GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Arctic air drops by for a visit. Not that you'll really notice it until tonight, though the day's going to be more blustery than usual—but also mostly sunny. High in the upper 20s by the afternoon, then temps start dropping...down into the singe digits tonight. Winds from the northwest, with gusts overnight hitting above 20 mph and wind chills by daybreak tomorrow well in the minuses.Snow as cake icing. At least, that's what Norwich photographer Brenda Petrella saw when the light hit the wind-formed snow just right on Monday evening. Now, of course, it's all covered up...Meanwhile... Also Monday, Jean and Chuck Townsend looked up at the sky in West Canaan, NH, to find a set of sundogs with wide strips of colors at the bottom and a thin white band across the top. What was intriguing, Jean writes, is that "the colors were upside down from the usual rainbow, which has red on top. These all had red on the side closest to the sun."Storage issue at Springfield Hospital leads VT to consider discarding 860 vaccine doses. The Moderna vaccine needs to be stored at between 2 and 8 degrees Celsius, and while Springfield's equipment registered a temperature within range, the state's sensors recorded a temperature of 9.1 degrees. State officials called Springfield to cancel a planned vaccination clinic a half hour before it was scheduled to start, and state officials and Moderna spent the afternoon in talks about how to proceed, reports VTDigger's Amanda Gokee. The state's sending technicians to check the monitors' calibration.Dartmouth engineering prof wins Emmy, though not for performing. In a first for the college's engineering faculty, Eric Fossum won the award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences for inventing the intra-pixel charge transfer CMOS image sensor—the basis, writes Thayer's Julie Bonette, "for all modern CMOS image sensors, including almost all cell-phone cameras, webcams, and many digital-still cameras." Fossum invented it while he was working for NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.So, after you've stuck that thing up your nose, what happens? A lot, it turns out. The Dartmouth's Brian Zheng looks into the behind-the-scenes effort to keep the college's Covid-testing operation running smoothly. There's Axiom Medical's 15-person team—“Axiom is really like, ‘OK, if you want to get tested, we’ll do it.' It could be on a mountain, or it could be in this lovely fieldhouse,” says team manager Lars Barr—and the courier who drives 1,000 to 2,000 tests each day to Cambridge, MA, and the Broad Institute there that does the tests and uploads data and sends emails...DHMC worker's unknown colleague donates part of her liver, helps save his life. Steve Burlew, an IT worker at the hospital, was born with a rare genetic disease that affects the liver. As his condition worsened, his doctors recommended using a portion of a "living donor's" organ that would grow over time. In desperation, Burlew's family took to Facebook to find one. The woman who turned out to be a match also turned out, reports WCAX's Scott Fleishman, to work in DHMC's IT department—but in a different building. “How does this happen? I mean, I’m still amazed by it,” Burlew says.SPONSORED: Join us at the VINS Nature Center this weekend for Vermont Days. Special $10 admission for Vermont residents on Saturday, Jan. 30 or Sunday, Jan. 31. All outdoor exhibits are open: Raptors, Songbirds, Adventure Playscape, Nature Trails (snowshoes available) and the amazing Forest Canopy Walk (excluding the Spider Web). In addition, the Birds Are Dinosaurs exhibit is open. You'll need to reserve your tickets in advance. Please present a VT driver’s license upon entry. Sponsored by the Vermont Institute of Natural Science.“Together they were just magical people.” It was 20 years ago yesterday that Half and Susanne Zantop were murdered in their home in Etna. In a commemoration organized by their former colleagues yesterday at a garden named for them, the two Dartmouth professors were remembered for their impact on the lives of the people they knew. “Those of us who remain continue to celebrate the community that they really, in many ways, started and nurtured," said writer and English lecturer Alexis Jetter. "It was important to them that we carry it on and they made that clear.” (Valley News)Some advice if you're signing up for a vaccine in NH: Pay attention to that email from the CDC. "As a guy with 