GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, warmer. I know, right? And we've still got a few more days of this. Today, temps look like they'll cross the 80 mark, winds from the southwest and west. Lows tonight in the 50s. Heads up: No Daybreak Monday. We could all use a break to honor Memorial Day, celebrate the traditional start to summer, and observe another sunny day, don't you think?Last numbers for a few days...
NH announced 67 new positive test results yesterday and 2,031 specimens tested, bringing its total reported cases to 3,935. Of those, 1,767 (45%) have recovered and 199 have died (up 9), yielding a total current caseload of 1,969. Grafton County is up 2 to 66 all told; Sullivan remains at 16. Merrimack County is at 299 (up 9). Hanover, Lebanon, Enfield, Claremont, Newport, and New London remain at between 1 and 4 current cases.
VT reported 6 new cases yesterday, bringing its total to 950, with 827 people recovered (up 3). Of the known active cases, 3 remain hospitalized. Deaths still stand at 54. Windsor County gained one to bring its total to 49 reported cases; and Orange County remains at 8. The state tallied 543 new tests, bringing the total to 25,701.
And just to keep you busy... Here are two graphically interesting ways to keep track of state-by-state reopening-readiness metrics.
One was developed by ProPublica: an easy visual of the two-week trend for each state's positive tests as a percentage of total tests—one of the key reopening metrics. Scroll down, and they give a fuller picture for each state and whether it's headed in the right or wrong direction.
Meanwhile, Axios plots that positive-test-percentage along with changes in the states' total case counts to come up with a quadrant separating states moving in the right direction from the handful—OR, AL, ND, and AR—headed the wrong way and the somewhat bigger crop with mixed results. Remember, though, "A state performing well on these metrics today does not mean it will keep performing well, or that it’s in any way immune from a second wave of infection. It definitely doesn’t mean the state has beaten the coronavirus."
Thetford officials estimated some 600 cars came through yesterday, WCAX reports, as National Guard troops handed out meat, cheese, milk, and produce "in speed comparable to a NASCAR team on pit road." In many cases, people were picking up food for neighbors and other families, as well, including one teacher who was helping out her students' families. "For me, that's really representative of Vermont. Folks are taking care of each other and that is really good to see," said Gregory Knight, commander of the VT National Guard.
VT adds testing dates next week in Springfield, Hartford. The state is making testing available for Vermonters without Covid-19 symptoms, along with second-home owners, college students and others returning to the state. On Tuesday, May 26, the pop-up site will be at Springfield High School; on Thursday, May 28, it will be at the Upper Valley Aquatic Center. There are still signup slots available at both sites, but they're going fast. Sign up at the link.SPONSORED: Thinking about buying an electric vehicle? So are one in five Americans. Why not join the club that’s replacing the gas station with a charging station—one powered by backyard solar? A Solaflect Tracker produces enough juice for 20,000 miles of driving a year for an average EV, at a price equivalent to about 75¢/gallon. That’s a savings of about $2,000 a year if you drive 10,000 miles a year! For more information on driving with solar and a useful guide to electric vehicles, check out the Solaflect Energy website. The power is in our hands to make a difference.Northern Stage is trying to get a handle on what audiences are thinking. Like all performing arts organizations, it's trying to make plans without knowing what audiences might tolerate. So it's asking directly: What would get you back into a theater? Just seeing other people around you attending again? Socially distanced seating? Nothing short of a vaccine? What if they did outdoors performances? Survey at the link. The virtual Prouty's coming up, and the Byrne Foundation has just upped the ante. For every person who registers between now and June 15, the foundation will donate $100 to the event. Which means that if 500 people sign up in that timeframe, the Prouty would land an additional $50,000. Since the in-person Prouty has been cancelled this year, it's staying alive by having people bike, walk, row (if you can), golf (if possible) or do any other event you’d like from home or outdoors. "We'd love to invite everyone to help us earn that match," says Prouty director Jean Brown.How visible might a 190-foot tower be? As you'll remember, AT&T has proposed a cell tower for a site off Sawnee Bean Road in Thetford. They did a "balloon test" last weekend, floating a balloon at the height of the tower so people could check out what it might look like. William Daugherty was there with his drone, and you can see for yourself. Wanna make something