WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!
Looks like we're just plain going to get wet. There's a cold front moving through today, and the entire region is due to see — and I'm quoting here — "efficient rainfall processes." Highest rainfall totals are expected along the spine of the Greens, but we could get up to an inch. Temps in the high 50s and low 60s, at least, and everything will clear out tonight, leaving us with some nice days ahead. Leb's FreshAir Sensor grows, gets ready to tackle vaping. The startup, which is one of the anchor tenants in the Dartmouth Regional Technology Center at Centerra, makes sensors for hotels, housing authorities, and apartment owners to detect and document smoking in real time—both nicotine and marijuana. Now it's gotten $225,000 from NIH to develop a device to detect vaping. The VN's John Lippman profiles the company. "We're in the data business, not the drama business," says CEO Trip Davis.Norwich stabbing arrest over the weekend. Amanda Zanis, who was wanted on charges of stabbing her partner in their home on New Boston Road three weeks ago, was taken in after a traffic stop in Danbury, NH on Saturday. She'll appear in Merrimack County Courthouse, where she'll face extradition proceedings to return her to Windsor County in VT.The back-story on Sean the barber, and new tenants for the Kibby Equipment buildings in WRJ. The ever-busy Lippman profiles Sean Taylor, and his new barber shop in Hanover. Taylor specializes in cutting black people's hair but says, "I hope this will be a community space … a chance for people to meet people they’d never come across.” Meanwhile, Aimee Goodwin's Puppy Junction, her dog-rescue storefront, will take be moving into one of the Kibby buildings across from Hartford Town Hall, and a health bar called Royal Nutrition will move in next door. (VN, sub reqd)Early-morning mist on Orford's Indian Pond. The sun's just over the hills in this photo by Reddit user Head_Menitino... Hunters asked to contribute to ruffed grouse study. The birds are in decline, and biologists theorize that they're falling prey to West Nile virus. Hunters in VT and NH are being asked to help researchers by collecting blood and feather samples from the birds they shoot this season and sending them to the state for testing.Meanwhile, whales are disappearing from the Gulf of Maine. Waters there are warming faster than 99 percent of the global ocean, says NPR in a story about the impact on right and other whale populations there. They're migrating north to follow their food sources, into waters that "haven't yet been adapted to protect them," and are running afoul of shpping lanes and fishing nets. It's also possible longer migrations will lower reproductive rates.NH and other states in region consider joining initiative to reduce transportation emissions. The effort's called the Transportation and Climate Initiative, or TCI. Modeled on the successful Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, it's aimed at pricing and limiting emissions from transportation fuels, which contribute more than 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions around here. The initiative released a draft framework this week.Plymouth State to offer in-state tuition to Vermonters, Mainers. The new tuition program will blend federal, state, and institutional grants and scholarships so that out-of-pocket tuition costs for undergraduates from neighboring states don't surpass the university's in-state tuition rate.Hey look, just because you've always wanted to try it doesn't mean you should. A guy driving a Nissan GT-R on I-95 in Hampton Falls, NH, was clocked doing 136 mph. But hey, he was kind of a piker: Nissan says the GT-R can reach 196 mph. Oh, the guy? Yeah, a reckless driving charge.So you take your binful of recyclables to the transfer station. Then what? That's what one listener asked VPR, and it's been on a lot of people's minds, especially since China stopped accepting "foreign waste," which included about 40% of our recycling. Brave Little State looks into the impact of the 2015 landfill ban and tours the Materials Recovery Facility in Williston, one of two in the state. Includes some mind-blowing waste-stream video.It's not just Ben & Jerry's. Those iconic Vermont companies? They're owned out-of-state. VTDigger's Anne Wallace Allen is up with an interesting piece on all the firms with VT roots that have passed into larger companies' hands. Seventh Generation? Unilever. Keurig Green Mountain? Something called JAB Holding Company. Vermont Casting's corporate parent's in Iowa. Vermont Creamery, Ibex, a passel of ski resorts, Hubbardton Forge... It's a long list. Ski Vermont is out with its 2019 "press kit." For those of us who like snow, fall's the most optimistic time of year. So it's a good moment for the downhill industry to get the juices flowing for what it calls "Winter in its Original State." Articles on what's new at the various resorts, snow-making, food and drink ideas by resort, best times to ski/ride, and more. Here's a cool map of population density in VT. Its creator calls it a "minimalist" map, which it is: just a bunch of spikes. Though as one commenter notes, "Every population map of Vermont is a minimalist map." Burlington, Montpelier, Rutland -- they're all obvious. Us around here? We're barely a blip. Oh, Deadheads... Talk about strange trips: A four-day scholarly conference on the Grateful Dead is set for the week after next at St. Anselm College in Manchester. Panels on the Dead's music and lyrics, the history and politics of the era, and drug culture. A keynote by Thomas Mangan, who produced a new four-part documentary on the band. And, of course, a jam to close things out.And before we leave the '60s... The National Review has a thoroughgoing, generally appreciative review of “Fields of Change: 1960s Vermont,” an exhibit at the Bennington Museum. "Vermonters were always the quirkiest of Yankees," Brian Allen writes. "Sometimes with discord, sometimes with unexpected harmony, old timers and newcomers made remarkable statements on ecology, human rights, and craftsmanship." Makes you want to get over there.
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SO JUST WHAT IS THERE TO DO ON A MONDAY?
The New Yorker
writer will be talking about "Liberal Morals and Liberal Minds," the first in a series of lectures sponsored by the college's Political Economy Project. Gopnik's book,
A Thousand Small Sanities,
came out in the spring, a defense of liberalism against the assaults of populist authoritarianism and progressive leftism. At 4:30 pm in the Rockefeller Center.
L'Inferno
was the first full-length Italian silent. Based, as you've already guessed, on Dante's happy little lark, it came out in 1911 and did land-office business both in Europe and here, maybe because, as one more recent reviewer puts it, it's "a compelling, immersive dive into Hell." It's followed by the US premiere of Stephen Broomer's
Tondal's Vision
, his psychedelic take on a pre-Dantean "tour of otherworldly lands." Starts at 7.
Evicted LA couple decide to set up a farm on 200 acres in Ventura County, learn a lot of lessons about biodiversity and living with nature. "If you’re looking for proof that our ecosystem can survive pretty much anything we humans can throw at it — a reason to believe that the planet’s scar tissue might not be 100 percent irreversible — this movie is like 91 minutes of the best kind of church," Janice Page wrote in the Globe this past spring. 7:30 pm at the Loew.
As the weather service says, watch out for large puddles and hydroplaning. See you tomorrow.
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