GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Definitely starting to feel uncharitable toward the words "mixed" and "precipitation." Not that today's system gives a hoot. There's a slot of warm air above and a system that, at some point this afternoon, is likely to move through mostly as rain, but with snow, sleet, and maybe freezing rain all tossed into the mix. Icing is unlikely below 1500 feet or outside the coldest hollows, and it look like it'll be all rain by dinnertime. Daylight high in the upper 30s, but we'll reach the low 40s before daybreak. Some winds tonight.Nostalgic for winter yet? Because whatever it's doing out there at the moment, temps in the 40s and the late-March-like cascade of drips from the roof don't really qualify. So just as a reminder...
Here's Green Woodlands in Dorchester at 5 below the other morning, from Jay Davis;
And the blowing snow in Thetford, with soundtrack, from Amanda DeRoy.
Okay, who skied in 6 miles with the Yale chair? If you've skied at Green Woodlands, you know that it has warming huts and that the hardest to get to—because it's up a steep climb—is the Mudgetts hut. The crew was a little nonplussed a few years back when a Harvard chair appeared there, given the different Ivy League school nearby. The following year, Dartmouth struck back with its own chair. So "you can imagine our surprise," the Green's folks wrote yesterday on their FB page, "when we went to Mudgetts this winter to restock supplies [and] found a Yale chair!" Game on, people. (Thanks, SVG!)VT schools, including Randolph, targeted in school shooting hoax. You may remember that in early December, schools throughout NH fielded hoax calls alerting them to an active shooter. Yesterday morning starting around 8:30, law enforcement agencies across VT received similar calls, sending police scrambling to 21 schools—where they determined the calls were a hoax, reports Seven Days' Alison Novak. Public Safety Commissioner Jennifer Morrison told a noon press conference, "If the assumption that these are swatting calls is true, this is terrorism, to evoke fear and chaos in a community.""Law enforcement should be at the table... but we shouldn't be the point of the spear." Homelessness, drug abuse, and mental health issues are all key issues for the Hartford police department, new chief Gregory Sheldon tells WCAX's Adam Sullivan, but the key to working on them will be partnerships with groups and agencies able to get resources quickly to those who need them. Sheldon talks over his priorities with Sullivan, including building trust with his officers and the community at large, and cementing ties with groups ready to help with the non-crime issues officers often confront.SPONSORED: When guys shop for Valentine’s Day... it’s usually an uninspired surgical air strike at a run-of-the-mill gift shop. But if you’re more than a Neanderthal, you could be a successful hunter-gatherer at Chapman's General in Fairlee. Chapman’s has locally crafted jewelry, decadent chocolates and sweets, and a superb wine selection. Gather it all into an eye-popping gift basket that won’t look like it came from the Stone Age. And don’t miss our once-a-year Valentine's jewelry sale! Sponsored by Chapman's General.At the Hood, "American art history" in a traveling Smithsonian exhibition. In particular, writes Seven Days' Pamela Polston, it's the 119 artworks by some 74 Chicano artists that make up "¡Printing the Revolution!" "Their aesthetic expressions in artwork, particularly printmaking, developed along with a broadening cultural and political consciousness as Mexican Americans," Polston says, making the exhibition a "vibrant" reflection of the times. The works get their ideas across "in a variety of lively visual modes — including satire, pop art, appropriation and portraiture — and printmaking techniques."Sure, the science matters, but what's really cool is watching a bat in super-slo-mo. In particular, a Pallas's long-tongued bat. They live in Central and South America, writes Michael Franco in New Atlas, have the fastest metabolism of any mammal, and happen to be the subjects of a Dartmouth research team looking into the role that their whiskers play as sensory organs. "Understanding the sensory world of other animals helps us 'see the world through their eyes' and understand their behavior, needs and challenges better," says lead author and biology post-doc Eran Amichai. Video at bottom.SPONSORED: Music, Film & Food Soiree at Billings Farm & Museum, Feb. 18! The Big Easy is coming to Billings just in time for Mardi Gras! Enjoy a screening of Jazz Fest: A New Orleans Story at 3:00pm, with fun to follow: live jazz with Michael Zsoldos and Ben Kogan, specialty cocktails, and a taste of Louisiana featuring authentic gumbo, muffuletta, and a sweet treat to finish. For Ages 21+. Advance tickets are $75/person, $85 at the door, and $65/members. Tickets include film, music, food, beer, wine, and one cocktail compliments of Vermont Spirits Distilling Co. Sponsored by Billings Farm & Museum."Our unassuming, modest Gunstock mountain as the Lexington Battle Green of postmodern American winter sports." Robert Sullivan was eight when he first took ski lessons at the Gilford mountain—and was smitten by local ski legend Penny Pitou—so he took great interest when the battle of Gunstock erupted last year. His article about the fight is part recap, part personal reminiscence, and part reflection on why the prospect of corporatizing a county-owned mountain raised so many hackles. "This battle was never about dollars and cents," he writes. "It was about [skiing's] heart and soul."Judge tells Slate Ridge owner to remove unpermitted buildings or face prison. Environmental