WELCOME TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!
Tan yet? We get one more day of this sunshine, on a day a lot like yesterday — only it'll be even slightly warmer. Temps reaching toward 50 and plenty of sun, though things will start clouding over in the afternoon as a weak front moves through, though with nothing much to say for itself. Winds from the south, temps into the high 20s or low 30s overnight.Three departments respond to third-floor bathroom fire at Dartmouth frat. Firefighters from Hanover, Hartford and Lebanon were called out yesterday afternoon to the fire at the Phi Delta Alpha fraternity; students living there were rehoused last night. The college is assessing water damage to see if the building is habitable.Town Meeting in Vermont is next week... And the VN is chock-full of previews. There's the question of whether Royalton will shift to Australian-ballot voting; Hartford considers the "welcoming ordinance" and hotly contested races for two selectboard seats; facing a volunteer shortage, Woodstock mulls paying for EMTs and borrowing up to $4.5 million to renovate and expand its public safety building; and everywhere from Pomfret to Newbury faces budget decisions and, in a few cases, contested SB races.Meanwhile, the Norwich Observer has Q&A's with the three SB candidates there. Blogger Chris Katucki checks in with Claudette Brochu, who's running unopposed for the seat she holds now; and with Doug Wilberding and Rob Gere, who are running against each other for the seat John Pepper is relinquishing. The solar panels at Lebanon's landfill maintenance building produced 233 kwh of power yesterday. As Susan Apel points out on her Artful blog, the city's installed arrays at seven municipal facilities, including the landfill, the Kilton, and the police station. You can follow along through the city's Lebanon Solar webpage. The solar facilities are meeting nearly a quarter of the municipality's power needs, and the city hopes to start selling excess capacity soon. Ribbon-cutting at the Kilton on March 2.Greyhound decides not to allow unwarranted searches on its buses, Concord Coach Lines reconsidering its policy. In the wake of an AP report that bus companies have the legal right to block warrantless Border Patrol searches on board, Greyhound on Friday said it would disallow them. A Concord Lines official — the company owns Dartmouth Coach — had initially told the Monitor's David Brooks that Concord would permit them as it didn't want to put its drivers "in the role of a judge in determining probable cause." Given Greyhound's move, however, it's decided to re-examine that policy. Randolph Union HS to change "Galloping Ghost" depiction. The school mascot's name comes from the speed at which its 1940 boys' basketball team (dressed in white) was said to move. But the image on a wall of the school gym and on the school's clocks is of a white-shrouded figure on a galloping horse — too close, say longstanding complaints, to images of the KKK. So district superintendent Layne Millington has decided the school needs a new pic for its mascot, probably one of a skeleton from the school archives.Hanover Co-op general manager to resign. Ed Fox, who replaced longtime Co-op general manager Terry Appleby in 2016, announced late last week that he'll be headed out the door for a “new professional opportunity” in mid-April. The move caught the board by surprise, president Rosemary Fifield told the VN. “He just gave the board a six-year plan for upgrading infrastructure ... he’s accomplished a lot in three years.”For second year in a row, Dartmouth engineering students are NASA challenge finalists. Last year, a team of undergrads won the space agency's BIG Idea Challenge for its design of a Mars greenhouse. This year's team, with both graduate and undergraduate students, is tackling exploration near the moon's polar regions by designing robot rovers modeled on shrews — which, as Thayer's Julie Bonette writes, "latch onto each others' tails, forming a train or caravan, in order to move in a quick and orderly fashion."Bradford Main Street seeing ups and some definite downs. The VN's John Lippman checks in with a good-news-bad-news look at what's been taking place. On the plus side, there's the Space on Main, a couple of new restaurants, a new home heating fuel distributor, a recently opened clothing store, and even a gourmet cheese shop. On the other hand, Copeland Furniture's showroom is shifting to its main building out on the edge of town, and Aubuchon Hardware is flat closing its Bradford location. “The community is absolutely sick about this,” says Paul Gallerani, whose family owns Farm-Way.