'geek' in the name of his newspaper column I’m supposed to be techy-savvy, so it’s embarrassing to admit how confused I got when signing up for a COVID-19 vaccine this week," writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog. He walks through his mistakes—misreading the signup URL at first, ignoring a followup email from the CDC because he expected it from the state, and others—so you don't repeat them.Things get tenser in NH House. You may remember that House Speaker Sherman Packard removed Democratic state Rep. Rosemarie Rung from her committee assignments after she tweeted about the Troy, NH police chief who'd attended the Jan. 6 rally at the US Capitol. Yesterday, she tried to attend a committee hearing. Packard stormed into the room, told her to leave, and called the GOP chairman into the hall—where, apparently, he gave him a dressing down for allowing Rung to show up. InDepthNH's Nancy West details the story and backstory.Meanwhile, in a different committee room... Remember the third graders in Hollis who, back in the late fall, got their state rep to propose naming the daring jumping spider the NH state arachnid? Well, they got a chance to make their case to the House Environment and Agriculture Committee yesterday. “We have a state vegetable, and I don’t really like vegetables so I think we should have a state spider to even it out a bit,” said one student. NH also has a state fruit (the pumpkin), but as the AP's Holly Ramer points out, legislators in 2015 refused to name a state raptor. It could be touch and go.Outbreak at Norwich University puts in-person classes at risk. Since students arrived back on campus Jan. 11, WCAX reports, the school has recorded 67 positive Covid-19 cases. It has 75 students in quarantine and 56 in isolation. School officials believe the outbreak is contained to campus."One case of attempted, but thwarted, election fraud out of a highest-ever total of about 374,000 ballots cast." In Seven Days, political columnist Dave Gram takes out after Rob Roper, president of the Ethan Allen Institute, for casting doubt on the integrity of VT's elections with no evidence for his claims. Roper counters that the problem is that fraud can't be detected. Taking pains to detail what the evidence does and doesn't show, Gram argues that Roper is pushing an ideological agenda. And that one case? Atty Genl TJ Donovan says it was a "provocateur" testing the security of mail-in balloting.“They are making an attempt to basically drop a nuke on communities across the state just because of their sense of personal entitlement." That is Montpelier's city clerk, John Odum, who like town and city clerks across VT is fuming about a lawsuit brought by a Connecticut title insurance company trying to force them to return to pre-pandemic office hours. The suit, reports VPR's Peter Hirschfeld, contends that clerks' pandemic protocols have interfered with access to land records for real estate transactions. "It would take a lot to make me forget about the pandemic, but the quiet of the Craftsbury trails came close." Seven Days' Margaret Grayson likes downhill skiing, but had always spurned cross-country. "It requires going uphill, for one thing, and frankly that was reason enough for me to avoid it for many years," she writes. This winter, she decided to check it out at the Craftsbury Outdoor Center, one of VT's premier—still with a venerable VT vibe—xc spots. "I can report with confidence: It's fun even if you're terrible at it," she affirms.Kärsivällisyyttä. That, in case you had trouble sleeping last night because you were wondering, is Finnish for "patience" or "endurance" (see yesterday's Samurai paper-folding item). Kathy Christie spent time there as an exchange student. Pronouncing it, she writes, is "no walk in the park. The ä = our a in cat. The r’s are rolled. The s’s are a bit whistley. Any double vowel or consonant is simply pronounced for twice as long a time as a single. And y = the ü sound in German, say an “e” with your lips making a “u”. Easy peasy. Good luck."Maybe somewhere out there a Kermit geode is just waiting for you to pick it up... Mike Bowers is a California-based geologist who, last year, was out rock hunting in Brazil's Rio Grande do Sul region. He found an agate that, split in half, revealed two pretty unmistakeable Cookie Monsters. "There are a few famous agates out there: the owl, the scared face…," he wrote, but well-defined likenesses are rare. He's been offered $10K for them.
Time to catch up...