of it? Andee Miller was out at her neighbor's in Weathersfield, VT, and snapped a shot of this bluebird. Wouldn't you say there's a challenge in those eyes? Here it is close up, in flight. And heck, since it's a blue bird day... In Thetford, meanwhile, Sally Duston caught these indigo buntings hanging out. So how do four characters all use the same prop when they're not on stage together? "Much of what we take for granted in making theater in a normal world has become enormously complicated," says Dan Kotlowitz, who chairs Dartmouth's theater department. Even making the characters seem like they're in the same room, lit by the same light, is "complex and convoluted," he points out. Even so, over the next two weeks the college's theater students are going ahead with their senior presentations, finding creative ways to handle online stagecraft. Hannah Silverstein runs down what's coming up.Feeling antsy to see someplace else? The Burlington Free Press's Austin Danforth lays out restrictions in neighboring states, plus Quebec (though honest, don't even bother with Quebec unless you're a health care worker, truck driver, or part of an airline crew). ME, VT, and NH all have 14-day quarantine orders in place. NY State, interestingly, may be the easiest. NH's lodging rules may differ from VT's, ME's. In Vermont, hotels and other lodging open today to state residents and out-of-staters who've quarantined in Vermont for 14 days. In Maine, same deal, only on June 1. But the proposal to the NH reopening task force yesterday would allow out-of-staters to quarantine for two weeks at home before coming to New Hampshire. Police in NH pulling over fewer motorists... and leading more processions. “Basically, we are being more selective on our motor vehicle enforcement,” Hancock police chief Andrew Wood tells the NH News Collaborative's Meghan Pierce. "Chasing the broken tail lights is not something we are prioritizing for now.” Overall, calls for service are down around the state, though at least one chief reports an uptick in domestic violence calls. But then, requests for leading driveby birthday-party parades are also up. "Whatever we can do to lift people’s spirits and keep them happy,” says one chief.Unemployment claims in NH continue to fall. New claims last week came to 8,333, compared to 10,016 the week before. That's a faster decline than most of the rest of the country, says Richard Lavers, deputy commissioner for Employment Security. A more telling number is the change in active claims, which are starting to decline as people go back to work. Last week, 115,267 claims were paid out, compared to 117,438 the week before.Local farm boom helps unique NH farm. Fresh Start Farm, in Dunbarton, is owned by the Organization for Refugee and Immigrant Success, which aims to help new Americans build secure lives, partly by giving them work growing food on the farm and training them to build their own sustainable farm enterprises. Now CSA shares are three times what they'd hoped for, and the farm is spearheading an effort by farms in the region to join the Farmers to Families Food Box Program, part of the USDA's Coronavirus Farm Assistance Program.Skinny Pancake starts its own farm program. Or, to be precise, ShiftMeals, the program started by the Skinny P to feed unemployed restaurant workers, musicians, gig workers, and others, is aiming to build "Victory Farms" so that laid-off cooks and other hospitality workers can grow their own food and learn about agriculture. "These are really talented, hardworking people who suddenly have lots of free time on their hands and have an interest in food and food production,” ShiftMeals director Jean Hamilton tells Seven Days.GMP gets okay to expand home power-storage programs. The VT Public Utilities Commission on Wednesday approved a proposal by the utility to expand its Powerwall and Bring Your Own Device programs beyond their test phase. The BYOD "tariff" works with solar companies and Renewable Energy Vermont to offer up to $10,500 in incentives for homeowners buying any of several brands of battery storage put in by local installers. The Powerwall program leases Tesla batteries. Each program will be able to add 500 customers a year for two years.A bald-eagle cold case, solved. This is beyond intriguing. Danielle D'Auria is a wildlife biologist with the ME Dept of Inland Fisheries & Wildlife. Last summer, she got a call from a game warden who'd found a dead bald eagle floating in Highland Lake with what appeared to be a bullet wound. Her necropsy suggested otherwise, so she sent the eagle corpse off to the National Wildlife Health Center in WI for more thorough investigation. Sure enough: The eagle, which was found near a dead loon chick, had been stabbed to death by a loon. "You can use your imagination..." D'Auria writes in a blog post.It all started with making homemade telescopes using scavenged photocopier lenses. Ed Ting, who lives in Amherst, NH, is now an accomplished and celebrated astrophotographer who's just written a guide to the