Daybreak Friday 8/28/20

GOOD OF YOU TO DROP BY, FRIDAY!

Back to at least some sunshine... for a day, anyway. And a measure of warmth, too, though it'll still be cooler than normal. Cloudy at first, then a mix of clouds and sun all day, temps rising to the mid-70s by mid-afternoon. Winds from the northwest, and back into the mid-50s tonight. When camp's closed... Things get kinda empty-looking. Ordinarily, Camp Coniston in Croydon would be levitating with kids swimming and learning archery and just running around. This summer it's not, but it did open itself to families going out to play for a day, and Lebanon photographer Travis Paige and his family headed over. Travis wound up wandering around Lake Coniston with his cameras. It was pretty quiet out there.

Last numbers for the week...

Christian broadcaster buys "The River" and "The Point." The Educational Media Foundation, based in California and the parent company of contemporary Christian music networks K-LOVE and Air1, is buying four stations in the region: 102.3 "The River" (Concord), 105.7 "The River" (Campton, NH), "Free 99.1" in Whitefield, and 103.1, "The Point" in Royalton/Hanover. The four stations are owned by affiliates of Steve Silberberg’s Northeast Broadcasting, and are selling for $755K.Daylong Claremont standoff resolved peacefully. At mid-day yesterday, Claremont police issued a shelter-in-place order to residents of a downtown neighborhood as they negotiated with a man on his back porch, the VN's Anna Merriman reports. At one point, they asked him to put down a weapon, saying, "You’re making us nervous” and offering to bring in a therapist. The incident ended around 5 pm. "He is getting help," Police Chief Mark Chase said.Were DHMC negotiations behind Trump's hangar switch? As you may know, the president is holding a rally at Manchester Airport today, and on Wednesday night changed it from one hangar to another. WMUR reports that the original plans called for using a hangar that houses the DHART helicopter for logistical support, and that DHMC was willing to move its chopper but needed to be reimbursed for the cost. Things seemed to be squared away before the hangar change was announced. "It’s unclear what happened in the interim," WMUR says.Instead of school supplies, hammocks. That's what Dothan Brook third-grade teacher Nicolette Raney asked parents to donate ahead of school this year, as she and her colleagues prep to move classes entirely outside. Raney features in an article by Insider (a sister pub of Business Insider) on the move. The kids will sit on tree stumps under a tarp Raney bought. "To give them this safe and comfortable space to learn and to feel a sense of calm and belonging in such an unpredictable time is really fortunate," she says."Dreaming turtle dreams... their pilot lights barely flickering." Turns out that snapping turtles spend a lot of time not moving—in the hollow on writer and naturalist Ted Levin's land, they spend six or seven months hibernating. "When I was a boy, suburban legend claimed that a sizeable hatch-faced snapping turtle...could snap a broom handle in one bite." He later tested it. It couldn't. But snappers do lurk beneath the algae and grab unsuspecting birds, he writes..."a fatal interruption for a sandpiper headed to the mudflats of Belize."Slowly, museums reopen. Artful blogger Susan Apel writes that two within driving distance—the Brattleboro Museum and the Currier in Manchester—have opened their doors again. Brattleboro's got Steve Kinder's portraits of people who are homeless and Alison Wright's photo exhibit, "Grit and Grace, Women Working." The Currier has Portsmouth artist Richard Haynes's drawings depicting the flight of an enslaved family via the Underground Railroad. Also, a link to Chronicle's recent segment on the Billings sunflower house and SculptureFest in Woodstock."The goal is that each week we show a movie that leaves people having a hard time describing what they just saw." For the past ten years, every Tuesday night WRJ's Main Street Museum has hosted what began as Mystic Movie Night, is now Revenge of Movie Night, and many of its adherents call "bad movie night." Junction mag's Colleen Goodhue talks to its hosts, Matt Mazur and Drew Peberdy, as they prep for “The Movie Night 10,000th Anniversary Extravaganza” on Saturday. Another local catches the music industry's eye. A few days after arriving at Tulane for his freshman year, Norwich's Hans Williams was one of the first people in the door responding to a floormate's suicide. Williams is a singer and musician, and he turned the experience and its aftermath into a new single, "Body on My Shoulders," which he put together with fellow Hanover grad Phin Choukas. Ones to Watch, a big-time blog devoted to up-and-coming musicians, just highlighted it. Lavinia and Francis Parker, enslaved by Ethan Allen's daughter, to get a "stopping stone." The stones—really, plaques—are an effort to remember enslaved people in the spots where they lived, modeled after Germany's "stumbling stones" honoring victims of the Holocaust. Started by a member of Burlington's Ohavi Zedek synagogue and now run jointly with Jericho's Good Lutheran Church, the project will place a memorial plaque to the Parkers outside the Skirack at the corner of St. Paul and Main streets in Burlington.  Vermont's "Everyone Eats" prepares to expand. Modeled after the Skinny Pancake's ShiftMeals and a project in Brattleboro to hire local restaurants to prepare food for struggling residents, the $4 million program will expand into Rockingham and Springfield areas, as well as Rutland and towns in the Northeast Kingdom. It aims to help restaurants prepare 400,000 meals for social service agencies to distribute through the end of the year, reports VTDigger's Kevin O'Connor.Planning to ski this winter at Stowe, Mt. Snow, or Wildcat? You'll need reservations. In fact, you'll need them at any of Vail Resorts' mountains—they've also got Attitash and Crotched in NH and Okemo in VT. The reservation system will limit the number of skiers on a mountain, reports Seven Days' Sasha Goldstein, and tix will be sold online and over the phone only. In addition, Goldstein reports, "Vail Resorts said it is reviewing its uphill policy and has yet to announce if it will be allowed or under what conditions."Cows have been known to return to their barns during a solar eclipse, birds to sing their night calls. "In this sense," writes poet Jessica Poli in the August issue of the literary mag wildness, "the eclipse is a microcosm of night, the dark sped up, the hour hand spinning around a clock at a horse’s trot." When the sun goes dark at midday, she notes, fireflies emerge, crickets chirp—and she, in the midst of it, reflects.Believe it or not, it's going to grow into a panda. Early yesterday morning, Mei Xiang, the National Zoo's star panda-mom, left her six-day old for a minute—twice—to go get a drink of water. Newborn pandas are usually entirely covered by their mothers, since they have almost no fur and can't regulate their own body temperature. So this was the zoo's chance to get some panda-cam footage of the cub. (Thanks, CW!)

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And oh, it's just been a while since I heard this voice. So just to ease us into the weekend, Steve Winwood 

with fireplace accompaniment. 

See you Monday.

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