GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, warmer. Not warm warm, but with winds from the south and clouds clearing out for the middle part of the day, we'll reach the upper 30s or even lower 40s on what's shaping up to be the choicest day of the week. Tonight, some clouds and that balmy southern air will keep lows around freezing.Ice song. Though it's more like a trill, actually. The other day, Terri Munson's grandkids were skipping stones on a thinly iced-over portion of Eastman Pond. The pond answered back—and Terri caught the sound.In case you happen to be somewhere over near Holderness late tonight... Okay, the odds that you'll actually encounter this are tiny, but hey, it's cool to know about: Tonight and early tomorrow morning, a New Jersey trucking company will be hauling a huge load of equipment from Nashua to Holderness: in all, 239 feet long (we're talking over 3/4 of a football field) and 455,000 pounds. It'll be headed up to Exit 25 on I-93, then onto NH 175A and NH 175; the whole route will involve 30 bridge crossings requiring rolling road blocks. If all goes well, it's due to begin at 9 pm and finish up tomorrow at 2 am.Rivendell board foresees shuttering Fairlee's Samuel Morey School, repurposing or selling the property. That decision came at its Nov. 14 meeting, the board wrote in a listserv post on Monday (you'll find it here: make your way to 11/27 posts and look for "Rivendell Community Letter"); it backs a three-year budget proposal from Rivendell administrators that seeks to find budget savings by creating multi-age classrooms in the '25-'26 school year and moving Morey students to a Rivendell Academy building the following year. The notion, the board said, "found support" at a series of community forums.Judge sides with Woodstock resident on sexual harassment op-ed. You may remember that earlier this year, Devon Kurtz published a commentary in the VT Standard alleging that the former director of the Woodstock Inn's athletic club, Alejandro Figueroa, had harassed him; Figueroa sued Kurtz for defamation and other wrongs. Now, reports VTDigger's Ethan Weinstein, a VT superior court judge has struck down Figueroa's claims, ruling that Kurtz's op-ed fell within the bounds of a VT law protecting speech against lawsuits aimed at stifling "public participation." Figueroa's lawyer is mulling an appeal.SPONSORED: Prydein and The Yale Alley Cats headline Wassail Weekend! Pentangle Arts kicks off Wassail Weekend with two special live concerts. Friday, Dec. 8 features the return of the popular Burlington-based Prydein, whose bagpipe rock with a holiday kick is not to be missed. Saturday evening Dec. 9 features The Yale Alley Cats, whose world-renowned a cappella vocals capture the spirit of the season. Beer & wine both nights provided by The Worthy Kitchen. Tickets are $35 Adults and $25 for 16 and under. 7:30pm – 9:30pm; lobby opens at 6:30, doors at 7:00. Sponsored by Pentangle Arts.Cartoonist Harry Bliss on James Sturm: "I just want him to slow down." It would take more space than this item has room to summarize Sturm's career, from The Onion to Raw to helping co-found Seattle's archetypal alt-weekly The Stranger to heading to VT (and reading Watership Down to help him settle in) to building WRJ's Center for Cartoon Studies into an artistic force to writing and drawing his own books and then conceiving and writing the graphic novel version of Watership Down. [Pause for breath.] So imagine trying to summarize Dan Bolles' fun Seven Days profile of Sturm. You should just read it.SPONSORED: The Family Place’s 21st Annual Gingerbread Festival this Saturday! It will run from 9 am to 4 pm at Tracy Hall and the Norwich Congregational Church in Norwich. The Gingerbread Festival is a family-friendly event offering a display and silent auction of over 100 gingerbread houses, a store with handcrafts and gift items, a café for a hot lunch, gingerbread house-making demonstration, cookie decorating, and fun activities for children. Admission is $10 per family or $5 per individual. All proceeds benefit The Family Place. Sponsored by The Family Place.“We’re crushed. I’ve never gotten that close to, you know, hoping for something.” Remember that painting that a New Hampshire woman, Tracy Donahue, bought for $4 at a Savers thrift store that turned out to be by NC Wyeth and sold at auction for $191K? Well, the NYT's Matt Stevens (gift link) has followed up: The buyer, who lives in Australia, refused to pay, and Donahue and her husband have the painting back. Plus a new cardboard box. Luckily, they only spent the money in their minds. They're considering next steps for the painting, but right now, Donahue says, "it’s worth $4 — and a cardboard box.”When it comes to family planning contracts in NH, fifth time is not the charm. Yesterday, for the fifth straight time, the Exec Council rejected contracts proposed by the state with Planned Parenthood and two other health centers, with all four Republicans voting against and Cinde Warmington, the lone Democrat on the council, in favor. The GOP members have repeatedly raised concerns the money might be used to fund abortion services, though audits have shown public money is kept separate. The council supported family planning with four other groups, reports NH Bulletin's Annmarie Timmins.NH Supreme Court rules in two big cases, on gerrymandering and public access to police disciplinary files.