subject as part of his Master of Arts of Liberal Studies work at Dartmouth. Junction Mag's Colleen Goodhue talked to him about photographing the night sky, how to get started, why Jupiter's so cool to photograph, and how he came to run the most popular telescope review site on the internet.Which is the perfect segue to what may be the first-ever photo of a planet being born. The image comes from a young star system called AB Aurigae, about 520 light-years away, and that twist you see in the center is where astronomers believe that, for the first time ever, they've caught gas and dust accumulating on the planet-to-be. It was shot using the European Southern Observatory's telescope in Chile. You go tell that vapid existentialist quack Freddy Nietzsche that he can just bite me, twice. That, readers, is a pangram, a sentence that uses all 26 letters of the alphabet. It was devised (as a joke) by type designer Jonathan Hoefler, who has written a witty and extremely informative plunge into word geekery of the sort you would never have noticed without him, explaining why "the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog" no longer cuts it for assessing typefaces. It comes down to putting letters in natural context. Best of all, along the way you'll learn about "typographical sirloin." Who knew?News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:
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At 4 pm today, NH Humanities offers "How Fresh Water Has Shaped NH," an online presentation by Jim Rousmaniere about how "Granite Staters’ impact on fresh water – and, conversely, inland waters’ impact on Granite Staters – has evolved over time." Rousmaniere's a longtime journalist, and was editor and president of the Keene Sentinel. You'll need to sign up at the link—it's limited to 500 attendees.
Still North Books and Literary North are kicking off their 2020 Summer Reading & Writing Bingo Challenge tonight with a three-fer reading by local authors Makenna Goodman, KJ Dell'Antonia, and Michele Campbell, each of whom have new fiction coming out this summer. They'll be reading, talking, answering questions, and there'll be a book raffle, as well. Tix are free, but a donation to Still North will help defray costs. Starts at 7, sign up at the link.
Also this evening, at 5, you can catch Paste Mag's "Happiest Hour" conversation and mini-performance by the Indigo Girls.
Tomorrow's the "backyard birdathon" sponsored by the Vermont Center for Ecostudies. VCE's changing up its traditional birdathon for the pandemic era. "Modeling our effort after traditional Big Sits (24 hours of birding within a 17-foot diameter circle) and 'patch birding,' we are asking people to bird individually (or with their families) on May 23, either from a single spot or by thoroughly exploring a defined 'patch' around their home." They'll connect up through Vermont eBird so that everyone can keep track of the day's sightings.
Also tomorrow, from 12-2, Hanover Bike Walk and Dartmouth Bikes are doing an in-person bike tuneup and minor-repair pop-up at Hanover High. Wear a face mask and bring your own disinfectants; bike mechanics will be wearing gloves. As Bike Walk says, "We strongly believe that in the era of Covid, we need to do what we can to make sure everyone who wants one, has a working ride—for transportation, and for the benefit of mind, body and soul. Bikes breed happiness."
The Stowe Jewish Film Festival starts on Sunday and will last three weeks, with each of the three films it's featuring available to stream for three days. It starts out with Crescendo, about an orchestra composed of young Israeli and Palestinian musicians with no great love for one another that relocates to an Austrian chalet as they prep for a peace concert, led by a German maestro with his own complicated family past. It got long ovations at the festivals where it's screened.
And whenever the mood strikes you, you should really check out New Zealand filmmaker Taika Waititi (JoJo Rabbit,Hunt for the Wilderpeople... and, oh right, the voice of Korg in Thor Ragnarok) reading James and the Giant Peach. For episode 1 he's enlisted Australian acting brothers Chris and Liam Hemsworth (you've seen them over and over at the cineplex) and American actor and comedian Nick Kroll. Waititi narrates with sly and edgy charm, and, in a brilliant bit of casting, has the Hemsworths read Aunts Sponge and Spiker.
Let's go into the long weekend in style. Twice.
First, the Brooklyn Youth Chorus Virtual Choir singing "You Will Be Found" from the Broadway musical Dear Evan Hansen.(Thanks, FB!)
And a virtual New Orleans funeral jazz band led by Wynton Marsalis to inaugurate #MemorialForUsAll, a "secular community remembrance, welcoming all to celebrate the lives of those who have left us too soon through small gestures of music" organized by faith leaders in NYC and Lincoln Center. It's in traditional form: dirge to begin, celebration to end.
Have a fine and restorative weekend. See you Tuesday.
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