GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Cooler, slight chance of showers in the afternoon. We've got a series of weak low pressure systems angling to pass through the region. Today's is relatively dry, but it is bringing us cooler air—highs today in the upper 40s—and mostly cloudy skies. Once the sun goes down temps will drop and we'll hit mid-20s by dawn. Winds today from the northwest.A departure today. I don't know about you, but I love mirror-smooth water. You may have noticed. Today, we get it three ways: through Patricia Norton's choice of jazz guitarist Paul Barton's "When the Water is Glass Calm" for her latest "pocket song"; through Patty Piotrowski's watercolor, which accompanies Patricia's podcast; and through John Pietkiewicz's photo the other evening of a glass-still Lake Fairlee at sunset. Of Barton's song, which she'll teach you, Patricia says, "I love the way I feel calm and clear after I sing this one."VT preps to vaccinate kids. It will open registration this morning at 8 (info at the link), following final approval of the Pfizer vaccine for kids ages 5-11 last night from the CDC. Families may need to add their child as a dependent in the registration system, according to an announcement from the state last night. In addition, there will be clinics covering some 100 schools across the state, vaccines will be available at pharmacies and docs' offices, and the state's Academy of Pediatrics is holding a series of virtual forums for parents: schedule here. The state is also making booster shots available for adults over 18 who are at least six months out from their second dose or two months from J&J.The vaccination effort looks different in NH. There, reports the Valley News's Nora Doyle-Burr, "health officials are urging families to be patient in scheduling...vaccinations for children ages 5 to 11, citing the Executive Council’s recent rejection of $27 million in federal funds to support the vaccination effort." State officials are pointing parents to pharmacies, though Doyle-Burr notes that D-H patients may be able to participate in vaccination clinics for children ages 5 to 11 on Saturday, Nov. 13 at DHMC and APD. Appointment info will be posted here later this week."I am always skeptical when book publishers tout something as 'The Next [Insert Wildly Popular Book Title Here].'" So when someone told Kari Meutsch, who co-owns Woodstock's Yankee Bookshop, that the forthcoming young adult novel All of Us Villains is like The Hunger Games and Harry Potter rolled into one, she was dubious. "Imagine my surprise," she writes for the latest Enthusiasms, "when a few days later I could not put the book down, raced through all 400 pages, and was devastated upon finishing it." Her full, "this book is the one you’ve been waiting for" writeup is at the link.“It feels like I’m in the mountains every day. It’s lit up at night; you can see it from the street.” Sam Wasp owns the South End Village Laundromat in Concord, and he's talking about the 16-by-7½ foot mural painted on one wall by Sarah Bissonnette. It took her three years to complete, along with deep wells of fortitude. Bissonnette is autistic and suffers from fibromyalgia. "Certain words soar over her head," writes Ray Duckler in the Monitor. "Her body aches with chronic pain." But when it comes to painting, he adds, Bissonnette "is really good." Though no more murals, she tells him. "It's tiring."NH acknowledges that vaccination data has been inaccurate since June. A gap between state and federal data has been apparent since the summer, reports NHPR's Allie Fam, but by late October it had grown to nearly 200,000 doses. The reasons, health commissioner Lori Shibinette tells her, have partly to do with the end of the state of emergency, which restricted the data the state could collect—including from pharmacies. The result, Fam says: "Inaccurate Covid-19 vaccine data is now likely leading to inaccurate counting of booster doses and breakthrough cases."UNH will help lead national research effort seeking to harness ocean tide, wave energy. Along with several other universities, including Lehigh and Stony Brook, it's gotten a nearly $10 million grant from the federal Department of Energy to form the Atlantic Marine Energy Center, one of four such centers nationally. The focus, UNH writes in a press release, "will be on the scientific understanding and overall effectiveness of wave energy and tidal energy conversion, including wave powered water pumps and tidal turbine farms.""A secret wine lab run by friends who are constantly thinking of new ways to enjoy life in Vermont with a glass of wine in hand." That's how Seven Days' Kim MacQueen describes Ellison Estate Vineyard, run by Kendra and Rob Knapik with a vineyard on Grand Isle and a "tidy, efficient winery" in the basement of their house in Stowe. When they introduced sheep to boost soil fertility, they were advised to slaughter them in the fall to sidestep over-wintering. "I was like, 'OK, that will work for us,'" she says. "And then, of course, we got four sheep and my children named them." They now winter in Stowe.There’s a troubling new trend in VT opioid deaths. According to a VTDigger report from Tiffany Tan and Alan Keays, out of 116 fatal opioid overdoses in VT this year, 13 percent involved a potent animal sedative called xylazine. Researchers have discovered that with xylazine present along with heroin or fentanyl, opioid antidotes like naloxone may be less effective in preventing death. “We had to build analytics to look for this drug,” said an analyst with the VT health department. “This is not one we’ve ever looked for.” And before last month, xylazine was unknown to many in opioid recovery centers.“One of our greatest risks is that the whales could be incredibly boring.” That’s a scientist trying to translate the language of sperm whales. Christoph Droesser writes in Hakai mag about a project to harness the power of artificial intelligence to make sense of their communicative clicking sounds (called codas). Do sperm whales, with brains six times larger than ours, express complex emotions? Do their clicks follow grammatical structure? Millions of codas must be collected to train a bot that may very well end up fluent in whale, while the scientists, Droesser notes, “couldn’t understand a word.”
