Daybreak Tuesday 10/26/21

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

A quick word? It's been about seven months since I did this, so it seems like a good time to mention the maroon "Yes, I count on Daybreak" button down below. It's pretty simple: Daybreak depends on your contributions to keep going. If you find your day or week doesn't feel right without it and you'd like to see it continue, hit the link at the start of this item or the button below and check out the options. There are plenty. And if you can't afford to contribute, please don't fret: We're really happy to have you as a reader. Now, on to...Sure enough: More rain likely. Seems the same on the ground, but up above things are happening: conditions for a bomb cyclone taking shape off the coast to the south, a warm front moving through from the west, seriously heavy rain in southern New England. Here? Light to moderate rain expected, less to the north, more to the south. Temps will be warmer than yesterday, reaching the low or mid 50s. Winds from the northwest and getting gustier as the day goes on. Mid or lower 40s tonight.Timing couldn't be better. Halloween's still a few days off, but the other day in Norwich, Cynthia Crawford happened on this highly photogenic turkey vulture in a tree outside her house. "This is an immature bird," she writes. "Normally they have red faces."Dartmouth rolls out at-home testing to undergrads, cuts in-person testing. The take-home tests had been available to varsity athletes, grad students, and staff, reports The Dartmouth's Sam Brook. Facing regional staffing shortages and long lines for testing at West Gym, however, the college has made them available to the entire campus community. Tests have to be put in drop-boxes within 12 hours of being used. The college has also seen compliance issues with its testing policies, and is considering sanctions starting this week, though their specifics "are still being decided," Brook writes.SPONSORED: You won't believe how busy they are right now at Blake Hill Preserves. This holiday season, during the course of an average 10-hour day, Blake Hill's team of 53 people and six jam kettles produce over 10,000 jars of artisan jam that get shipped nationwide. What is it about this "little" Vermont artisan company that has people all over the country saying "I'm so JAM Happy"? Maybe it's because they're true artisans, relying on local farms and paying attention from seed to jar. Find out more at the maroon link. Sponsored by Blake Hill Preserves."It has always been a dream of mine to have a shop to sell hand-crafted things, hence the name." If you drive Route 5 between Norwich and Wilder, you've seen Linda Tuck's home—or, more likely, her gnomes and bird houses and, now, her shop: Linda's Dream Shoppe. On his About Norwich blog, Demo Sofronas talks to Tuck about her store—a pandemic project that opened in May and features everything from bird houses to jewelry to pottery, stained glass and artisan soaps, all made by her and members of her family. Demo takes a photographic tour around the inside."This is not only a public health issue, this is an economic issue." Marie Ramas is a family doc in Nashua and president-elect of the NH Academy of Family Physicians, and NHPR's Peter Biello spoke to her about the vaccine rollout for kids in New Hampshire. The parents she talks to are divided over whether to get their kids vaccinated, she reports, and tells Biello she's not a big fan of the state's approach, which will get the vaccine to children through physicians and pharmacies, rather than mass sites. Cases in school-age kids are rising fast, she says, and "our families need to have their kids in school."NH sees 16-point drop in student math performance over two years. It's been two years since the state's carried out statewide assessment testing, and overall, reports the Union Leader's Mark Hayward, student proficiency dropped from 48 percent to 32 percent in math, according to data released last week. Reading scores fell about 4 percentage points. The education department is still finalizing the numbers, but Ed Commissioner Frank Edelblut tells Hayward, "I do believe that as we begin to pull apart the results we’re going to see the evidence of learning loss during the pandemic.”Start prepping your car.... That's NHDOT, which yesterday tweeted out photos of what its crews found this morning on the Kancamagus: snowy roads. That is definitely a winter landscape right there."It’s as if Capt. Kirk had a wood stove on the bridge of the Enterprise." That's the Monitor's David Brooks contemplating what he calls the "delicious possibility" that the New Boston Space Force Station may turn to biomass—ie, wood, ie "a fuel that dates to the