GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
There's dry air aloft... Which cleared out the skies last night, will give us a chilly start to the day, and will keep things sunny but on the cooler side today—highs in the high 20s. We've got these steady northwest winds for the next while, and they're going to pick up in the late morning, with gusts getting up toward 25 mph or so. Down to the low teens or below overnight. Sunrise, Moonrise... Swiftly flow the days.
Today's daybreak photo comes from Christine Savage in Boston, looking out over a blazing red sky from Causeway Street.
Meanwhile, at the other end of the day, Midge Eliassen was out skiing on Lake Sunapee in the early evening last week, just as the moon was rising over the Loon Island Lighthouse.
And over in Hartland, Neal Bastas was out in the full moon, taking this shot of Tinkham Hill that's got that eery, looks-like-daylight moon-on-snow feel. "Talk about Moonlight in Vermont!" writes his wife, Julia.
And speaking of snow... Etna photographer Jim Block has been sticking close to home recently, paying close attention to how light and shadow play with the texture of snow—and wondering why beech and oak leaves always seem to find their way into bootprints. Dirt Cowboy to reopen, shift to all takeout. The popular Hanover café, which closed its food service last November and has been limited to selling bulk coffee, will open once renovations finish up sometime after March 15, The Dartmouth's Hannah Jinks and Ben Fagell report. Owner Tom Guerra tells them he's moving the bakery from the basement into the ground-floor seating space. “In essence, the dine-in was distracting us from our main business, and now, with no more dine-in, we really focused in on what the demand is really for — the demand for this place is mostly takeout,” he says.Covid cases headed in right direction, Dartmouth provost says. In yesterday's online "Community Conversation," Provost Joe Helble noted the college's numbers have dropped from 40 new cases Saturday to an average of 10 a day for the last three days. The college will announce tomorrow whether it is loosening or extending its restrictions on activities. Covid-19 task force co-chair Lisa Adams said it seems likely the outbreak is caused by the so-called British variant, and college health director Mark Reed noted that cases have been mild, but students have begun showing up with long-haul symptoms. SPONSORED: What if renewables could ride to the rescue of electric utilities, but didn't have a good horse? Costs are falling for wind and solar and Wall Street's bullish. But solar and wind producers—big and small—still have to hook up to the nation’s rapidly aging electric grid. Remember the Texas blackout?! Some see big investments in long-distance, high-voltage power lines as an answer, but your solution might be right in your backyard. Hit the maroon link to find out more about the green grid boom and how to put power in your hands to solve the climate crisis. Sponsored by Solaflect Energy.Tunbridge library builds connection through virtual book club. The venture, organized this winter by town librarian Mariah Lawrence, was aimed at bringing together people of different ages to read, talk, make paintings...and not always on Zoom. "I mean, we're all sick of Zoom meetings," Lawrence tells Seven Days' Margaret Grayson. In the end, 33 people from 8-80 years old took part, and liked it so much that Lawrence is planning more: a similar one this month, and then one focused on connecting Tunbridge and Chelsea, which just merged school districts.Even with more than half its members missing, Skiway ski patrol carries on. It's staffed by Dartmouth students, and normally has 60 members keeping the slopes safe and responding to emergencies during Dartmouth's winter term. But, writes Brian Zheng in The Dartmouth, the college’s Covid plans mean only 24 members have on-campus privileges this winter. So the ones who are around have taken on additional shifts—"It doesn’t feel as much of a burden as it could potentially be," says one—and adapted to safety protocols.Haverhill tree marking Maura Murray's disappearance cut down. For the last 17 years, writes the Caledonian Record's Robert Blechl, the tree with a blue memorial ribbon has stood on Route 112 at the spot where Murray crashed her car into a snowbank in 2004 and then disappeared. Last summer, the owner told the family she intended to cut the tree down—the Murray family countered by offering to buy the land and asked at least to spare that single tree—but its disappearance last Friday still came as a surprise. The family is petitioning the state for a memorial highway marker.Yours for a buck. But it's going to take $300K in repairs. The historic 1850s Marsh House, which used to house the town offices of Chesterfield, NH, has been sitting empty for the past dozen years, "falling into such disrepair that some townspeople wanted it demolished," reports NHPR's Sarah Gibson. So resident and preservationist Jeff Scott asked the selectboard if he could clean it up and put up a sign on the outside reading, "Own this building for one dollar." They said yes. Last week it got featured on cheapoldhouses.com, and suddenly, Scott is fielding calls from as far away as Norway.A new news outlet gears up for