A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!
That front? Still lollygagging. It moves northward today and should eventually clear out... just in time for another coming in from the west. Here on the ground, things start out a lot like yesterday: cloudy, slight chance of showers. In the afternoon, though, we should get some sun and temps will hit the mid-to-upper 60s. Winds from the south, down into the low 50s tonight.“People need to take this seriously. This is not going away.” That's DHMC infectious disease specialist Michael Calderwood, talking to the Valley News' Nora Doyle-Burr about concern among local hospitals as cases rise. Numbers now match what they were seeing in May, he says, though unlike then, hospitals have so far seen just a slight uptick in patients. Mt. Ascutney CEO Joseph Perras tells Doyle-Burr the uptick is “really due to not following the rules,” such as failing to wear masks or keep social distancing in mind. Red pickup trolling BLM in New London attracts police attention. The truck, reports NHPR's Sarah Gibson, "has a fake skeleton attached on the front grille wearing a T-shirt with 'BLM,' the acronym for Black Lives Matter. A sign on the skeleton reads: 'BLM are terrorists. This one was too slow.'" The New London police received complaints from "multiple residents" over the weekend, and has been in touch with the state's civil rights unit. A mere $11.50 gets you three quarters. Of course, they're not just any quarters. They're Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller commemorative quarters, recently issued by the US Mint. The reverse (that is, the non-George Washington side) shows an image of a young girl planting a Norway spruce seedling near a mature tree, with "LAND STEWARDSHIP," "MARSH-BILLINGS-ROCKEFELLER," "VERMONT," "2020" and "E PLURIBUS UNUM." Regular versions without the fancy packaging went into circulation last month.We're getting to the fading-to-pastel phase. Especially from above. Here's a straight-down shot from Emily Johnson's drone of the forest canopy above the Forest Canopy Walk at VINS yesterday. Just a matter of time, now...Or maybe it's the every-possible-shade-of-yellow phase. Hartland's Jennifer Hannux just posted this to Reddit. "Took a walk down my driveway this morning between rain showers," she wrote. "It was... yellow." Everywhere.And speaking of fall leaves: 425 trillion. That's how many "peep-able" leaves there are in New Hampshire, David Brooks figures on his Granite Geek blog. Or at least, that's his calculation for maple, beech, and birch leaves. He calculates, using Forest Service estimates, that there are about 670 million of those trees in the state, producing 1,460 pounds of leaves per acre, times 2.6 million acres, at 1/7 of an ounce per leaf... Oh, just go read it yourself.NH fines restaurant $2,000 for Covid violation. Fat Katz Food and Drink in Hudson, down by Nashua, moved a karaoke party inside following a noise complaint. Turns out, one attendee had tested positive and went anyway; another was supposed to be in quarantine. So far, 18 cases have been linked to the event and the state is asking anyone who went to the restaurant Oct. 2-9 to get tested. In a letter to the restaurant's owners, the AG's office said the decision to move indoors was "reckless."USPS assures NH it'll make ballots a priority. Remember how earlier this month town clerks around the state reported that absentee ballots were being routed through processing facilities in WRJ or Manchester? Yesterday, the secy of state's office said it had met with postal officials, who say that the policy remains in effect, but as the election gets closer, "if mail should remain in your local post office as opposed to getting transferred to a sorting facility first, that they will take that step.” Just in case, they say, mail your ballot early anyway.Need a 10-wheel dump truck? Or maybe a couple of used kayaks? How about a 1993 John Deere grader? Twice a year for, like, ever, New Hampshire has auctioned off used state and local equipment at White Farm in Concord. But this year, you don't have to travel. It's going to be livestreamed online tomorrow starting at 9 am with live bidding (though pre-bidding's already begun). Today's your last chance to go see items in person. Hmm....you know, they've got some of those solar-powered outdoor message boards...VT jobs picture holds warning signs. Recently retired UVM econ prof Art Woolf digs into the September employment report from the state and finds that although Vermont has one of the lowest unemployment rates in the country and employer payrolls rose, the actual number of people in the labor force fell significantly. Moreover, the total number of jobs in the state is nearly 10 percent below what it was a year ago, the third worst performance nationally. Nearly 1 in 3 of the jobs in restaurants, hotels, etc that existed a year ago no longer do. With winter coming on, he says, "Many will likely go out of business."Which is why it's probably good that VT's just announced $76 million in new business grants. State economic development director Joan Goldstein outlined the details at a press conference yesterday. Funding will be based on estimates of revenue losses, and unlike the previous round of grants, businesses without a full year under their belts (through February of this year) can apply. The application window for businesses that collect state sales and use or rooms and meals taxes—eg, restaurants and hotels—has opened.A converted horse trailer in a two-bay, heated garage. So let's just say you happen to be passing through Hardwick, VT this winter, maybe on your way back from skiing at Craftsbury, and you're hungry. Where do you go? You'll find the Caja Madera food truck cozied up for the winter across from the Aubuchon Hardware on Rte. 15, writes Melissa Pasanen in Seven Days. He'll be doing tacos every day, along with gyros on Wednesdays, smoked wings on Thursdays, and barbecue plates on Fridays. Oh, and breakfast burritos. Sadly, it's not open weekends. You'll just have to play hooky.Outdoor growing pains in VT. NH isn't alone in rising calls for help from hikers. Stowe Mountain Rescue saw its busiest summer in 40 years, reports VTDigger's Amanda Gokee. And with public lands remaining open for the fall and winter, “We have some concerns that it’s going to be worse this year than in the past because of the lack of experience of some folks,” says Neil Van Dyke, search and rescue coordinator at the state's Dept. of Public Safety. On the flip side, state parks commissioner Michael Snyder says he's happy that “different demographics of all types, age, race, creed” are heading outdoors.A tree-hugging Siberian tiger. "The Embrace," by Sergey Gorshkov, won this year's Wildlife Photographer of the Year award from London's Natural History Museum. National Geographic has a slideshow of the various winners in other categories, including a striking male proboscis monkey with light blue eyelids, a Manduriacu glass frog in Ecuador, two wasps caught just before they enter their nest holes, and my fave, a playful family of Pallas’s cats on the Qinghai Tibet Plateau. (Thanks, NS!)