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At noon today, the Upper Valley Land Trust holds a lunchtime poetry reading and discussion (scroll down) with three poets who wrote about lands held by the Trust for the Writing the Land Project. It's an effort to pair poets with land trusts around the country, and the Northeast version of its latest anthology has just appeared. Today, Exeter NH's Jessica Purdy will talk about Dismal on Pressey Brook, the wetlands at the head of the Mascoma River; Essex, NY's Christopher Purdy will ruminate on True's Ledges in Leb; and Canterbury, NH's Hope Jordan will read about and talk about the fields and forests of Charlestown. Here's Claire Potter's story in the VN yesterday with more on the project.
And at 12:30, Hood director John Stomberg hosts Tricia Y. Paik, who runs the Mt. Holyoke College Art Museum, to talk about Ellsworth Kelly's painted aluminum Dartmouth Panels—the huge multi-colored panels on the side of the Hop that loom over the Maffei Arts Plaza.
At 5 pm, Dartmouth's Neukom Institute hosts an in-person talk by David Mindich, a former CNN editor and journalism chair at St. Michael's College who now chairs Temple U's journalism department: "Which Lives Matter in the News: A Call for a Truer Mirror." "On his first day as an assignment editor for CNN, David T. Z. Mindich was told that a fire in a welfare hotel does not have the same news value as a fire in the Waldorf Hotel," and since then, Mindich has made a career of exploring news values and how they're formed. In Filene Auditorium.
This afternoon at 5:30, Vital Communities is hosting an online discussion among regional experts, "How Homeowners Can Become Home Creators," about accessory dwelling units—a home built on the lot of an existing home. It's an approach to the region's housing crunch, Vital Communities says, that "communities and ordinary homeowners can use to create much-needed housing that fits within the context of a surrounding neighborhood." They'll talk about how they help, what's preventing their more widespread use, and how to address those barriers. No cost, but you'll need to register.
At 6 pm, the Fairlee Selectboard is holding a special meeting to talk over the future of the Fairlee Town Forest, the tract of land west and above Lake Morey that's used by hikers from all over the region as well as loggers. The meeting, as the VN's Potter wrote last month, comes "after months of contention over logging, erosion, and recreation on the public land," and is designed to help the selectboard and townspeople sort through the various concerns. It will be both in person at Fairlee Town Hall and online via Zoom.
And at 7 pm, you have your pick of Vermont Humanities "First Wednesdays" lectures, all online. For starters, the Norwich Public Library and the Norwich Historical Society host Tufts prof Peter Levine on the decline of civic engagement and how to reverse it. Elsewhere, you'll find talks on philanthropy and civil society, the history of Thanksgiving foods, "historical and contemporary perspectives on Abenaki sovereignty," the early history of the bicycle in Vermont, and a whole lot more. No cost, but you'll need to register for your choice.
Cande Buasso and Paulo Carriizo first met when she was a 15-year-old learning piano in their shared hometown of San Juan, Argentina, and he was her teacher. She soon went off to become a self-taught jazz and opera singer (and to master upright bass), he headed off to the Buenos Aires rock scene. They met up again in 2017 to work out a duo performance of “Barro Tal Vez,” written by poet and guitarist Luis Alberto Spinetta when he was 14; he went on to be considered one of the founder of Argentinian rock. That Cande y Paulo performance was their break-out, and brought them to the attention of Decca records, which has just put out their debut album.
(Thanks, TML!)
See you tomorrow.
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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