NH. States Newsroom, a fast-growing nonprofit news organization that covers statehouses in 20 states, including Maine, is expanding to Concord. It's already hired an editor in chief and a lead reporter, both veteran Granite State journalists, and is looking to fill two additional reporter slots. The States network began in 2017, launched by Chris Fitzsimon, a longtime reporter in North Carolina who had been watching state capitol coverage disappear all around the country. The NH newsroom will start up sometime this spring, along with another in Idaho.NH has no plans to move teachers up in line, despite new White House push. With the Biden administration asking states to vaccinate teachers and school staff before the end of March, MA and ME announced yesterday that their moving school workers that they're opening up vaccine eligibility to school workers. VT made the same move on Tuesday. But in NH, reports NHPR's Sarah Gibson, state health officials told school nurses yesterday that they're evaluating the idea, but for the moment still plan to wait until April.NH details plans for public college merger. The state on Tuesday gave more insight into Gov. Chris Sununu's proposal to blend the state's public university and community college systems into one, reports InsideHigherEd. Its plans call for the two boards to consolidate in July and gives that board a year to plan the merger before the systems' budgets are combined. Funding would drop from a combined $143.8 million this fiscal year to $138 million in FY 2023.State asks some unemployed Vermonters to return their benefits—but doesn't know how many or how much it's asked for. Most of the overpayments it's reclaiming are due to honest mistakes, legal advocates tell Seven Days' Colin Flanders, though one notes, "It's devastating for folks to get these notices." But the state doesn't have an overall sense of how much money is at stake or how many recipients it's pursued, Flanders reports, "because the labor department has never tracked that information [in the past] and says it does not have the staffing nor technological resources to do so now."Just three VT towns Say No to retail cannabis. Voters in Newport City, Richmond, and Lyndon weren't interested, but in two dozen other cities and towns, from Burlington to Randolph, Strafford, and Windsor, they went for it, reports Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen. Under last year's retail cannabis law, municipalities have to opt in by popular vote before any sales can occur. Only about 10 percent of towns had such a measure on their ballots Tuesday. “One of the big surprises for me in this process is how the selectboards were adamantly opposed to putting this vote to the people,” says one lawyer.Men outnumber women, talk more at VT press conferences. Last year, Gov. Phil Scott's office began circulating data on attendance and the amount of time taken up by reporters' questions at the state's twice-weekly Covid press conferences. VTDigger's Erin Petenko has crunched the numbers and finds that male reporters outnumbered women two-to-one over the course of the 26 press conferences, were more likely to be regulars, and cumulatively took up 1,500 minutes with their questions, versus 484 for women, averaging 3 minutes 45 seconds per exchange vs. 3 minutes 23 seconds."Copenhagen-based craft brewery Mikkeller opened a Singaporean outpost at a Chinatown hawker stall today, just in time to quench thirsts in this sweltering weather." I dunno, that first line just grabbed me on this cold morning. The tie-in? Most of the beers both on the shelves and on tap come from Mikkeller, which is based in Denmark with outposts in SF and San Diego, but they're also making way for a line of brews from Hill Farmstead. So if you ever get to travel again and go to Singapore, you know where to head for a taste of home.Okay, time to noodle. Plan8 is a music and sound design company based in Stockholm and LA that works with big companies (Google, IKEA, Spotify). But it's also got this playful little lab that designs fun stuff. The link takes you to "Jazz Keys": Once you're on the page that asks you to type, go ahead. The little "play" icon on the right plays it back; the music note below it lets you change the jazz style. And if your taste tends more to electronica, try Snowflake.
Meanwhile...
Dartmouth now reports 139 active cases among students (up 1) and 3 among faculty/staff (also up 1). There are 139 students and 4 faculty/staff in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 142 students and 9 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 244 new cases yesterday for a cumulative total of 75,990. There were 5 new deaths, bringing the total to 1,175. Meanwhile, 89 people are hospitalized (up 1). The current active caseload stands at 2,215 (down 59). The state reports 215 active cases in Grafton County (down 3), 37 in Sullivan (no change), and 168 in Merrimack (no change). In town-by-town numbers, the state says Hanover has 114 active cases, Claremont has 13 (up 1), Newport has 6 (no change), Lebanon has 5 (no change), and Plainfield has 5 (up at least 1). Haverhill, Orford, Enfield, Grantham, Cornish, Charlestown, Grafton, Sunapee, New London, and Wilmot have 1-4 each. Piermont, Canaan, and Springfield are off the list.