“We’ve fought to get them defined as livestock.... But we’re alpacas, so we’re under ‘crazy.’” That's Jen Lutz, who with her husband owns the 600-acre Cas-Cad-Nac alpaca farm in Perkinsville. VTDigger profiles the farm, which outlasted the boom-and-bust alpaca craze of a couple of decades ago to become a success at breeding championship alpacas, selling alpaca fiber and meat — and, in a project that took over a decade, last fall producing the world's first baby alpaca from a frozen embryo, which now carries the sprightly name CCN Exuberant Frost Blossom-ET.It's not just about balloons and experimental aircraft, you know. No, the Post Mills Airport is also about things like a motorized picnic table, an assortment of old vacuum cleaners, a really old one-person submersible, and what has to be the oddest collection of hot-air balloon baskets on the planet. Not to mention more crutches than you can shake a stick at, walls-full of old circus posters, another of beer bottles... In the pantheon of eccentric Vermont sites, Brian Boland's museum at the airport has to rank near the top. Bob Totz has a photo essay on his Old Roads, Rivers and Rails blog.Just a reminder of why people snowshoe up mountains. Remember how stunning it was on Saturday? Now imagine what it was like at 4,459 feet, atop Mt. Liberty, over in the Presidentials. Actually, you don't have to imagine it: Here's Reddit user hikerkay's photo.Feltes ads say he's not taking "corporate PAC or LLC contributions"; NHPR says otherwise. In the state Senate, the Democratic candidate for NH governor has sponsored bills to outlaw corporate campaign donations. But NHPR reporters Josh Rogers and Casey McDermott have found that "he’s collected thousands of dollars from political action committees tied to industries like banking, real estate, car dealers, trial attorneys, doctors, and dentists." In response to their inquiry, the campaign says it's returning donations collected since Feltes' candidacy announcement last September.VT proposes shooting moose in order to save them. Okay, it's a little more complicated than that. Fish & Wildlife wants to issue more hunting permits up north in order to shrink moose population density, because it believes higher densities are promoting the spread of winter ticks, which have been devastating the moose population. Officials believe it will take four years to reduce moose density below one per square mile, at which point research shows a reduced tick frequency.VT fears change to Census reporting could affect small-town totals. VTDigger's Erin Petenko reports that after finding individuals in small places can be identified in Census results, the Bureau will randomly change the count in small towns and villages. That could swing population counts by as much as 10 percent — which, Petenko writes, "could impact federal funding, election districts and the fundamental understanding of the state’s demographic trends." Researchers have expressed concern, and the Bureau says it's "continuing to take feedback" about how to implement the change.If you're down in Brattleboro and hungry for lunch, there's a new dosa place. Well, not entirely new. First it was a food stall at the Brattleboro Winter Farmers Market. Then, for the last five years, it was a food truck. And now, Dosa Kitchen is an actual restaurant, where owners Nash Patel and Leda Scheintaub serve up the South Indian rice and lentil "crepe" with an array of fillings, both traditional and not — like dosa dogs, and Belgian-style dosa waffles with butter, maple syrup, and cinnamon-cardamom topping on weekends.
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OH, WHAT TO DO ON A MONDAY?
. Downhill skiers from local high schools compete for... well, the fun of it, plus, of course, glory. There'll be barbecue on hand, the concessions stand will be open, the lights'll be bright, and heck, it'll still be in the 40s when the racing starts at 5 pm.
An extremely cool lineup tonight in this series on what it's taken to get businesses going in the region. Three mainstays of the region's local food ecosystem — Corinth's Crossmolina Farm; Fairlee's Root 5 Farm; and Piermont's Robie Farm — will be talking about their struggles and success at feeding a local market. 5:30 pm.
The politics of designing legislative districts is ever fraught, and legislators are pretty fond of doing whatever they can to give their own party an advantage. There's a concerted push in NH to create an independent redistricting commission, and tonight Olivia Zink of Open Democracy and Liz Tentarelli, president of the League of Women Voters New Hampshire, will talk about it all. 7 pm at the Starr King Fellowship.
At its heart, it's a simple story: two guys have to get a message across former enemy lines during WWI in order to save 1600 lives. It's been alternately praised and criticized for its apparently single-long-take technique ("gimmicky" says
The New Yorker;
"a brilliant feat of camera work," per the
Seattle Times
); its storytelling ("cheap" and "shallow"; "an emotional and moving experience"); and its focus on the two protagonists without asking larger questions about the war. You can just make up your mind for yourself. At Woodstock Town Hall, 7:30 pm.
Have a great start to your week! See you tomorrow.
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