Daybreak Thursday 8/6/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

This is going to get a little boring, but oh heck, we'll take it. High pressure from over the Great Lakes is moving in, so today we get another day of dry air and sunshine. High in the higher 70s, gentle wind from the southwest. Low tonight in the mid-50s. Could you ask for anything better?Jim Block explores a "bird nursery" in Newport, NH. "This blog was originally conceived as a story about a warbler nursery," the Etna photographer writes. He and his wife had seen a bunch of immature males and females on a hike. But when he went back the next day, the Common Yellowthroats he'd been hoping to photograph were gone. Instead, he found Catbirds, a Veery, Cedar Waxwings, and a pair of Red-eyed Vireos. Here's what they all looked like.So let's talk numbers...

NH Electric Co-op customers in Upper Valley still lack power. Overall, the utility says 37,000 lost electricity during the storm, but by this morning it's been restored to all but about 4,000. They project that power won't be entirely restored until Friday. At the moment, hundreds of customers in Canaan, Hanover, Lyme, and Orford are still affected. "Stakes mount" in Dartmouth hunger strike. Apologies, this is paywalled in the Boston Globe. The rundown: Maha Hasan Alshawi, the Dartmouth grad student protesting the college's handling of her sexual harassment allegations against a professor, told supporters this week via Facebook that she is rapidly deteriorating. The college has agreed to hire an external investigator; Alshawi, who refused a visit from a concerned supporter on Tuesday, responds that "until Dartmouth provides her with the name of the investigator and the date the investigation will begin" she will neither eat nor drink. A "small group of activists demonstrated outside the home" of Provost Joe Helble Tuesday night, the Globe says, chanting “Date and time!”Dartmouth Coach lands its $2 mil to restart. You'll remember that the bus company and its sister, Concord Coach Lines, had been waiting to hear whether they'll get federal relief money from the state before reopening. Gov. Chris Sununu has approved the funds—$2 million to each, plus $3.5 million for Portsmouth-based C&J Bus Service. Dartmouth Coach and Concord Coach Lines have announced they'll start service to Boston again on Aug. 16. Dartmouth Coach will run to NYC only on Fridays and Saturdays."Dartmouth is the blueprint for NFL success in 2020. Yes, Dartmouth." That's the headline on a Wall Street Journal piece (not paywalled, just x out of the pop-up) arguing that coach Buddy Teevens's dedication to no-contact practices over the last decade is the model the NFL needs as it navigates a pandemic season that bans padded practices with full contact for the first three weeks of training camp. "Rethinking how football teams have practiced for over a century made Dartmouth healthier—and better," Andrew Beaton writes. (Thanks, MT!)More primary rundowns in the VN:

SPONSORED: Digging into Joe Biden’s climate plan. The presidential candidate's recently announced $2 trillion dollar climate plan is about jobs and scale, and calls for the utility sector to be carbon-free by 2035. His proposal would add a million new clean energy jobs to the economy while deploying hundreds of millions of solar panels. Learn more about what this bipartisan vision of clean job creation means for America at the link. The power is in our hands to make a difference! Sponsored by Solaflect Energy.Testing regime has already begun for arriving Dartmouth grad students; so far, no positives. At yesterday's Dartmouth "Community Conversation," Lisa Adams, the associate dean for global health, said the college is focusing intently on testing and isolation for the first 14 days after students arrive. "We know that travel is a risk factor associated with COVID transmission, so the high-risk period for the virus to be introduced into our Upper Valley community is when there are newly arriving groups," she said. Undergrads will be assigned staggered arrival times over the six days before classes start, and will be tested for COVID-19 on arrival and on their third and seventh days on campus.“A couple of months ago, I could tell them, ‘people in the state value you.' Now I’m kind of at a loss at what to say.” Stipends for NH health care workers in long-term care facilities came to an end July 31, and the state isn't extending the program, leading to fears of rising staffing shortages. The program was aimed at keeping frontline workers on the job, and administrators worry that without it, they'll be forced to shut their doors. “I’m just terrified,” says the head of the NH Health Care Association. “I feel like we’ve been holding this whole thing together with baling wire.”NH Exec Council confirms controversial Fish & Game chief. Members of the council voted 3-1 yesterday to approve Stratford dairy farmer Scott Mason to run the agency. Environmental advocates and others had opposed Mason, who supported and worked as a liaison for the Northern Pass transmission project, and who agitated against creating a conservation commission in his home town. The council's fifth vote, Andru Volinsky, abstained because he had represented Northern Pass opponents as a lawyer.NH reviewing whether other states can tax Granite Staters who now work remotely. The state's Justice Department announced yesterday that it's looking into a Massachusetts move to subject people who were working in MA before the pandemic to state income tax—even if they haven't set foot in the Bay State since then. The uproar is bipartisan. "That’s unfair, that’s anti-worker, that’s anti-public health, and it rests on, at best, shaky legal grounds,” Democratic state Sens. Dan Feltes and Lou D'Allessandro wrote to MA's revenue commissioner.Embedding social workers with police expands in VT. A Northeast Kingdom social services agency plans to hire two social workers to serve directly with the state police in Derby and the Newport Police Department. “They ride with them, they walk the streets with them, they’ll check on individuals who may or may not be struggling,” says Tonya Davis, emergency services program manager for Northeast Kingdom Human Services. The effort's modeled on a five-year-old program in the state's northwestern counties. Town clerks in VT adapt to an unusual year. They've been flooded with absentee ballots as the Aug. 11 primary approaches. "There are folks that are voting that have never voted in a primary that I remember," Georgette Wolf-Ludwig, town clerk of Fairlee, tells Seven Days' Kevin McCallum. "I'm quite encouraged. Traditionally, primaries are not well attended." This year, they're allowed to start counting early, though until the polls close the tabulator machines will only tell elections officials how many ballots have been counted, not how they were marked.In the mood for a road trip north to see a perfect Windsor knot? Well, and other knots, too. Seven Days cofounder and coeditor Pamela Polston headed east from Burlington to Glover, bound for the Museum of Everyday Life. Along the way she stopped at Palmer Lane Maple in Jericho, Two Sisters Mill & Mercantile in Jeffersonville, and the "magical" Red Sky Trading outside Glover. The museum itself continues to entertain and surprise, as this year's knot exhibition attests. Polston appends a list of interesting spots to visit in the area. 

Meanwhile, for some virtual travel... Every other summer for the last half-century, a horde of volunteers have laid thousands of begonias guided by grass and bark to create a patterned carpet on the cobblestones of Brussels' Grand Place. It's not happening this year, sadly. But Berlin filmmaker Joerg Daiber recently posted a time-lapse of the 2018 event, which honored Guanajuato, Mexico—where people create tapestries from sawdust—so that everyone "can enjoy the awesomeness" to tide them over. 589 CE: The invention of toilet paper. 1764: Mozart writes first symphony. 1803: New York Yellow Fever plague. Am I revealing too much when I say I could spend hours on this site? Histography.io presents as a series of dots on a timeline. Hover over any one, and it's an event harvested from Wikipedia. Click on it, and you can read the entry—without leaving the site, by the way, which is handy if you're in the mood to lose an entire day down a rabbit hole. 

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1981: The Pointer Sisters, at The Attic in Greenville, NC, cover "Fire" by "Mr. Bruce Springsteen from New Jersey" with slink and shimmy that The Boss wouldn't even try. As if you ain't hot enough, indeed! (Happy Birthday, kRh!)See you tomorrow. 

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