GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Chance of lingering showers. Looks like they may not quite know how to say good-bye. It will be mostly cloudy all day, with a chance of rain until this evening. Temps will be a bit warmer than yesterday, though, reaching the mid or upper 60s. Light breezes from the north, down to the lower 50s tonight.Orange on white. Buckwheat is in full, glorious bloom at Crossroad Farm in Post Mills, and co-owner Tim Taylor sends along this shot of a lone monarch enjoying the spread.Whew! Exit 19 off-ramp closure delayed until next Monday. You'll remember that NHDOT is going to close the northbound off-ramp for 8-10 weeks while it refurbishes the highway bridge over the Mascoma River (honest, there's one there). The agency announced yesterday that the start date will now be Monday, Sept. 26. The detour will take northbound exiters up to Exit 20, dump them on 12A briefly, then send them back south to Exit 19 southbound.Lebanon, state reach tentative agreement on rail yard land. After years of stasis on making land in the Westboro Rail Yard publicly available, state and city officials last week met to talk over a potential sale of 6.7 acres of state-owned land along the Connecticut that could, at some point, become a park and provide a link through West Leb to the Mascoma River Greenway and Northern Rail Trail. They reached a tentative agreement, reports Patrick Adrian in the Valley News: The city will buy the land for an undetermined price, the state will remove existing contaminants. Long list of official sign-offs to come.Feds recognize three NH schools, two in Upper Valley. The three new "National Blue Ribbon" schools are the Enfield Village School, Hanover High, and the Birches Academy, a public charter in Salem. Schools are chosen, writes Paul Feely in the Union Leader (here via Yahoo, no paywall), "because they either consistently deliver outstanding academic outcomes for their students or because they do an exemplary job of narrowing or closing achievement gaps." VT doesn't participate in the program.RIP Bob Norman: “an amazing example of someone who feels like they always have more to give to this universe.” That’s how Tracy Moloney describes the indomitable spirit and goodwill of her colleague, Dartmouth mathematics prof Bob Norman, who died in June at 97. Frances Mize’s superb “A Life” in the VN honors Norman’s legacy of conservation—leading the effort to protect Hanover’s Mink Brook Nature Preserve—and equity—helping to found Dartmouth’s Women in Science Program. He recycled everything, wrote limericks for his beloved Nita, and was smiling up until the end. (TH)SPONSORED: An imp-ish Anniversary Sale + Free Shipping! The “silly season” of non-stop polling and political calls is coming. Thankfully, there’s an imp for that. imp is the call-screening, scam-fighting, time-saving landline solution that actually works. That means no more spam, scam, or robocalls will make your phone ring. And this week only, Daybreak readers can save $25 and receive free shipping using code DAYBREAK at checkout. Join imp today and get 100% fewer landline spam calls. Guaranteed. Learn more at joinimp.com. Sponsored by imp.Dartmouth grad student assaulted at Main and Wheelock in Hanover, but uninjured. Dartmouth Safety & Security yesterday sent out a message to students reporting that at 10:49 p.m. on Saturday, the student was “accosted and physically assaulted by an older male.” According to The Dartmouth, bystanders intervened and the assailant left before police arrived. "Hanover Police has identified the suspect, and Safety and Security has issued a trespass letter for the suspect," the student paper reports.Hanover may impose inspections, new safety standards on rental units. The move comes in a proposed ordinance that the Selectboard is due to take up Oct. 3, reports Ray Couture in the VN. To pass, he writes, rental units—including in owner-occupied buildings—"would need to comply with a series of state building, life safety, and fire codes and applicable health standards." In addition to ensuring that the existing roughly 1,200 rental units in town are “safe, sanitary and fit for human habitation," Town Manager Alex Torpey says the move could ease the way for short-term rentals, which Hanover now bans.“If someone was handing out a 5-pound bar of Hershey chocolate, we might want to talk about that.” Instead, Associate NH AG Anne Edwards says, it was just fine for GOP state House candidate David Hershey (yep, but no apparent relation) to hand out Hershey's mini-bars outside his local polling station in Alton last week. His opponent had complained that his "charitable chocolateering," as Laconia Daily Sun reporter Joe Decker puts it, having way too much fun, was too close to the polling place. An investigator set that issue to rest. The moderator barred voters from leaving wrappers in the booth.In VT, childcare centers are still waiting for help from state as they struggle to retain staff. Legislators during the 2022 session allocated $7 million this year for retention bonuses, but centers still haven't seen the money—even as some are pulling back services because of staffing shortages, reports Alison Novak in Seven Days. That state's Child Development Division says it's just been authorized to spend the money, and is finalizing paperwork and a tutorial for centers on filling it out.It’s like Beatlemania under the sea when humpback whales start to sing. That’s the fitting comparison of Dr. Ellen Garland, a researcher of humpback whale song. In a video at Aeon, Garland describes how she came to discover “one of the most elaborate acoustic displays in the animal kingdom” after analyzing countless hours of whale song recordings. Each year, mating male humpbacks learn the same, astonishingly complex vocalization pattern, which spreads among them like a chart-topping earworm across the ocean basin—a “wave of culture” that doesn’t happen in any other species but our own. (TH)The Tuesday Vordle. With a very fine word from yesterday's Daybreak.
