GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
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Mostly sunny, warm. We’ve got high pressure above for the next few days, with air moving in from the south raising temps well above normal for November over the course of this week. Today, it’s highs in the upper 60s, lows somewhere around 40, with calm winds throughout.
Since we seem to be looking backward, weather-wise… Why not look back just two days, to the pair of pumpkins that Jon and Erin Ames carved in Grantham?
Fentanyl-laced joint in WRJ leads to scare. Last night, reports Eric Francis for Daybreak, police received a frantic call from the porta potty behind Hartford Town Hall. A homeless woman who’d bought marijuana from friends in West Leb had started smoking it, realized something was wrong, and called police immediately. They ran it through an opioid test kit, “which confirmed that an unknown amount of fentanyl was mixed in with the marijuana,” Eric writes. The woman was taken to the hospital as a precaution, and police fanned out to warn other members of the homeless community about adulterated weed. “You know there’s more of this out there,” one officer says.
Divided selectboard approves raise for Norwich town manager. At last week’s selectboard meeting, reports Sofia Langlois in the Valley News, the board announced that a majority agrees that Town Manager Brennan Duffy “did a satisfactory job” with such tasks as financial oversight, managing the town’s employees, and running the town’s day-to-day business, though they singled out communications and “customer service” as areas that need improvement. They then voted, 3-2, to give Duffy a raise, with selectboard chair Kimo Griggs and vice-chair Brendan Classon opposed. Langlois explores the contentious history of Duffy’s performance review and what lies ahead.
Vershire selectboard grapples with accounting problems. The bad news came in two waves, reports The Herald. At the beginning of October, members heard about an unfinished audit that the town was out of good standing with VT’s Secy of State’s office, potentially compromising its ability to get grants. Then, at its Oct. 20 meeting, town administrator Nick Caputo told them that finished audits show the town’s financial reporting is inadequate, lacking both a complete inventory of its fixed assets and a written record of all adjustments to its accounting records. “Caputo noted that the accounting problems predated the current town office staff,” The Herald writes.
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Polling places tomorrow. Where to show up to cast your ballot in:
New Hampshire. The Secy of State’s office’s list of town-by-town voting information. First you’ll have to prove you’re human by using a slider (there’s also an accessible mode feature) and then, once you’re on the info page, scroll nearly all the way to the right for polling place hours and address.
Vermont. The VT Secy of State’s page just assumes you’re human. You can browse by town, enter your own address, or click on the map.
“Now it’s all about the equipment”: Deer hunting goes high-tech, but there are still more deer than ever. Changes in hunting culture in the Upper Valley, writes Steve Taylor in the VN, “can be boiled down to just two words: technology and posting.” The tech, Taylor writes, ranges from high-powered sights to high-powered crossbows to internet-connected game cams. They’re popular, but there are also plenty of hunters who reject them, and Taylor talks to several: “It’s all about the kill, not the hunt. That’s not hunting,” says former Lyme outdoors writer Jerry Robinson. Meanwhile, Taylor writes, posted land proliferates. He surveys current hunting culture.
Former Dartmouth provost says he was “not afforded a meaningful opportunity” to respond to AI inquiry. That’s according to Santiago Schnell’s attorney, who in a short article tells the Washington Post’s Susan Svrluga that although Schnell felt he didn’t get enough of a chance to detail his side of things during the college’s internal review of his use of AI in his publications, “he has chosen to allow the Dartmouth community to move forward”—hence his resignation last week. (Gift link.)
Meanwhile, Schnell’s interim replacement, Matthew Delmont, sits down for an interview with The Dartmouth’s Sahil Gandhi to talk about his goals as the college’s chief academic officer: focusing on the faculty’s “scholarly commitments” and encouraging students to understand that “you get to wrestle some really difficult things, and it’s the struggle and messiness that makes education in the pursuit of knowledge interesting.” On AI use, he says, “It’s about having consistent institutional policies that map [the] landscape in a way that’s legible to faculty, students and staff” and being aware that “there’s a real danger that we will lose the ability to struggle with the challenges of learning and the uncomfortability of not knowing.” Delmont’s appointment runs through June, 2028.
Gift of Newbury, VT forest parcel boosts large conserved tract of land. The 301-acre gift to the Upper Valley Land Trust comes from Doug and Katharine Britton, Liz Sauchelli reports—and with the addition of the Britton Forest, she writes, the town now is home to “more than 1,300 acres of contiguous conserved land, including Tucker Mountain Town Forest.” Its location next to the larger tract matters, Doug Britton tells Sauchelli. “The more contiguous acreage you can get, the more good it can do,” he says. “The larger the tracts, whatever aspect you’re looking at whether it’s water quality or recreation or forestry, the more impact it’s going to have.”
“This was supposed to be a hobby.” That’s Christine McCue, who co-runs Fern River Farm in Chelsea, where they make cow and sheep cheeses and butter. McCue tells Happy Vermont’s Erica Houskeeper that she never expected to like dairy farming, but wanting more time away from her desk at a US Fish & Wildlife Service office in MA, she began helping out a neighbor with chores and milking and then got interested in dairying as a volunteer at the nearby Hancock Shaker Village Farm. She and her partner eventually moved to an old goat farm in Chelsea. “Because I can never do anything halfway, I got 10 sheep and a donkey,” she says. And then came the cows.
The Monday Jigsaw: The Trouble With Harry. Not the whole film, of course, but a still of a six-year-old Jerry Mathers—the future Beave—out in the woods with his ray gun, before he finds the dead body that sets Hitchcock’s film in motion. On his Curioustorian blog, Cam Cross details the film’s Vermont connections—including the fact that the film’s opening live shot “is the Sharon Congregational Church, with the green and the brick Old Town Hall beside it.”
Today's Wordbreak. With a word from Friday’s Daybreak.
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HEADS UP
At Dartmouth, “Lessons From Globalization for the Technological Age.” The Dickey Center hosts Jeremy Weinstein, dean of Harvard Kennedy School, who delivers a lecture on lessons to be drawn from globalization’s mixed results and backlash-inducing politics, and how they might be applied to the age of AI and data centers. 12:45 pm in the Tuck School’s Tseng Classroom as well as online. Registration reqd.
And for today...
Is there an instrument that the great Swedish musician Gunhild Carling can’t utterly transform? Here’s a recorder samba.
See you tomorrow.
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