In the first, reports NHPR's Josh Rogers, the justices split 3-2 in deciding that political gerrymandering in New Hampshire centers on “non-justiciable political questions" and is not fodder for the courts. The ruling involved a 2022 lawsuit by Democrats charging that district boundaries passed by the GOP-controlled legislature for the state Senate and the Executive Council had unconstitutionally been drawn "in ways that allow Republicans to claim Council and Senate majorities regardless of receiving fewer overall votes," Rogers reports.
The second case involved a dispute between the ACLU and the NH State Police over the disciplinary records of a state trooper fired in 2021 after "he illegally searched someone’s phone without a warrant and misled investigators," reports NHPR's Paul Cuno-Booth. The state had claimed police did not have to hand those records over to the ACLU; in a 4-1 decision, the justices disagreed, ruling that police disciplinary records can be subject to public records requests from the public.
7,000 miles of trails. That's how much Leb's Twin State Trail Busters, Canaan's Mt. Cardigan Snowmobile Club, and NH's dozens of other snowmobile clubs groom annually. In all, reports NH Bulletin's Hadley Barndollar, the Bureau of Trails will give some $2.6 million to roughly 100 clubs to maintain the state's vast network, which requires large groomers and an army of volunteers. The result, says the director of the state snowmobile association, is that "when there is statewide snow coverage, you can pretty much snowmobile anywhere across the state into Canada, Maine, or Vermont,”Say goodbye to "Chamber of Commerce snow"? It's not that the dry, fluffy stuff is going to disappear, but the kind of heavy, wet snow that knocked out power to tens of thousands of Vermonters Sunday night and Monday morning is becoming more frequent, thanks to warmer winters and more extreme precipitation. That storm, reports VT Public's Lexi Krupp, caused more outages to electricity customers than all but four other storms since 2009. One of the challenges for forecasters (as with Sunday's storm), says Krupp: "Wet snowfall can...be difficult to predict."It better not rain. Northern VT will fall within the slim “path of totality” during the April 2024 total solar eclipse, and Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen reports it's spurred years of planning: thousands of cardboard safety glasses on order, UVM classes cancelled, Pink Floyd cover bands booked, and hotel prices tripled. Not everywhere, though; Wendy Monninger, owner of the Marshfield Inn and Motel, didn’t have time to raise prices when she saw bookings surge, but in any case, “I'm not going to price-gouge people.” Plan your viewing spot now—if you miss this, you’ll have to wait until 2106 to see the next one.33 consonants, 12 vowels, and a staggering number of conjugations. Fewer than half of the 400,000 Navajo people now living speak their language. On Big Think, Tim Brinkof looks at how history, social pressures, economics, and education factor into the decline—and potential resurgence—of the language. Learning it is a challenge: Navajo separated from Apache hundreds of years ago and is astonishingly complex, with various tongue positions, exhalations, and multiple pronunciations for the same word. Verbs morph with their objects, writes Brinkof. “If you want to ask someone to give you a glass of water, you’ll first have to check whether the glass is empty, full, or half full.”In 1939, at Tuckerman Ravine, "people saw what was possible on skis" and it changed American skiing for good. The hell-bent-for-leather race known as The Inferno had actually arrived six years earlier, but it was skier Toni Matt's 80 mph schuss down the headwall in '39 that spurred big-mountain skiing in the US, says moguls pro Marcus Caston in this 6-minute ode to skiing at Tuck's that Blizzard-Tecnica just dropped. Plenty of current ski footage along with the history, of course. "Tuckerman's is this, like, rite of passage," says local Hillary McCloy. Plus a puzzled Caston: "Can I say, 'Tuckerman's'?"The Thursday Vordle. With a word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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Swag maestro Jeremiah Brophy has created this great-looking puzzle in 252- and 520-piece sizes, just in time for those long nights by the fire. Plus, of course, fleece vests, hoodies, sweatshirts, even a throw blanket to keep you warm. And hats, mugs, and—once you work up a puzzle-piece sweat—tees. Take a look!
