GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
That thing in the sky? We call it "the sun." Don't worry, it's friendly (for now). It's going to be a beautiful day out: mostly sunny skies, highs getting up toward 70. You might notice the winds shift direction sometime in the afternoon as a front... but, oh heck, let's just save that for tomorrow. Today? Revel.West Leb Feed & Supply takes on Amazon. In yesterday's VN, John Lippman had a fantastic piece about WLF&S owner Curt Jacques's plan to help small retailers compete against the giants. His venture, called Goober Pick, is placing locker "pods" in high-traffic areas around the Upper Valley (starting in Enfield, but eventually in Sharon, Windsor, Lyme, at DHMC, and elsewhere). You order online -- pet food, groceries, whatever from any participating retailer -- and then pick it up at the locker on your way to or from work or whenever else you're out and about. He already has retailers here and in other states interested. (VN, subscription reqd)Beto O'Rourke headed to Hanover. He'll be doing a "town hall" at the Top of the HOP on Friday at 3:30.Hanover church dispute gets thornier by the minute. Both Christ Redeemer Church and Greensboro Road residents who object to its plans to build there are feeling abused by Hanover's zoning board. They've asked the board to reopen its late-March decision allowing the church to go forward with its building plans. The neighbors hate the whole idea and think the board had no business reversing an earlier decision to disallow construction. The church objects to conditions the board placed on occupancy and operating hours. (VN, yadda yadda)There was a police shooting on the Quechee-W. Hartford Road last night. Vermont State police responding to a call of shots fired during a domestic assault found a man with a shotgun walking along the road. After refusing to put his gun down, he was shot, tasered, and taken to the hospital with "minor, non-life-threatening injuries," according to a VSP press release.Willing Hands to take over old Agway/Suburban/Grassroots-Soccer property in Norwich. The nonprofit, which gathers, grows, and distributes food for those who need it, will use the building as a storage facility and the land to grow produce. The property, on Church Street, has bumped around for years, and at various times been considered for the town's police/fire facility and for affordable housing. Willing Hands is buying it from Lyme Properties. The move will allow it to quadruple its cooler space. (VN: I know, I know, but they've run a lot of interest -- which is what the local paper is supposed to do, right?)Is WRJ next? The US Customs and Border Patrol ran an internal immigration checkpoint this weekend up along the causeway between South Hero Island and the mainland, in the Champlain Islands. It caused a stir. "People when they are going about their business don’t expect and don’t want to be stopped, delayed, questioned, all in the absence of any suspicion that they’re doing anything wrong whatsoever,” says an ACLU staff attorney.VT Law School's commencement speaker on Saturday will be Tammy Baldwin. The US senator from Wisconsin was the first woman elected to the Senate from her state, and the first openly gay member of the Senate from anywhere. She's focused on issues like college affordability, health care access, and environmental protection and conservation. Stunningly, she is a Democrat not running for president. VT Dept of Libraries to change name of Dorothy Canfield Fisher Award. If you've ever had a middle-schooler in the state, you've been aware of the award, which is given to a book chosen by kids in grades 4 through 8 as their favorite. Fisher had distant ties to the eugenics movement in the state during the 1920s and '30s, and after much debate the new state librarian has decided to look for a new award name. "We do examine people and we do hold them to a certain esteem at a time, and then we become reflective. It's what we do," he told Seven Days. The state's schoolchildren will be asked to help come up with a new name.Sununu vetoes NH death penalty repeal. This happened on Friday, but since we've been keeping track here, you ought to know. The measure passed both houses, but as he did last year, Gov. Chris Sununu turned it down. Last time, the Senate lacked the votes to override. This time, the measure passed both houses with enough votes that an override is entirely possible this fall. In his veto press conference, Sununu clearly lobbied for some lobbying. "What the first vote was is not necessarily what the second vote will be,” he declared.Need a cheat sheet on all the Democratic candidates visiting New Hampshire? Axios, a fast-growing DC news outfit geared toward hard-core in-the-know types, is out with a list of the one talking point that encapsulates each of the candidates. Like: Mike Gravel (former US senator from Alaska) wants to "end all wars." Good to know someone does.Vermont college woes likely to get worse before they get better. VTDigger's Lola Duffort is up with a deep look into the issues besetting the state's small colleges -- three have announced they'll close, and a fourth is on probation. "In many ways," she writes, "what ails Vermont’s colleges is what ails the rest of the state – too few young people." And the state will probably lose another 10 percent of its high school grads between now and 2030. But there's lots more at play as well, and Duffort goes into all of it.NH wants to crowdsource stone-wall inventory. There may be as many as 150,000 miles of old stone walls snaking through the state's forests, a legacy of the days when New Hampshire -- like Vermont -- was 80 percent pastureland instead of 80 percent woods. The state geologist is spearheading a new "N.H. Stone Wall Mapper" project, which is making LIDAR images of the state available for close scrutiny -- stone walls are visible if you look closely, and you can identify and map them to help build the state database. BUT IF YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HUNT FOR STONE WALLS TONIGHT, WHAT ELSE COULD YOU DO?Valley Improv holds auditions. If you've ever thought to yourself, "Yeah, sure, I'd like to be funny with an audience watching and no earthly idea what's about to come out of my mouth," then this might be your chance. "We believe that improv is about exploring a shared reality, deriving entertainment and humor from what is odd about it and what is odd in it," they say. At Leb Opera House starting at 7:15. Check the page out for directions (you don't want to go in the main entrance). Thetford poet Corey Cook is holding a reading from his new collection, The Weight of Shadows. Cook's poetry is conversational and accessible, but not light -- he deals, in this collection, with things like memory loss, and living with the stillborn birth of a child. Yet, says another poet, "far from weighing down his readers, Corey Cook shines light on those dark moments with courage, sensitivity, and skill." 7 pm at the Latham Library on Thetford Hill.It's movie night at the Howe, featuring Germinal. A 1913 silent-film adaptation of Emile Zola's novel of the same name, about a coal miners' strike in northern France in the 1860s. You can find French critics who call it a masterpiece, but it was early, and film-making techniques (let alone on-screen story-telling) hadn't evolved much. Abridged to a bit over an hour from the two-and-a-half hour original. Sharing a screen with Hollis Frampton's 1974 experimental film, Winter Solstice, filmed at the Homestead Steel Work outside Pittsburgh.So hey, today? Get outside! See you tomorrow.
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