GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
It's pretty out there, eh? With dry air moving in from the north, any lingering clouds should be pretty much gone by late morning, leaving us with a brilliant—but chilly—day. That northern air will keep temps from getting much above freezing, and with clear skies tonight we'll be down into the teens by bedtime.Yep, it's pretty out there. The view overlooking Daybreak HQ this morning, from Jack Taylor.In Leb, officials worry that evictions could be start of a trend. In early November, tenants in a 13-unit W. Leb property got notice it had been sold—followed a few days later by notices they were being evicted by the new owner to make room for renovations, reports Nora Doyle-Burr in the Valley News. Leb's human services director, Lynne Goodwin, has been scrambling to help tenants, and tells Doyle-Burr she worries the previous owner, which still owns other low-priced rental units, may be unloading them. If so, "we would have a huge crisis on our hands,” she says. Doyle-Burr follows up with evicted tenants.A tale of two RVs. You may remember that about ten days ago, Hartford towed a derelict RV from the Rt. 5 Park-and-Ride after months of complaints from neighbors. There was another RV that had also attracted comment, parked first at the Haven, then at the WRJ McDonald's, and last week the town had it towed, too. In the VN, Patrick Adrian follows up with the owner, Dwayne Robinson, who'd been using it to get to carpentry and home-repair job sites, and who says he's been "suffering the backlash" from being associated with the other RV. Adrian digs into the town's towing policies and challenges."You’ll gasp a time or two." Not so much at the plot of The Railway Children, writes Susan Apel in Artful, but at the design and production work that bring the train onstage in Northern Stage's musical adaptation of the Edith Nesbit classic. "The kids are the center of the story and of the action, heroes always in a series of loosely connected vignettes about various aspects of railroad town life," Susan writes of the play, which transplants Nesbit's English countryside setting to WRJ in 1929. She also bids a fond farewell to Eric Love, the play's co-director and longtime actor and education director, who's moving to NYC.From gymnastics studio corner to a community salute three decades later: Dancers' Corner's Doreen Keith retires. The original "corner," writes Jim Kenyon in the VN, was at Northern Lights, where Keith set up a small dance floor in 1989. Over the years that followed—most in her own spaces—she taught "ballet, jazz, tap and hip-hop to literally thousands of Upper Valley kids," Kenyon writes: to those whose parents could afford to pay, and to those whose parents couldn't. Keith was honored at the Briggs on Saturday night; Her path, Kenyon writes, began with pumping gas to pay for dance lessons.We're hard-wired to be attuned to social interaction. At least, that's the implication of new research at Dartmouth, which found, as Amy Olson writes for Dartmouth News, that "much of the brain responds more strongly to information that is interpreted as social versus random." The work was led by brain sciences postdoc Rekha Varrier and assistant prof Emily Finn. “We’re likely tuned to see social information in our surroundings because the cost of missing a social interaction would likely be higher than that of falsely perceiving something as social," Finn says. Olson describes the work and what it means.Hiker falls to death in Crawford Notch. Saturday morning, NH Fish & Game says, the unidentified hiker and his wife were on the summit of Mt. Willard taking photos, when the wife "heard her husband yell and looked over to notice him falling over the edge of the mountain down a steep cliff that extended to the bottom approximately 800 feet." Mountain Rescue Service personnel were able to rappel down the cliff in icy conditions and found the hiker's body about 300 feet below the summit. He was eventually carried out. Identity is being withheld pending notification of family.NH teachers union head sues NH schools head over Education Freedom Accounts. Deb Howes, president of the NH chapter of the Am. Federation of Teachers, filed the case against ed commissioner Frank Edelblut last Thursday, reports NHPR's Sarah Gibson. The suit contends that the accounts, which pay for non-public-school options for low- and moderate-income families, use money from the Education Trust Fund—which is intended to fund public schools. Friday, the Union Leader's Paul Feely reports, the libertarian Institute of Justice said it would defend the accounts on behalf of parents.Could Chris Sununu be running for president? The question comes up thanks to a pair of interviews, one in Politico (scroll down), the other in the NYT (gift link), and both of them drawing attention in DC political circles. In both, Sununu took aim at former President Donald Trump and at the Republican Party, which, he told the NYT, needs to relearn the “basic tenets of politics.” "I think New Hampshire has an incredible model," he told Politico. "Our model of local control. Our model of empowering individuals. Not just being about political stunts, but actually getting stuff done."Meanwhile, in VT, Phil Scott contemplates a veto-proof legislature. Although, as Vermont Public's Bob Kinzel tells his colleague Mary Engisch, "There aren't a lot of issues that break down totally along party lines. So I think this concept of having a veto-proof majority is a little overstated." Even so, Scott tells Kinzel he and the legislature often have common goals; their challenge is how to reach them. "There's sometimes a path forward. And other times there isn't," Scott says. He, too, thinks the GOP needs to change, telling Kinzel he wants to see it "move away from Trump" before he'll engage with it.Care for a trip down toy memory lane? Because Stacker's got not just a list, but a writeup about each of the top-selling holiday toys for every year from 1920 (Raggedy Ann) to 2021 (a reversible octopus plushie). With stops along the way for Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, and chemistry sets (all in the 1920s), as well as finger paint (1931), Monopoly (1937), Slinkies (1945), Clue (1949), Scrabble (1954) and Silly Putty (1955), the Rubik's Cube (1980), troll dolls (popular in the '60s, bestsllers in the late '80s), Furbies and Tamagotchis, Playstations, Xboxes... It's 102 years of nostalgia, right there on one page.The Monday Vordle. With a fine word from Friday's Daybreak.
Last year, Austrian guitar virtuoso and YouTube personality Bernth Brodträger decided to promote his first solo album by scorching his guitar with blowtorches. "Maybe it was a bit dramatic," he said later, "but it was a statement about all these articles that were going around, every single one of them saying ‘guitar music is dead!'" Which he proved wrong by picking up his crisped six-string and playing it. Now he's going the other direction. He's got an acoustic Ibanez and for a piece called "Waterworks," he filled it with water. And here's the thing: It's not just a stunt. It sounds pretty darn great. (Thanks, PB!)See you tomorrow.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner design: Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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