Daybreak Tuesday 11/17/20

GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!

It'll look pretty much the same out there, only colder. Mixed clouds and sun (though definitely more of the former than the latter), with a weak disturbance moving through that brings chance of flurries this afternoon. High in the low 40s, winds from the southwest in the morning shifting to the northwest later, down to around 20 overnight.  Okay, yeah, it's November. "This is what it looked like the morning after the sun took all the colors with it when it set," writes Jay Davis. Still beautiful there along the river, though, with the mist rising off the water and the bare trees etched against a slate blue sky.Amid the closings, an opening: Lebanon City Hall. After $6.7 million in renovations, it reopened its doors yesterday sporting a new lobby, new furniture, TV screens with information, and "a line with social distancing markers placed on the floor," reports the Valley News's Tim Camerato. There's also new meeting space in the basement, new offices upstairs, and new insulation throughout. The Opera House isn't open yet—it still needs a fresh coat of paint.Dartmouth announces new academic center. The Center for the Study of Computation and Just Communities is named for James and Susan Wright—he's a US historian and former Dartmouth president, she ran the Montgomery Fellows program and the graduate advising program—and will focus on "researching and advancing democratic, equitable societies through the use of computational techniques and innovations," the college says in its announcement. It's funded by a $15.5 million gift from Sally and William Neukom, who also funded the institute where the Wright center will be housed."Beneath what might appear to be an ordinary...life is at least one unexpected story, which sometimes tragically goes untold." Fortunately, writes Susan Apel, playwright Marisa Smith lets her four characters tell theirs in The Naked Librarian, now online at Northern Stage. "Each monologue is cozy and intimate, and utterly convincing," Susan writes in her review. The play, she says, has a fitting companion in Chekhov's On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco, in which Emmy-winner Gordon Clapp’s character also has stories to tell: "His life unfolds like bursts of pent up steam when he is (mercifully) given a podium."SPONSORED: Still haven't created your Will? What are you waiting for? Find out how easy and inexpensive it is to do. Everything in Order, a company based in the Upper Valley, will walk you through how to create a Will during a free webinar on Thursday, November 19th at noon. The webinar will demystify and clarify the process of creating a Will so you can make yours with ease and confidence. It lasts 30 minutes and space is limited. Please register by hitting the maroon link above. Sponsored by Everything in Order.Tamaracks ablaze, spiders that fish... and just what was it that Ötzi, murdered 5,000 years ago, had in his pouch? It's the third week in November, and the woods are still full of cool stuff, writes Northern Woodlands' Elise Tillinghast. Tamaracks offer "a last bright flash." Fishing spiders are out. Crabapples and acorns are getting cached. And if you look you can find tinder polypore, useful for starting fires (there's a link to a how-to) and among the contents of the pouch belonging to the naturally mummified remains of Ötzi the Iceman, who lived in the Tyrolean Alps around 3000 BCE.More bald eagles have been over-wintering. If nearby water remains open through the winter and they can find enough food, naturalist Mary Holland writes, they'd prefer to stick around and defend their nest sites. They do adapt, though. "While they continue to feed on fish, they also do a fair amount of scavenging in the winter, feeding on roadkills and animals such as deer that may have wandered onto the ice, fallen and not been able to get back up," she writes. Also, they tend to cluster together overnight.NH launches arsenic-filter effort for pregnant women. The program, reports NHPR's Annie Ropeik, will give out water pitchers with a three-year supply of arsenic filters to pregnant WIC users whose home wells test at unsafe levels of arsenic. "We're lucky enough that we have the funding to extend it to after the baby is born,” WIC program director Lissa Sirois says. “So when moms are preparing formula, it makes us feel better to know that she'll have a safe water source too." The project is one more outgrowth of work at Dartmouth on the presence of arsenic in regional groundwater.  Unlike his neighbors, Sununu resists Covid restrictions. NH's governor is upfront about the dire case numbers he expects to see, reports the Monitor's Ethan DeWitt, but is reluctant to reimpose the kinds of restrictions VT, MA and ME have recently seen. For one thing, he says, better testing and contact tracing make this a different kind of wave than in the spring. And without new federal assistance, Sununu says, closing down would produce more dire economic pain—not to mention the mental health and abuse issues that rose last time around. Still, if hospitals are straining, he'll reconsider.Scoff no more: VT tree wardens are getting an upgrade. Only about half the towns in the state have them—though that's probably more than have weighers of coal. A new state law, however, is aimed at updating their role and making it possible for towns to appoint wardens who don't live locally. “The role of green infrastructure, the green stuff in our built spaces, is really important,” state parks commissioner Michael Snyder tells VPR's Howard Weiss-Tisman. “And ever more so with climate change, with resilience needs, and with these invasive pests, pathogens, plants.”Who better than high school students to know what an outdoor classroom might need? That, at least, is what Norwich U architecture prof Tolya Stonorov and her colleagues figure, writes Seven Days' Amy Lilly. They've launched a design competition open to high school students around the world: pick a site on school grounds where you live and design an open-air classroom for it. It's partly marketing—winners get reduced tuition to Norwich—but also a cool way to bring students who are affected by outdoor classrooms into planning for them. Submissions are already coming in.Tractor trailer overturns in Coos County. It's not really the photo from the state police that's worth mentioning—you've seen one overturned massive truck, you've seen them all. It's the remark below, on the NHSP's Facebook page. "This Peterbilt is part of a plethora of procumbent portages of property passing over our pavement. Poorly," the commenter writes. Such a relief to know that alliteration is alive and well in the North Country. Fortunately, no one was hurt.Tour the quirks of all 50 states. Since we're traveling from our armchairs now more than ever, it's a good thing Atlas Obscura has finished up its "50 States of Wonder" project, with guides to "the country's most curious sights" in each state, built around a theme. There are the monuments to animals (and pests) in Alabama, the noteworthy trees of Indiana, Connecticut's culinary institutions (they give pride of place to Louis' Lunch, though they also go for Pepe's, not Sally's, an outsider's mistake), and some pretty great granite and marble sites in VT. But as they ask, "What is it with New Hampshire and the devil?"Seeing sound. So, this has a fancy name—cymatics—but that's like saying what's on the Sistine Chapel ceiling is called a "painting." You have to see it. Kenichi Kanazawa, a Japanese artist, uses a steel table sprinkled with sand to make visible the vibrations caused by rubbing a mallet. Depending on the mallet, and hence the oscillations it produces, the sand moves into different patterns. Or as music historian and jazz critic Ted Gioia puts it more poetically with this Twitter video, it creates "a visual demonstration of the power of sound to create order out of chaos."

Where we are now.

Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into theconversation. The kettle is singingeven as it pours you a drink, the cooking potshave left their arrogant aloofness andseen the good in you at last. All the birdsand creatures of the world are unutterablythemselves. Everything is waiting for you.

—By David Whyte, from "Everything is Waiting for You."

a few years back.

See you tomorrow.

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

And if you think one or more of your friends would like Daybreak, too, please forward this newsletter and tell them to hit the blue "Subscribe" button below. And thanks! And hey, if you're that friend? So nice to see you! You can subscribe at: 

Thank you!