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At 4:30 today, the Institute of Arctic Studies at Dartmouth's Dickey Center hosts a public talk and livestreamed webinar with Dalee Dorough Sambo, "Empowering Arctic Indigenous Peoples: Our Role in Addressing Climate Change." Dorough, past chair of the Inuit Circumpolar Council and currently a scholar at the University of Alaska Anchorage, will talk about the roles, perspectives, and knowledge that Arctic indigenous peoples bring to research, planning, and international efforts related to climate change.
At 5 pm, Dartmouth's Rockefeller Center revs up its fall programs with Senior Circuit Judge Laurence Silberman, of the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit, on "Free Political Speech Under Threat: Eisenhower Would be Ashamed." It's a Constitution Day event, and Silberman will trace the origins of the First Amendment, describe threats to it over the course of US history, and explore how and why it is imperiled today. Livestreamed and in-person in Filene Auditorium.
At 6 this evening, Center for Cartoon Studies co-founder James Sturm will be at the Springfield VT Town Library for "Cartooning Reconsidered." It's a VT Humanities event in which he'll talk about the language and art of comics, and the ways in which cartooning and visual storytelling are changing the world.
Also at 6, Here in the Valley's final Tuesday Jukebox of the season features Toronto-based singer-songwriter Melissa Lauren and her trio. Lauren's work straddles jazz, folk, and pop; her latest album, My Voice, was released about ten days ago. Both in-person and livestreamed.
At 6:30 the Thetford Arthouse Cinema continues its summer/fall 2022 run with Ingmar Bergman's 1958 film, The Magician in the Martha Rich Theater at Thetford Academy. "It’s haunting and beautiful at times, surprisingly playful at others, and like all great movies about magic, it has more than a few tricks up its sleeve," Scott Tobias wrote for AVClub a few years back. The week's films also include Jean-Pierre Melville's Bob Le Flambeur on Friday at 7 and Wes Anderson's Fantastic Mr. Fox on Saturday at 10 am. Link takes you to the season brochure: Scroll down for film descriptions from organizer Arthur Kahn.
And at 7:30. the Lebanon Opera House presents "An Evening with Cowboy Junkies." Unbelievably, it's been 37 years since Alan Anton and Michael Timmins, friends since kindergarten in Toronto and bandmates in a couple of bands that went by the wayside, joined up with Timmins' brother Peter and sister Margo and formed Cowboy Junkies. The group's still intact, still experimenting with where it can take blues, roots music, folk, and country, and still picking up fans. There are still tix left, though not a whole lot.
And the Tuesday poem
Let's go to Dawn Schooland learn again to beginoh something differentfrom repetitionLet's go to the morningand watch the sun smudgeevery bankrupt ideaof nature "you can't write aboutanymore" said my friendthe photographer "exceptas science"Let's enroll ourselvesin the school of the skywhere knowinghow to know and unknow is everything
— From
.
See you tomorrow.
The Hiking Close to Home Archives. A list of hikes around the Upper Valley, some easy, some more difficult, compiled by the Upper Valley Trails Alliance. It grows every week.
The Enthusiasms Archives. A list of book recommendations by Daybreak's rotating crew of local booksellers, writers, and librarians who think you should read. this. book. now!
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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