Daybreak Friday 2/5/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

Heads up: No Daybreak Monday. Back in your inbox as usual Tuesday.Light snow. There's a front pushing through fairly rapidly, bringing a decent chance of snow showers especially in the late morning, though the chance lasts throughout the day. Temps will get into the mid-30s, which means there may be some rain mixed in this afternoon, at least in the valleys. Because of all the clouds, lows tonight will be a bit warmer than last night, around 20."I do take responsibility. I just hate taking the blame." It's "Lost Woods" Week 10, in which Eddie causes trouble. Lebanon author and illustrator D.B. Johnson (Henry Hikes to Fitchburg and other classics) lends his new comic strip to this spot each Friday, a week's worth at a time. Scroll right to see what happens, left to catch up on previous weeks.Get ready for UVER. That's the all-local food-delivery app being piloted by Lou's, Boloco, and Murphy's, which Lou's owner Jarrett Berke expects to be ready at the end of this month. Its goal is to compete with the national delivery apps, Boloco owner John Pepper tells The Dartmouth's Eliza Durbin. “We are keeping the money local, keeping it in the hands of the people doing the work, helping us raise wages in our restaurants as opposed to paying it out to people in corporate in San Francisco,” he says. They're aiming to have other restaurants, retail stores, farms, and convenience stores join in.  Local consultant mutters racial slur in VT hearing, shocks legislators, loses job. The incident took place on Wednesday as Steven Gayle, with WRJ's Resource Systems Group, waited to testify via Zoom to the Senate Transportation Committee. During a break, unaware his mic was live, he swore and uttered the slur twice. In an email to VTDigger's Grace Elletson, he later explained he was reacting to something he was reading, and was in counseling for an unspecified health issue. In a statement yesterday afternoon, RSG CEO Stephen Lawe apologized and said that Gayle had been fired.Lebanon becomes second town to join NH community power coalition... after Hanover. The city council voted Wednesday night to join up, boosting the effort to help municipalities in the state supply electricity to residents through bulk purchases. The approach "gives residential customers more opportunities to control their own electric destiny, both in terms of the way they personally use electricity in their homes and through their municipal governments,” state utility consumer advocate Don Kreis tells NHPR's Daniela Allee.SPONSORED: Dartmouth's Randall Balmer takes on separation of church and state. From the persecution of Baptists in colonial America to Donald John Trump and today’s US Supreme Court, Balmer’s new book, Solemn Reverence: The Separation of Church and State in American Life (available in print, audio, and ebook) informs and entertains. Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne says it’s “filled with backstories that I'll bet you have never heard before . . . a brilliant scholar's telling insights on the right way for church, state and society to interact." Sponsored by T2P Books, a Steerforth Press imprint.It didn't have to be this way. That's the conclusion several experts draw in a post-mortem by the Valley News's Pete Nakos of Dartmouth's athletic-team-cuts debacle. At the time the cuts were announced last summer, the college declared the percentage of women on remaining teams would "be identical" to their proportion of undergrads. A review of the data, Nakos writes, shows that wasn't so—and wasn't even true before the cuts were made. He explains the numbers, how the Title IX lawsuit that led Dartmouth to reverse course came about, and some of the fallout the controversy has caused."Don't mope, make something." Perry Allison certainly could mope. Since the start of the pandemic, the director of the We The People theater troupe has been unable to do the one thing she loves best. Instead, last Sunday she headed outside, collected some striking red branches, pine boughs, cones, berries, and other items, arranged them in oven trays filled with water—and then froze them solid outside, creating what amounted to stained-ice windows. Which she then hung in a garden stand. "Voila! Joy! Suddenly I was energized and happy!" she writes on her Remember What You Know blog.Hiking close to home: The Hartford Town Forest. The Upper Valley Trails Alliance points out a "hidden gem" not far from WRJ that boasts a large network of multi-use trails. The trails pass through or by hardwood forests, vernal pools, and wetlands; one leads to a fire tower. Some trails also connect to the Hurricane Forest Wildlife Refuge, where only hiking is permitted. The refuge has its own parking area and trail network as well as Wright's Reservoir which provides great opportunities for year-round fishing. Be conscientious, they say: Both parcels contain sensitive wildlife habitats."My favorite thing to do in the woods is just wander. And if you do that long enough, you see some pretty strange things." Willem Lange spent a day with the Upper Valley Land Trust's Jason Berard exploring some of the "mysteries" Berard has seen. The remains of a 180-year-old Shaker dam and spillway in the Smith Pond forest in Enfield, a folding chair 20 feet up in a tree, a skull-shaped quartzite mine, a woodstove high up on Moose Mountain. Then he moves on to Smith Pond itself, featuring the only person who lives there, Greg Baker. It all just aired on NH PBS, now on YouTube.McKinsey settlement brings $3 million to NH, $1.5 million to VT. The money comes from a just-announced multistate deal with the mega consulting firm over its work with Purdue Pharma to boost Oxycontin sales despite knowledge of the opioid epidemic. In Vermont, state legislators will decide how to spend the money, Attorney General TJ Donovan announced yesterday. In New Hampshire, the money will go into a fund created to address problems caused by opioids.