GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
High pressure builds in, air dries out. A fine day to be outside. And it's going to be warm! Not many clouds out there today, temps getting up into the mid-60s, breezes from the northwest. Lows tonight only around 50.Divided Hartford board decides to let voters decide on pool. In a 4-3 vote Tuesday night, the selectboard opted to put the $3.3 million pool project approved by voters in March before town meeting again next March. The majority argued that, facing financial fallout from the pandemic, voters should decide if they still want it. The three dissenting board members contended that voters had already decided and that delaying the project will simply increase its cost. (Valley News)Thyme expands. "At a time when many restaurants are strategizing about how to continue through the upcoming winter," writes Susan Apel on her Artful blog, "owner Eileen McGuckin’s plan is to go bigger." The WRJ restaurant has taken over a vacant studio in the Tip Top Building and turned it into a dining area, which gives Thyme both more seating capacity and more room for distancing. The new room looks like Thyme's main space, McGuckin says, "so that no one would feel like they were 'banished to the back room'." ACCUSED: Willie the Steer. AGE: 1. You know that whoever writes VT State Police incident summaries went home happy yesterday. Late in the morning, Willie got onto I-91 in Newbury and wandered around in the north- and southbound lanes for a while. State police slowed and re-directed traffic until he "was eventually guided back through an opening in the interstate fence and returned home uninjured." Those hooves are made for walkin'... 225. That, remarkably, is the number of people who so far have volunteered to work the polls in Hanover this election. Normally, the figure's about 80. And this year they include Dartmouth undergrads and young moms as well as retirees. All of this is in Daniela Allee's profile on NHPR of Jen Hutchins and Jess Brooks, two of those volunteers. Town clerk Betsy McLain is pleased. The outpouring "integrates the whole community into something that should be a community event instead of just a cohort of people who happen to have the time running your elections," she says. "It really should be all of us.” SPONSORED: If you sing along, no one will mind. Oenophiles and operaphiles are invited to Opera North’s special virtual wine tasting at 5 pm Monday, November 9 or Monday, November 16. You’ll receive two specially selected bottles of wine from Napa Valley’s Bouchaine Vineyards delivered to your door. A Napa sommelier will guide our wine tasting over Zoom, and Opera North alumni will offer a special musical treat—a performance of Menotti's The Telephone. Hit the maroon link for more information and to register. Sponsored by Opera North.
School bus driver's widower donates to Hanover High scholarship fund. Canaan's Joey Billingham wants to make the $1,000 gift in honor of his late wife, Heather, who suffered a heart attack while driving kids to school along Lyme Road last month. The two were married five years but had known one another most of their lives, the Union Leader's Damien Fisher reports. They "loved to talk, and were in constant communication throughout the day," Fisher writes. Says Billingham, “It’s kind of different now, sitting around and waiting for a text that isn’t gonna come."Oxbow HS case tied to Montpelier hockey cluster. In a message Tuesday, reports the VN, Orange East Superintendent Emilie Knisley said that while half of the 34 cases linked to hockey and broomball at the Central Vermont Memorial Civic Center are among people who play there, the other half caught it from infected players. Oxbow has gone to all-remote learning this week. In addition, two New London-area schools—Kearsarge High and Kearsarge Elementary—have joined the list of Upper Valley schools with cases.VT, NH snubbed at craft beer awards. I know. It's outrageous! But there it is... The Great American Beer Festival handed out its awards virtually this year. Oregon walked away with 22. But the twin states? Nada. Not Hill Farmstead, not Lawson's, not Moat Mountain... At least Allagash was in the mix to uphold New England pride. (Boston Globe, there may be a paywall.)Remote learning doesn't disqualify students from voting in NH, AG's office says. In a letter responding to efforts by the state GOP to keep college students from voting in NH if they're learning remotely, Assistant Attorney General Nicholas Chong Yen yesterday wrote that if a student has previously registered legally, he or she "does not lose his or her domicile due to temporary absence." This is obviously big news for Hanover, where Dartmouth students can comprise as much as 30 percent of voters. Speaking of voting, have you considered showing up in a pony-drawn cart? Terry Allen, an E. Montpelier photographer, has taken to documenting central Vermonters who are getting things done early by mailing or using a drop box or bringing their ballots to the town clerk. "People are really invested in the results of the election because they know it will, in some ways, determine the future of democracy in this country," she tells Seven Days. (Maroon link takes you to Allen's portfolio.)"The hunters are going to be cranky." To the list of pandemic-era shortages, we can now add guns and ammo. “I’m going into deer season, and I have no .308 ammo at all and no 30-30 ammo," a Rutland gun-shop owner tells the Herald's Gordon Dritschilo. First-time gun owners are buying guns "to protect themselves," says the head of VT's NRA affiliate; the head of the national Liberal Gun Club says its membership has grown substantially, driven by White House rhetoric. Whatever, ammo shortages are across the board just as Vermonters' interest in hunting is rising.That $8 billion Purdue Pharma settlement had some of its roots in VT. The deal announced yesterday by federal prosecutors includes three guilty pleas, two of them related to a kickback scheme uncovered and pursued by Vermont's US Attorney, Christina Nolan. “The unlawful, dangerous scheme put profits over people by seeking to increase scripts for addictive drugs,” Nolan said at yesterday's press conference in DC.So did the CDC's new definition of "close contact." Yesterday, the federal health agency expanded its definition for contact tracing purposes to anyone who's spent a cumulative 15 minutes or more over 24 hours within six feet of someone who's infectious, not just 15 consecutive minutes. This comes after a VT correctional officer—who was masked at all times—contracted Covid after "multiple brief encounters" with six inmates who were mostly, but not always, wearing masks as they awaited test results that later came back positive.Rutland school board opts to abandon mascot. Joining the move away from stereotyped mascots both in VT and nationally, the board voted 6-4 to jettison Rutland High's "Raiders" mascot and arrowhead imagery; the moniker was once the "Red Raiders," with an image featuring a Native American wearing a headdress. Though some board members wanted more public discussion, the majority noted that most speakers at a recent forum felt the current symbol "creates a divisive and unwelcoming environment in our schools."Dead North is not a haunted house. No, says radio producer Erica Heilman in her latest VPR piece, it's "an awful and dark mile through cornfields and haunted buildings and, scariest of all, Danville [VT] residents. Neighbors like JP and Bill and Logger Dave." Heilman checked out Dead North, which for the last 19 years has been set up by Mike Boudreau next to his Great Vermont Corn Maze using animatronics and special effects and townspeople who are really into scaring people. I'm guessing you'll want the audio for this.Hey word people! We now have a museum! And no, it's not a library. It's Planet Word, and it opened yesterday in DC. It's designed by Local Projects, the same people did the 9/11 Museum in NYC and the Equal Justice Museum in Alabama, and it's "the world’s first voice recognition powered museum,” says Local Projects' founder. There's a globe that encourages you to try words in 30 different languages, a library with "books" that spring into graphics and narration when you lay them down, and a spot where people pair up to read jokes to one another. Field trip once this whole thing ends, 'k?