This afternoon at 5 pm, the Vermont Comedy Festival launches its four-day standup extravaganza with a kick-off party at Ramunto's in Bridgewater, then an 8 pm "1-minute standup battle" at the Woolen Mill Comedy Club, followed by a DJ'd dance party at 10 pm. Though events center on the Woolen Mill in Bridgewater, they're taking place all over: at Killington, at the Grange Theater in S. Pomfret (a musical comedy variety show Friday), and, for headliner Colin Quinn Saturday night, at Woodstock Town Hall Theater. In all, some 60 comics will be taking part, including big names like Quinn, NYC's Ashley Austin Morris, and musical comedy star Nikki MacCallum.
At 6:30 this evening, the West Claremont Center for Music and the Arts presents the Apple Hill String Quartet, with pianist Sally Pinkas. The quartet, who perform all over the country, are resident artists at the Apple Hill Center for Chamber Music in Nelson, NH; Pinkas, who is pianist-in-residence at the Hop, is of course a regular on concert stages all over the world. At the Union Church in Claremont.
Also at 6:30, Interplay’s November jazz jam takes over the Vermont Room at WRJ's Hotel Coolidge. The monthly event is both social gathering and communal practice session, open to both players and listeners. As they write, "Instrumentalists, you can join in on the songs others bring, or you can bring 8 copies of the sheet music for tunes you want to play. Singers, please bring 6 to 8 copies of lead sheets or sheet music for your tunes in your key." No link.
This evening at 7, Shaker Bridge Theater continues its inaugural season at the Briggs Opera House in WRJ with It's a Wonderful Life: A Live Radio Play. In Joe Landry's version of the holiday classic, it's George Bailey, the evil Mr. Potter, Mary, Violet, Giuseppe Martini, Clarence of course, and a slew of other characters, all played by a handful of actors performing a '40s-era radio broadcast. Runs through Sunday, Dec. 17.
Also at 7, the Claremont Opera House presents A Seussified Christmas Carol. Which pretty much says it all: Dickens' classic reworked by author Peter Bloedel in rhymed couplets to sound like... well, here's what the Opera House says: "With zoot fruited juices and binka bird geese, from Bed-Headed Fred to Timmy Loo Hoo, this tale of glorious holiday cheer is similar to something Dr. Seuss might have come up with, if he ever had his way with the story." Runs tonight and tomorrow night with 20 young local actors.
And anytime, you can check out JAM's highlights for the week, including former political consultant Maynard Goldman's entire OSHER series on "The Road to the White House" in 2024; the Lampshade Poets' recent reading at JAM; and US Rep. Becca Balint at the Bugbee Senior Center last week on life on Capitol Hill and issues of concern to Vermonters.
Who do you think you are?
No, no, not
you
. We're talking about Mr. Big Stuff, the subject of Jean Knight's double platinum 1971 single and R&B chart-topper for Stax Records. Knight, the New Orleans-born soul singer, died last week in Tampa at the age of 80. After her "Mr. Big Stuff" breakout she recorded plenty of other songs—"You Got the Papers But I Got the Man", a cover of "My Toot Toot", and more. But she'll be best remembered for that one song,
.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Poetry editor: Michael Lipson Associate Editor: Jonea Gurwitt About Rob About Michael
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