Daybreak Tuesday 10/20/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

That front's got its hands in its pockets and is stopping to gawk at the foliage... It'll move south and eastward sometime later today then, believe it or not, return as a warm front overnight. The result of all this indecision is that there's at least a chance of showers all day and overnight into tomorrow as well. Winds from the south, high in the low 60s, down into the low 50s tonight. Now that's red. Twice over. Speaking of foliage, Janice Fischel was out and about in Eastman on Sunday and caught these three trees near the visitors' center at their flamboyant best. Next time you're in Bellows Falls... Susan Apel was just down there and discovered Canal Street, with its artists' studios and the Canal Street Art Gallery. Her blog, of course, is Artful, which meant a stop in. She found pieces by six artists who work in glass, as well as a series of landscapes—all a reminder that whatever the times, the urge to create remains undimmed.Well, that was fast! On Friday, a collection of local organizations launched "Hartford Dollars," a bid to keep spending local by offering a discount on the face value—50 Hartford bucks for $25. By yesterday, it was sold out: 200 people had bought up $18,000 worth. They've got until Nov. 30 to spend the money at over 40 participating Hartford businesses. The organizers, including the Hartford Area Chamber, the town, and Vital Communities, hope to find funding to extend and maybe expand the program.State panel agrees to $110K for Mascoma clinic. As you may remember, the Mascoma Community Health Center had been seeking $220K from the legislative advisory board helping make decisions on distributing federal CARES Act funds. On Friday, the board met by phone and agreed to the $110K figure, directing the clinic to work with the state health department on longer-term approaches to dealing with its $20K per month deficit. (Valley News)Hanover poster store to move. International DVD and Poster, "beloved by Dartmouth students for its eclectic array of College memorabilia and vintage records," is leaving its S. Main St. location at the end of this month, reports The Dartmouth's Lorraine Liu. Owner Ken Gorlin, who opened it in 2003, is retiring, and longtime manager Bryan Smith will take over. Smith says the new location “will be visible to anyone walking down Main Street," but wouldn't reveal where it is until he's signed a lease.Police chase through Quechee, W. Hartford, Sharon. It began in Hartland yesterday afternoon, when state police tried to pull over Robert Blanchard's car after he'd made "threats to harm others, including law enforcement." He took off instead, and the pursuit "exceeded the speed limit several times," the VSP says in its press release, as it passed through succeeding towns, coming to an end in a field on Route 14 in Sharon after the police deployed deflation strips. Blanchard and his dog were unharmed, the VSP reports; Blanchard was taken into custody, the dog was taken to a friend's.Why turkey vultures wobble as they soar. Turns out they keep one wing raised and the other parallel to the ground so they can maintain lift in uneven air flows. It's the third week of October, and Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast checks in with the vultures, maidenhair ferns, the "tar spot" fungus on falling maple leaves, red oak—which are in full color right now—and how to tell the difference between downy and hairy woodpeckers. You're welcome. Black-capped chickadees have a proportionally larger hippocampus than other birds. Yeah, I didn't know, either. That's the region of the brain associated with spatial memory; chickadees hide food and can find it up to four weeks later. On cold nights, writer and naturalist Ted Levin says, a chickadee will go into a sort of nocturnal hibernation and then wake up "latte-fresh, ready to exercise its brain, ready to uncover its hidden treasures." Chickadees, he writes, are "one of Earth's most creative marshalings of stardust."NH approves first utility-scale solar project. The 30-megawatt array will cover 100 acres in Fitzwilliam, which sits on the Massachusetts line south of Keene. It's the first solar project large enough to need approval from the state's Site Evaluation Committee, NHPR's Annie Ropeik reports. The project is being developed by Florida-based NextEra, which also owns Seabrook and solar arrays in 26 states. Even adding this project, Ropeik notes, NH has the lowest current and planned solar capacity in the region.NH takes it right to the Supremes. Not wasting any time, the state yesterday filed suit against Massachusetts in the US Supreme Court, arguing that the Commonwealth has no authority to collect taxes on NH residents who worked there pre-pandemic. The temporary MA rule went into effect last week; it violates both the commerce and due process clauses of the Constitution, NH contends. Justices will have to decide whether even to take it up.And the Supremes—a few of them, at least—take it to VT. The court yesterday declined to take a case involving a VT Supreme Court ruling that state game wardens were legally entitled to walk around the home and property of a hunter suspected of deer-jacking. But Justices Neil Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan still reprimanded the VT court for its decision, saying it had misinterpreted a 2013 US Supreme Court ruling extending Fourth Amendment protections to the area around a home, not just the home itself.VT newspapers still struggle, but adjust. Readership is up in the pandemic, VTDigger's Emma Cotton reports, but ad dollars remain a fraction of what they were and show no signs of returning. For the Brattleboro Reformer and the other papers owned by New England Newspapers (not to be confused with Newspapers of New England, which owns the VN), this has meant axing the Monday print edition and upping its digital game so that it could avoid cutting staff or coverage. The Addison Independent has also cut one print edition and begun publishing online newsletters. You know, that whole stopping, pulling-out-your-passport, talking-to-border-control thing... it takes so much time. On Saturday, a guy who lives right on the border in Derby Line, VT came home to find that his backyard game camera had caught a minivan on the Canadian side pull up to his yard and three guys get out, remove a large granite block that was in the way, then cross the border through his yard and drive off. The van was found abandoned by the Derby Walmart. The feds are investigating.Think they'll have to do a balloon test to keep the neighbors happy? NASA and Finnish telecom giant Nokia have just struck a deal to bring a 4G cell network to the moon. The goal is to create the lunar communications infrastructure necessary for "voice and video calls, data transmission, robotic controls, and real-time navigation" (Turn left at Copernicus Crater...) before astronauts head back there starting in 2024, Fast Company reports. June Julie: "What are you going to tell me next, the sky is on fire?” October Julie: “It’s just orange..." So, if you could go back four months to alert your earlier self to what 2020 had in store...That's the premise of three videos Julie Nolke's put together—the first was in April, in which she talked to her blissfully innocent January self, then June and earlier this month. They're bitterly funny, and may capture 2020's head-snapping vibe better than anything else out there. Link takes you to the most recent one. (Hat tip to Lisa Reinke and her Exeter-area Jady Hills Pandemic Times newsletter.)

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