WELCOME BACK TO THE WEEK, UPPER VALLEY!
I don't know how you feel, but rain better show up today. A cold front dropped down from Canada last night, and there's a low setting up along it; we should be within the rain zone as it spreads north, though probably not until after noon. Depending on where you are, highs not getting much past.... wait for it... mid-70s. Cooling into the high 50s overnight. Oh boy.How hot was it? "It is totally way too hot for criminal activity this weekend," the Brattleboro Police Department posted on its FB page Saturday. "If you plan to commit a crime, we respectfully request you wait until early next week when it’s cooler. Committing crimes when the heat index is over 100 is totally next-level henchman stuff. Also dangerous for everyone involved. So stay home and crank the AC, binge watch Game of Thrones, and practice karate moves in your basement. We’ll all meet up again Monday."Homelessness appears to be on the upswing. Though official numbers are hard to come by, anecdotally it looks like things are getting worse, writes the VN's Jordan Cuddemi. Police Chief Phil Kasten says the Hartford PD's gotten 68 calls from people in crisis so far this year, compared with 86 calls in all of 2018 and 64 calls in 2017. UVGEAR, which budgets for 40 tents a year to people who need emergency camping gear, has already handed out 65. Including to families, says its director. (VN, sub reqd)"The Upper Valley is a vast forest dotted by towns." If you've been reading Daybreak for a while, you know that every once in a while I stumble across a drone video by William Daugherty and link to it. I've been curious about who he is, why he does it, and what he's noticed about what we look like from above. So last week I decided to ask him. Here's the first (but not the last) Daybreak Q&A with someone helping us understand the Upper Valley better. Bonus: A little feast of his videos. "People are itching and dying to tell those stories, so when there’s an opportunity, people are latching onto them." That's Jarvis Green, founder of JAG Productions, in a sort of "Why I Built This" interview on VPR about how his African-American-focused theater company came to life in the Upper Valley. It all started with a personal crisis....Eric Francis appears to have the most thorough account of what happened in yesterday's horrific rollover crash in New London. He talked to a driver who saw the whole thing: She'd merged onto I-89 north, and a car in the right lane moved over to give her space. A black SUV came up from behind "at a high rate of speed," swerved to avoid them, and lost control. Three people in that car died. Is this yours? There's a black hen that's been hanging out in the parking lot at the Price Chopper in Windsor for the last few days.And also a new sculpture off I-89 in Randolph. On Friday, sculptor Jim Sardonis installed "Whale Dance," a bigger version of his pair of whales' tails that you see off the highway south of Burlington. That sculpture, "Reverence," was originally sited on the Randolph land, until it was moved in 1999. This version is 16 feet tall and made of bronze. There'll be a party to celebrate on Wednesday—more on that then.Sununu drops poet pick. Remember that Slate story Daybreak linked to on Friday? The one about Gov. Chris Sununu's choice for NH poet laureate having penned a sexually suggestive poem about Condoleeza Rice? Sununu axed the nomination on Friday and said he'll try again. In an email to the AP on Saturday, the dropped poet, Daniel Moran, said the furor was silly. The poem, he explained, was the “imagined musings of an adolescent crush.”Still catching up on Friday.... The NH Supreme Court most likely put an end to the Northern Pass project. The court ruled unanimously that the state's Site Evaluation Committee had not erred in rejecting Eversource's bid to run a $1.6 billion, 1,090 megawatt, high-voltage transmission line to carry Hydro-Quebec power to southern New England. Eversource says it may apply for another project.It's not just Vermont: Independent booksellers are thriving in NH, too. NH Business Review has a rundown of the resilience of independents around the state, including Gibson's in Concord, Toadstool in Peterborough, White Birch in Conway... and Allie Levy's still-to-come Still North in the old Dartmouth Bookstore space. In Exeter, Water Street changed its mission from selling books to building "a diverse and vibrant community around the written word.”Opioid distributors got 191 pills for every person in Vermont from 2005-12. After a legal battle, The Washington Post and WV's Charleston Gazette-Mail last week finally got their hands on federal Drug Enforcement Agency data that helps detail the roots of the opioid crisis. Seven Days crunched the numbers for Vermont. There were 119,480,773 oxycodone and hydrocodone pills sold at wholesale--the database doesn't track sales to consumers, just the inflow.Put a fern in your cap. That's the upshot of a piece by David Brooks, the Concord Monitor's Granite Geek (here in the VN), about how to avoid getting bitten by deer flies. They've been especially annoying this year. But they swarm to the highest point, so putting something above your head to attract them works. Or you could go the Nova Scotia route: Build pretend dragonflies--a deer fly predator--out of bobby pins, colored foam and green string. Your choice.Okay, yeah, cider donuts in NH, maple creamees in VT. Buzzfeed's up with a list of the most popular dessert in each of the 50 states. These are crowdsourced, so some of the choices might be a little suspect. Really, Connecticut? You couldn't do better than Carvel? Still, I am so making tracks for Nebraska. And -- purely out of scientific curiosity, mind you -- Michigan. But I think I'll be staying away from Utah.SO, GOT PLANS?Two game-changing local nonprofits are inviting the public in for a look at what they do:
Hartford Dismas House is holding a block party starting at 5. Staff, board members, volunteers and residents to talk about the group's work to bring former prisoners and the community together.
And Willing Hands, which has moved into its new space on Church Street in Norwich, is holding an open house and tour of its new facility and garden.
Meanwhile, the Woodstock History Center's got John Belohlavek talking about women on both sides of the Mexican-American War. He's a history prof at the University of South Florida whose book, Patriots, Prostitutes and Spies, details how women on both sides of the war (1846-48) "were propelled by the bloody conflict to adopt new roles and expand traditional ones." They played crucial, often prominent, roles--and then, within a few decades, all had been forgotten.Or you could go to Woodstock for another type of history: Pentangle's got Echo in the Canyon. It opens with the Byrds' Turn, Turn, Turn, which pretty much sets you right down in a time and a place: LA in the mid-'60s. There's the Beach Boys, too, and Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas, and how they all created the soundtrack to an era and influenced bands to come. "The ’60s were really blessed,” Tom Petty says, in his last interview on film. “All that stuff showed up at once.” Starts at 7:30.Hope you made it through the weekend with good humor intact. See you tomorrow.
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