Judge Thomas Durkin's ruling is the latest turn in the long-running legal case involving Daniel Banyai, owner of the paramilitary training facility in W. Pawlet, reports VTDigger's Emma Cotton. In 2021, Durkin ordered Banyai to pay fines for zoning violations and to dismantle buildings for which he'd never received a permit. Now, faced with Banyai's "willfulness, perhaps even an enthusiasm" for ignoring officialdom, Durkin has given him deadlines for the structures to come down or be sent to prison.As VT houses the unhoused in hotels, Rutland Town asks hotel owners to help pay for policing. The town, which surrounds the city and is incorporated separately, has four police officers, and calls for service—mostly from stores—have risen dramatically in recent years at the end of town where hotels are located, writes Dominic Minadeo in VTDigger. With no financial help for policing coming from the state, the town has been forging agreements with hotels that house people under the state's transitional housing and wintertime emergency shelter programs. “We thought it was reasonable," says one hotelier.“Vermont was coastal property. There wasn't anything to the east..." So says Steve Trombulak, a former Middlebury College professor. And then wham! Wayward land masses crash into the coast and: Welcome eastern New England. This week, Brave Little State revisits its 2017 look at how the different geological histories of VT and NH led to a divergence in landscape, livelihoods, and even politics. That the Greens were formed by “slamming” and the Whites were “blobs of magma” made all the difference to the bedrock, soil, trees, and, millions of years later, whether citizens were farmers or shipbuilders.“If you were looking for a start date for the era of conspicuous consumption and ‘planned obsolescence,’ you could hardly choose a better moment than this one.” OK, guess when. We’ll wait. And... you're wrong! The answer is: the 1920s, when GM started using color as a marketing tool, shifting hues every few years to convince buyers their old car was out of fashion. Ed Conway delves into the surprisingly gripping history of auto paint—the economics, manufacturing challenges, and chemistry—in his newsletter, Material World. His book about the history of six substances is due soon.The Thursday Vordle. With a fine word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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This evening at 6:30, the Norwich Historical Society hosts a Zoomed discussion, "Behind the scenes at the Norwich Inn"—a topic that may hold interest to you wherever you live if you're interested in what it takes to run an inn. Owner Joe Lavin and inkeeper Dave Burtonbush will talk about the inn's history and then take viewers on a tour to show how things work. By donation, 20 percent of which goes to Health Care & Rehabilitation Services.
Also at 6:30, Hanover's Howe Library hosts Pamela Weeks, curator of the New England Quilt Museum in Lowell, Mass., for a talk on "New England Quilts and the Stories They Tell." Weeks will delve into world history, women's history, industrial history, American history, New England history—and whatever else comes up, since participants can bring along a quilt for identification or story-telling. Both in-person and online.
And at 7 this evening, the Norwich Bookstore will host an evening dedicated to the late author Howard Frank Mosher, led by fiction writer and essayist Peter Orner. Mosher's fiction gave voice and literary presence to the Northeast Kingdom and its history. New editions of Mosher's Marie Blythe and Where the Rivers Flow North (to which Orner contributed the introduction) have recently been released.
At 7:30 this evening, the Parish Players kick off their annual ten-minute play festival (through Sunday this week, and again Thursday-Sunday next week). Seven plays by writers from around the country (including one by Orner), with directors Hetty Thomae, Jenn Langhus, Faith Catlin, Samantha Davidson Green, Brian Kenyon, and Zoe Fleer.
At 8 pm, the Hop—in Rollins Chapel—presents pianist Sally Pinkas with "From Vienna With Love": works by five Vienna-based composers: Marianna Martines, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, and Alexander Zemlinsky.
And this week, JAM's streaming highlights include a celebration at Andover NH's Proctor Academy of Richard Potter, the magician, ventriloquist, and performer who is often labeled "America's first Black celebrity" and who lived in Andover from 1814 to 1835; an interview with artist John Killacky about his “Flux/Flow/Elegies" installation this month at JAM; and Valley Improv's show last Friday, as temps plummeted outside and troupe members heated things up inside with a three-minute version of Frozen.
Now. Let's start the day with...
Brad Mehldau, whom Andrew Marantz just called "arguably the greatest working jazz pianist. Top five, for sure," in
The New Yorker
. Nonesuch Records tomorrow issues Mehldau's long-awaited album of Beatles covers,
Your Mother Should Know
. He's always mixed the band's songs into his wide-ranging work, but this album is the live version of a 2020 all-Beatles concert he gave at the Philharmonie de Paris after the concert hall asked him to follow up a highly successful all-Bach program. In anticipation, Nonesuch has been posting some of the songs off the album, and any one of them is worth your time. Just for the pleasure of it,
whose phrasing may never leave your head. And heck, why not?
Have you ever looked up all the different spellings of, take your pick, "Goo goo g' joob," "kookookachu," "coo coo ca chu"...?
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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