Stone Age"—to heat its facilities. It's part of the military's push to use more renewables, and Brooks recaps a conference held last week discussing the option to explore the pros and cons of expanding biomass use in New Hampshire. "It’s no slam-dunk, as the folks in the Space Force realize," he writes.If you're past your due date and are driving distance to Concord... The medical literature is "unconvinced" that spicy foods can induce labor, Teddy Rosenbluth writes in the Monitor, but that hasn't stopped the region's pregnant women from giving Hermanos Cocina Mexicana a shot at speeding things up. The green salsa, waitress Jonna Gaskell tells them, is "gonna get you rolling probably quicker than walking or...doing something else." All she wants in return: bring the "salsa-babies" back so she can meet them.$144 million in federal relief funds for affordable housing in VT... but it still won't be enough. To be sure, it's allowing organizations that house low-income residents and the homeless to make big strides, report Peter Hirschfeld and Nina Keck for VPR. They look at two efforts, one in Barre, one in Rutland, that are re-writing what's possible when it comes to very-low-income housing. And over the next few years, the state's Housing and Conservation Board expects to bring 1,150 new units online. But that's compared to an estimate that the state will need 6,000 of them by 2025 to meet demand."These are not people who talk to each other." Remember last week's item about the draft VT House district map that would split Norwich into two districts? Well, the line-drawers went Middlebury one better, splitting it into three, and that's a local justice of the peace commenting to VTDigger's Lola Duffort and Erin Petenko on how "absurd" it is to lump disparate towns together. Duffort and Petenko take a look at the redistricting panel's push for single-member districts, which reprises a similar move a decade ago, and at its uncertain future in the House.New VT numbers: 1,127 new breakthrough cases over the previous two weeks. But unvaccinated people were 3.9 times more likely to be hospitalized and 2.4 times more likely to die from Covid-19 during that time, report Erin Petenko and Mike Dougherty after running the numbers for VTDigger. Overall, VT now ranks 17th in the country for its recent Covid-19 case rate (35 cases per 100,000 people), which puts it below (ie, better off than) ME and NH, but above NY and MA. Petenko and Dougherty detail the stats.Snag a piece of late, great magician Ricky Jay. The man whose sleight of hand wowed audiences for decades was also a prodigious collector. And Matthew Taub at Atlas Obscura reminds us that Jay’s extraordinary collection—”of texts, artworks, and apparatuses related to magic, its history, and all varieties of its curious offshoots”—goes up for auction at Sotheby’s today. Among 634 lots up for bid: a book that belonged to Houdini, covered in his marginalia. “One hopes that the next owner will also be a legendary magician, to keep the chain intact,” writes Taub.It’s a good thing vultures like to eat the dead. We started with one variety, we'll end with another. A city in Brazil is conflicted about its population of voracious black vultures, writes Sam Schramski in Guernica. The birds, which like to congregate at a landfill near the airport, too often fly into planes’ turbines at takeoff—sometimes catastrophically. But as officials try to prevent this from happening, they’re forced to consider that vultures’ trash-eating habits, in fact, prevent disease. Schramski says “tests have shown worldwide decreases in incidences of brucellosis, anthrax, and cholera” because of the birds.

And to catch up...Daybreak reports Covid numbers on Tuesdays and Fridays.

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The number of rice grains left in your supper bowlforetells how many pockmarks will appear on your lover's faceEating the fat inside the crab sharpens the mindso too with roe extracted from a steamed fishNever let our feet touch cold water from the bathtub or the seaon days when you're menstruatingYou'll wreck your eyesight poring over pages in low lightbut looking at all things green from a distance can coax it back

—From "Old Wives' Tales on Which I was Fed" by Jenny Xie.

Here's Glenn Close reading the full poem

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See you tomorrow.

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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt         Writer/editor: Tom Haushalter    Poetry editor: Michael Lipson  About Rob                                                    About Tom                                 About Michael

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