“Life at the intersection of plasma physics research and motherhood.” That's the Twitter "bio" of Amy Kesee, a space physicist at UNH, whose team has just figured out a way essentially to map a "highway" of charged particles that's created close to Earth during periods of intense activity by the sun. Until now, the only way to measure it had been when satellites flew through it. Kesee's work was just summarized on NASA's "Sun Spot" blog (and pointed out by David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog).NH throws up its hands on vaccine appointment system, will start automatically booking second-dose slots. Instead of sticking with the creaky federal system it's been using until it can develop its own, the state announced yesterday that starting Sunday, residents who show up for their first shot will get a card with a date and time for their second shot. NHPR's Todd Bookman and Peter Biello talk over the scheduling-system struggle that got them to this point.NH state revenues continue to do much better than expected. Driven by real estate transfer taxes and business taxes—and two large national lottery jackpots—the state's revenues in January were $181.4 million, reports InDepthNH's Garry Rayno. That's $29.8 million above the budget plan and $43.3 million more than a year ago. The state's tobacco tax also did better than expected, Rayno reports, "due to Massachusetts’ ban on menthol and other flavored cigarettes and fewer people quitting smoking in the pandemic."A third VT-NH school district? The Upper Valley may get some company. VPR's Anna Van Dine looks at the effort in Canaan, VT and Colebrook, NH to join forces. The two towns' high schools sit just eight miles from each other, and sometimes compete for teachers—all while the populations of the two school districts have seen sharp declines. VT Senate votes down Act 250 reorganization executive order. Under state law, the 22-8 vote is enough to block Gov. Phil Scott's effort unilaterally to create a statewide review board and hand it power currently held by the nine district commissions that review development applications. Scott, writes Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, wants to make the process more efficient; critics argue his move would end communities' control over decisions that affect them. Scott contends the law requiring just one chamber's rejection is unconstitutional.“We have a special role, as the flagship research institution in Vermont, to keep as many doors open as possible to our students." That was Latin American and Caribbean studies prof Sarah Osten at Wednesday's UVM "teach-in" opposing the administration's bid to cut 23 humanities programs and three full departments. VTDigger's Katya Schwenk also notes that the day before, the university reversed pandemic-induced pay cuts, thanks to better-than-expected fall enrollment. The program and department cuts still have to go through review by the faculty senate and then by the board of trustees.Think of it this way... In 1920, VT had 20,000 working dairy farms. Each had at least one barn. Now, it's got 700 dairy farms. And that, points out Amy Lilly in Seven Days, leaves a lot of unused, deteriorating barns around the state. Hundreds are lost each year to fire, collapse, or teardowns, estimates Ben Doyle, president of the Preservation Trust. Fixing them up, writes Lilly, takes work. She details what went into restoring the iconic 1790s barn on Hartland's Lemax Farm: a Kickstarter campaign, three state grants, and $200K all told. VTRANS? NHDOT? You listening? It's not just that Scotland has a GIS map that lets you track the location of their "gritters," or snowplows. It's that they give each of them a name. Mary Queen of Salt. Lord Coldemort. Spreddie Van Halen. Wouldn't you feel better knowing that that's the Winnipesaltee handling the right lane over 89's New London heights on an icy night? Or that Chomp is biting a path for you up to Montpelier through falling snow?

Got time on your hands this weekend? NYC-based web developer Alicia Underhill has you covered. She's built a mandala app that lets you... well, create your own mandala. Choose a background color, brush color and size, how you want the symmetry to work (just play around, you'll get it), and you're on your way. No, really, my pleasure.

Last numbers for the week...

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Stephen Malinowski is a composer, animator, software designer, and inventor, who among other things created an animated way to show music graphically. It's... well, you just have to see it.

performed by Itzhak Perlman and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Daniel Barenboim. Hit "Show More" for details on what Malinowski's up to.

See you Tuesday.

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