Okay, so...
NH reported 85 new positive test results yesterday, bringing its official total to 9,828. There were no new deaths, which remain at 468. The state's current caseload dropped substantially, to 824, including 29 in Grafton County (no change), 5 in Sullivan (no change), and 160 in Merrimack (no change). Hanover remains at 7 active cases, while there are 1-4 cases each in Lyme, Lebanon, Plainfield, Canaan, Enfield, Grantham, Springfield, New London, Sunapee, and Newbury.
VT reported 10 new cases yesterday, bringing its official total to 1,956, with 197 of those still active (up 5). Deaths remain at 58 total, and no people with confirmed cases are hospitalized. Windsor County gained 1 new case to stand at 110 over the course of the pandemic, with 16 cases in the past 14 days. Orange County gained 1 and is now at 31 cumulative cases, with 6 new cases in the past 14 days.
VT also updated its travel-restriction map yesterday. Grafton County is still on it. And when the state applied its criteria to the full country, so is most of the US. Last week there were 1.9 million people living in green counties who could travel here without quarantining. Now there are 1.6 million. And for Vermonters looking to travel without quarantining upon return... the map's shrinking. Banner County, Nebraska, anyone?
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Today at 2 pm, Dartmouth's Neukom Institute presents the winners of this year's Neukom Awards for speculative fiction. Cadwell Turnbull won for his debut novel, The Lesson, about the tense relationship between residents of the U.S. Virgin Islands and aliens parked overhead on a multiyear research mission. Ted Chiang won for Exhalation, a collection of nine stories treating everything from time travel to alien life. They'll be in online conversation with Neukom director Dan Rockmore and Nebula-winning awards judge Sam Miller.
Today at 5, the Rockefeller Center is hosting UNH pollster Andrew Smith, talking to Dartmouth Prof. Jennifer Jerit about the 2020 New Hampshire state elections. They'll cover what surveys show to be the "state of the race" and their implications for the future.
At 6 pm, the Hood is hosting a panel of three Indigenous academics and artists using the current Hood exhibition Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics, as a starting point to talk aboutthe environment, changing our understanding of the land from one of ownership and extraction to one of relationality, intergenerational knowledge, and art-making. They'll be moderated by Jami Powell (Osage Nation), the Hood's associate curator of Native American art.
Also at 6 pm, NH Humanities presents UNH English Prof. Dennis Britton for a talk on "Reading Shakespeare While Black." Britton specializes in early modern English lit as well as Protestant theology and the history of emotion, and will be talking about the variety of ways in which African American writers and thinkers have explored what it means to be Black "in relation to one of English literature's whitest authors."
At 7 pm, Still North Books will feature bestselling author Katie Crouch (Girls in Trucks) talking to Sarah McCraw Crow about McCraw Crow's debut novel, The Wrong Kind of Woman. It's set at a fictionalized version of Dartmouth in the tempestuous era leading up to coeducation, as feminism and anti-war activism build on campus. Save your spot at the link.
Oh, but then also at 7, the Norwich Bookstore is hosting artist and writer Paul Madonna in conversation with novelist, story writer, and essayist Peter Orner. Madonna's written and drawn an ambitious new mystery featuring his detective, Emit Hopper, a former rock star turned author and artist. The story's told through both words and drawings. To join, email [email protected] for info.
Then to top it all off, at 8 pm the Hop's got ace mandolinist Chris Thile (Nickel Creek, but you may know him as Garrison Keillor's replacement on what used to be Prairie Home Companion and then was Live From Here until it got cancelled this summer). Thile will be joined by vocalist Aoife O'Donovan (Crooked Still), who was a member of the Live From Here house band and is the featured vocalist for Thile's Goat Rodeo collaboration with Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, and Edgar Meyer. On YouTube, tix are $25+, which gets you access for 30 days in case you can't watch tonight.
Reading Deeper
You may know this already, but Election Day is two weeks from yesterday. And it's a fair bet that the day itself, as well as its aftermath, will be fraught. Now along come Garrett Graff, former editor of Politico (and deputy press secy for Howard Dean's presidential campaign) and Vivian Schiller, who used to run NPR and now runs the Aspen Institute's media and technology program, with a compelling article in the Columbia Journalism Review. It's advice for journalists and media organizations on how to cover Election Day, but it's filled with good advice for us ordinary citizens, too. Problems, they point out, are not failures: Routine mishaps, which are bound to happen, are not evidence of skullduggery—though there will be skullduggery, which is also important to document. Results are going to shift over the course of the night and the days that follow, because absentee ballots are counted later or urban precincts report later or election administrators work toward "orderly results" in their own ways. Don't believe any premature declarations of victory. And above all, use this smart guide for the media as your own cheat sheet for whether the media you watch on Nov. 3 and afterward is doing a decent job or not.
Yeah, well, we pretty much have to: Yo-Yo Ma, Stuart Duncan, Edgar Meyer, Chris Thile, and Aoife O'Donovan
off their new album,
Not Our First Goat Rodeo
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Written and published by Rob Gurwitt Banner by Tom Haushalter Poetry editor: Michael Lipson About Rob About Tom About Michael
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