Okay, so...
Dartmouth is down to just 1 active case, a student. In all, 5 students and 8 faculty/staff are in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 9 students and 9 faculty/staff are in isolation as they await results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 92 new positive test results yesterday, bringing its official total to 9,917. There was 1 new death, which are now at 469. Despite the new cases, the state's current caseload dropped to 798 (down 26), including 19 in Grafton County (down 10 over the last 2 days), 6 in Sullivan (up 1), and 154 in Merrimack (down 6). Hanover's at 5 active cases (down 2), while there are 1-4 cases each in Lyme, Lebanon, Plainfield, Canaan, Enfield, Grantham, Springfield, New London, Sunapee, and Newbury. There are also now 1-4 cases in Orange and Grafton, but Sunapee's off the list.
VT reported 16 new cases yesterday, bringing its official total to 1,971, with 205 of those still active (up 8). Deaths remain at 58 total, and 1 person with a confirmed case is hospitalized. Windsor County gained 3 new cases to stand at 113 over the course of the pandemic, with 18 cases in the past 14 days. Orange County remains at 31 cumulative cases, with 6 new cases in the past 14 days.
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Today at noon, AARP New England is putting on a webinar on how to avoid internet fraud: "Inside the Mind of a Master Con-Artist: How to Protect Yourself Online." It features Brett Johnson, who among other things invented a tax-return fraud scheme, a variety of identity-theft scams, and ShadowCrew—a precursor to the dark web—then went to prison. These days he consults to the Secret Service and others, and has been doing a series of these presentations for AARP.
At 5 pm, the Dickey Center for International Understanding at Dartmouth is hosting three distinguished foreign policy experts for a Q&A on the 2020 elections and the future of US foreign policy: Johnnie Carson, former assistant secretary of state for African affairs; Chris Savos, former director of the CIA's weapons intelligence and nonproliferation center; and Anne Witkowsky, former deputy coordinator for homeland security at the State Department and then deputy assistant secretary at Defense. They did a scene-setting discussion, which you can watch here. The followup Q&A at 5 will be live, and you'll need to register.
Also at 5 pm, you could catch writer and historian Gretchen Sorin talking about her new book, Driving While Black: African American Travel and the Road the Civil Rights, the book that underpins Ric Burns's upcoming documentary on the role of the automobile in Black people's lives in the 20th century. Sorin's book looks at "the creation of a parallel, unseen world of black motorists, who relied on travel guides, black-only businesses, and informal communications networks to keep them safe." She'll be talking to SUNY Oneonta history prof William Walker, hosted by Northshire Books.
At 7 pm, via the Norwich Bookstore, local mystery writer Sarah Stewart Taylor will be on the Children's Literacy Foundation's virtual book club for adults. They'll be talking about Taylor's new novel, set in Dublin, The Mountains Wild.
Tonight at 8, NHPBS is airing Communities and Consequences II: Rebalancing New Hampshire’s Human Ecology, a sequel to a 2008 project on the state's aging population and its economic and social consequences. Tonight's program looks at how communities are finding ways to "create vibrant and welcoming places for people of all ages and backgrounds."
And anytime over the next few days, the Hop's got two new films to stream. River City Drumbeat is about an after-school community drum corps in W. Louisville at a moment of inflection: Its longtime leader, Edward "Nardie" White, is preparing to step down and pass the reins to Albert Shumake, a young man whose life was transformed by the drumline. The film, the NYT wrote, "listens for this community’s heartbeat, finding its steady pulse just as expected: healthy and strong." Then there's The Dark Divide, based on butterfly expert Robert Pyle's book, Where Bigfoot Walks: Crossing the Dark Divide. Per the Austin Chronicle, when you hear it's about a guy "with nothing left to lose heading into the Pacific Northwest in search of Bigfoot, your first thought would be, 'Well, that's a horror movie, right?' You have no reason to expect a beautiful, quiet, lyrical, funny wilderness trip, a meditation on loss and picking up the pieces, and the most perfectly poignant performance of David Cross' acting career." As always, films are free to Hop members.
Okay, time to wake up! I don't usually do rock in this spot because it's not always what you want over breakfast, but sometimes genius needs its due. Will Wilde is a British harmonicist known for inventing a harmonica tuning for hard rock.
Go for it: You'll greet the rest of the day eyes wide open.
See you tomorrow.
Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner by Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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