VT reported 115 new cases yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 15,487. It added 1 death to reach 207 all told. Meanwhile, 23 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (no change). Windsor County gained 4 cases to stand at 1,060 for the pandemic, with 63 over the past 14 days. Orange County added no new cases and remains at 514 cumulatively, with 35 cases over the past 14 days.
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For the fourth year in a row, Bradford is marking National Poetry Month next month by mounting a town-wide event displaying poems on local business storefronts. The Bradford Public Library has put out a call for poets of all ages to submit poems—deadline is in 11 days, March 15, so there's still plenty of time to find your muse.
At 5 pm today, the Hood and U Chicago's Smart Museum of Art co-host a virtual panel discussion, "All the World's Futures: Global Art and Art History in the Wake of COVID-19." It's an effort, with panelists from Singapore, South Africa, Australia, and New York, to consider the global art movement—emphasizing at its best "mobility, exchange, networks, transnational and transcultural studies" and at its worst "travel-dependent practices that celebrate biennials, art fairs and a roster of globe-trotting curators, collectors and artists," they say—as it emerges from the pandemic.
At 6:30, the Norwich Historical Society is holding the last in its series of dinner-time presentations, hosting Vermont Center for Ecostudies director Chris Rimmer talking about birding and some of the prime spots you can go to find and watch avian life. As always, the registration fee if you sign up now for tonight's event will go to support the Haven.
At 7 pm, the Green Mountain Club hosts a free Zoom talk by Curtiss Reed Jr., executive director of the Vermont Partnership for Fairness & Diversity and founder of the Vermont African American Heritage Trail. He'll be talking about his efforts to attract tourists from the rapidly growing multicultural marketplace and broaden knowledge about the historical role and contributions of Vermonters of African heritage. Free, but the GMC wouldn't mind an $8 contribution to support the Long Trail.
Also at 7, two Tuck professors, Peter R. Fisher and Curt Welling, will be hosted by the Rockefeller Center to talk about the GameStop/Robinhood/Reddit controversy and what it means. They'll go into the basics—what happened, how it happened, who made it happen, and why they did it—and talk over what, if anything, should happen now. No need to register.
At 8 this evening, former US Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Dartmouth government prof Jennifer Lind talk over "What Does a Rising China Mean for the US and the World?" As part of the Dartmouth NEXT series of discussions, they'll delve into superpower politics and the future of relations between China and the West.
Also at 8, both tonight and tomorrow, the Hop's got the semi-finals of Dartmouth Idol—20 contestants (10 a night) hosted by Walt Cunningham in a sparkling competition to become one of six finalists who move on to the final, all-in-it-together singing/dancing extravaganza. Pick your own price from $0 up, but you'll need a ticket.
And finally, Billings and the Hop roll out their next sets of films. Through Sunday, Billings Farm's film series is showing Ernie and Joe: Crisis Cops, Jenifer McShane's 2019 documentary about two officers working in the San Antonio police department’s mental health unit whose goal is to defuse potentially violent encounters with the mentally ill and steer them into treatment instead of jail. Meanwhile, the Hop's got Rams, an Australian remake of the 2015 Icelandic film of the same name, this one starring Sam Neill and Michael Caton as estranged sheep-farming brothers who are forced together when a devastating illness leads authorities to order a purge of all sheep in their valley; and Shadow in the Cloud, Roseanne Liang's action/monster mashup in which Chloë Grace Moretz deals with sexist jerks, enemy planes, and gremlins, all while banished to the rear turret—or hanging and battling outside it—of a WWII flying bomber.
The four members of bluegrass/alt.country/folk band Mipso all went to UNC-Chapel Hill together, though they didn't form as a band until afterward. They've got a reputation far beyond North Carolina now as both ace solo musicians and for their lush, sometimes-existential-sometimes-playful work together. Here's "Coming Down the Mountain."See you tomorrow.
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner by Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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