and skiing down Black Mountain 60 times as they outlasted 80 other athletes in the second annual Last Skier Standing in Jackson, NH. The idea is pretty simple, writes Outside mag's Elliott D. Woods: You climb and descend the mountain once an hour until you can't do it any longer. In the end, it was Eck and Arnold slogging it out against one another—in 40-mile-per-hour gusts and sub-zero temperatures the second night, trying to navigate moguls in the dark.You know those maps of ski mountains that look like they're hand-painted? They are. In many cases by a guy named James Niehues, who's done over 200 ski resort trail maps in North America, South America, New Zealand and... wait...Australia? "You feel safe with Jim's map in your pocket," Ski Vermont's Adam White tells the UK's Daily Mail. "I've spent more time skiing with Jim than with anyone else in my life." Niehues paints every tree, shades every slope, takes photos from small planes, and can spend up to three months on a project. Then you just take his work, fold it up, and stick it in a pocket.Seriously, you haven't lived until you've heard Susi Dorée's cover of "Locomotion" in German. It was the rage in Germany in 1963. Meanwhile, in Mali a couple years later, they were listening to "Rendez-Vous Chez Fatima." And in Trinidad in 1961, it was Lord Invader's "Human Race." If Radio Garden takes you all over the world right now, Radiooooo takes you all over the world back in musical time (as well as now). Launched in 2013, it gets submissions from tens of thousands of contributors around the globe, then lets you choose the place and the decade, 1900s-2020s. Oh, and don't sweat the o's: They own all the domains from radiooo.com to radioooooooooooooooooooo.com.

Last numbers for the week.

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Peter Gabriel turned 71 last Saturday, and Playing for Change marked the occasion by 

It will probably get lots of mileage, too. It brings together Gabriel, Yo Yo Ma, Angélique Kidjo, bass legend Meshell Ndegeocello, the Cape Town Ensemble, California's TaikoProject, LA's Dynamic Music Collective, dancers of Nevada's Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe, and a whole lot more in one exuberant blast.

(Thanks, LPH!)

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