Dartmouth reports 13 active cases among students (up 1) and 4 among faculty and staff. In the meantime, 24 students and 8 faculty/staff are in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 14 students and 20 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH added 440 new cases yesterday for a cumulative total of 63,563. The state crossed the 1,000-death threshold with 12 new deaths, bringing the total to 1,006. Meanwhile, 223 people are hospitalized (up 10). The current active caseload stands at 5,214 (down 216); 90 percent of all cases have recovered. The state now reports 280 active cases in Grafton County (down 1), 155 in Sullivan (down 2), and 375 in Merrimack (down 23). Town by town, the state says that Claremont has 67 active cases (up 4), Newport has 26 (down 1), Lebanon has 22 (down 1), Unity has 21 (no change), Hanover has 18 (down 3), Charlestown has 12 (down 2), Enfield has 12 (no change), New London has 11 (up 1), Grantham has 11 (up 1), Sunapee has 10 (no change), Canaan has 10 (no change), Haverhill has 8 (down 1), Rumney has 7 (no change), Warren has 6 (no change), and Wentworth has 5 (no change). Dorchester, Plainfield, Grafton, Springfield, Newbury, and Wilmot all have 1-4. Croydon is off the list.
VT reported 78 new cases yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 11,379. It now has 3,51 active cases (down 29) with 67.6 percent of all cases recovered. There was 1 new death, bringing the total to 172 all told, while 46 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (down 4). Windsor County gained 1 new case to stand at 800 for the pandemic (with 176 over the past 14 days). Orange County also had 1 new case and is now at 409 cumulatively (with 39 cases over the past 14 days).
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At noon today, Dartmouth's Dickey Center and the American Academy in Berlin host a panel discussion, "A Superpower Laid Low: America and the World After January 6." It features defense and national security expert Michèle Flournoy, who was under-secretary for defense under Barack Obama; Ivan Krastev, chair of the Centre for Liberal Strategies in Sofia, Bulgaria; government Prof. William Wohlforth of Dartmouth; and will be moderated by Daniel Benjamin, president of the American Academy in Berlin and former director of the Dickey Center.
This evening at 7, the Norwich Bookstore hosts Melanie Finn online, talking about her new psychological thriller, The Hare, whose official publication date was Tuesday. "This is a page-turner about a tough woman and her con-artist lout of a partner, and I will eat my laptop if it doesn’t get optioned for TV or film the minute it hits bookshelves," Molly Young writes in NY mag's The Vulture. "It is also woven through with ideas about feminism, parenting, narcissism, and self-sufficiency — a book that is easy to read without being remotelylightweight."
Also at 7, Standing Trees Vermont, a group dedicated to protecting forests on public lands in the state, is hosting an online screening of Burned: Are Trees the New Coal?, a 2018 documentary about the biomass fuel industry and its hunger for trees, especially in the eastern US. The film delves into everything from energy policy to the dynamics of forest ecology to the effects of deforestation to the practices of the biomass industry—a lot of biomass processing is on the East Coast, since wood pellets get shipped off to England and Europe. Followed by a Q&A with two of the filmmakers.
And also at 7 pm, Marlboro/Emerson College political theorist and lecturer on the Constitution Meg Mott will be talking about the First Amendment, hosted by NH Humanities. The amendment, she notes, "begins with the freedom to follow a higher moral standard (freedom of religion) and ends with political protest (freedom to petition the government for a redress of grievances)." Her Zoom talk will consider how the Framers understood these First Freedoms and how we might think about them in the context of current events.
And, um, also at 7, Spruce Peak Arts is streaming a concert on its YouTube channel, "Let's Tango," with the Boston-based Duo Cello e Basso and Brazilian pianist Victor Cayres. They'll be performing their own arrangements of the music of Astor Piazzolla and Carlos Gardel, including both well-known and more obscure works. Free, but you'll need to register for the link.
The French acrobat, juggler, dancer, and all-around "nouveau cirque" performer Yoann Bourgeois is also, the
New Yorker
once wrote, "an unsurpassed master of the trampoline as a tool for poetry." You can see why in
that somehow manages to walk (or is it bounce?) the lines between lyricism, pathos, and slapstick.
See you tomorrow.
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