Daybreak Wednesday 12/1/21

RABBIT RABBIT, UPPER VALLEY!

Partly sunny, slightly warmer. But don't break out the t-shirts—the high will only be in the mid-30s to around 40, depending on where you are. Today's sandwiched between two systems, one that came through last night and another tomorrow, so it's a good day to enjoy. It'll be breezy through the middle part of the day, with winds from the south shifting to the west. Low 20s tonight, chance of snow showers overnight.Seems safe to say that winter's here. It may be three weeks until the solstice and above freezing today, but out there in the landscape there's not much question.

And speaking of Thetford Center, it's getting a new art movie house. Not until next year, and it will be in the existing community center on Route 113. Still, writes Nick Clark in Sidenote, it's part of a "quiet revitalization" taking place in the village. It's organized by part-time Thetford resident Arthur Kahn, who's already got people in four towns waiting breathlessly for next April's opening. "You have our promise that these screenings will comprise the finest body of films shown in the Upper Valley...and that you’ll love (or not) the films but will always go home glad you spent the time with us," says the project's website.White River Subaru owner snags $30 million settlement. David Rosenberg, scion of a famed New England family of dealerships started by his father, Ira, reached the agreement with the company he once ran, Massachusetts-based Prime Automotive Group. It stems from his firing after he blew the whistle on financial mismanagement by Prime's parent company, GPB Capital Holdings, reports Denise Coffey in the Cape Cod Times. The settlement, Coffey writes, clears the way for GPB to sell Prime and the 30 dealerships it owns around New England and the Mid-Atlantic.Hartford Selectboard nixes mask mandate. The measure had been drawn up by town manager Tracy Yarlott-Davis, who noted rising Covid caseloads. At last night's meeting, Revolution owner Kim Souza, who sits on the board, noted that a mandate generally had support among business owners, reports Lauren Adler for the Valley News. But a majority of board members, including UVAC's Joe Major and board chair Dan Fraser, of Dan & Whit's, argued that a mandate would be difficult for small businesses to enforce. “We’re all a little disappointed by the state of Vermont pushing this down to our level,” Fraser said.SPONSORED BY... the gallery that everyone is talking about. Textural Scottish Landscapes by fiber artist Julie Crabtree and Finding Beauty in Industry by potter Amanda Ann Palmer are on display now at Long River Gallery in WRJ, through March 1. Meet the artists this Friday, Dec 3, from 5-7 pm. Visit the gallery in WRJ, Wed-Sat 11-5, Sundays (in Dec) 11-3 or by appointment; shop online; or email [email protected] for a personal shopping service. Sponsored by Long River Gallery."This novel has cured my reading slump." That's Still North Books' Allie Levy in this week's Enthusiasms, talking about Louise Erdrich's latest, The Sentence. It's partly a ghost story—Tookie, an ex-con who works in a bookstore, finds herself passing time with the ghost of the store's most annoying customer, who's decided to stick around—but it's also a reckoning with the pandemic. "Erdrich writes her sentences with such beauty and wit that they act as a salve," Allie writes, "offering a chance for the reader to process the grief, upheaval, and reckoning we have all just experienced.""A very large piece of meat." That, according to Hanover farmer William Worthington Dewey, is what one town resident tried to swallow sometime between 1797 and 1859...and wound up in what's known as Dartmouth Cemetery, the burying ground first laid out by Eleazar Wheelock in 1771. Over the centuries, writes Charlotte Albright for Dartmouth News, nature has taken a toll on the cemetery; a new working group of Dartmouth and Hanover officials is taking over cataloging and cleaning gravestones. Meanwhile, Rauner archivist Ilana Grallert has been researching the site's intriguing and colorful history.New London Hospital opens urgent care option: "It's been a long journey." The new service for patients two years and older, called Express Care, was originally supposed to debut in the summer, but supply chain issues—like fire-rated doors sitting on cargo ships on the West Coast—delayed things. It's designed to fill the gap between primary care and the hospital's emergency services. At the maroon link, CEO Tom Manion and clinical director Tom Beauregard talk through the details of what it will treat; here's the now-open center's page.Supply chain crisis hits home for NH crafters. Pottery artist Jillian Fisher of Pelham recently loaded her car up with 1,000 pounds of clay, four times what she normally buys from her supplier. Writes Brad Spiegel for the Granite State News Collaborative, Fisher and other small, local crafters are buying more raw materials up front as global shortages and delays drag on. Compounding the problem: fewer outlets like craft fairs. For Brenda Adams Bell of Henniker, it means doing more to support local crafters this holiday season. “I want to see them survive this. They need our help the most.”Well that was fast: NH exhausts its supply of free at-home Covid tests in less than 24 hours. Turns out it wasn't 1 million but 900,000, writes Annmarie Timmins in NH Bulletin—and they went to "far fewer than half as many people." After touting the tests on Monday, the joint federal-state effort notified people trying to snag tests online yesterday morning that it was having trouble meeting demand from Granite Staters, and shortly after posted a message that it had run out. In an email to Timmins, the guv's office said it is looking into "the possibility of replenishing supply" and that community testing is still an option."The winter surge is here." That was NH Gov. Chris Sununu at a press conference yesterday, as the state hit a new record for hospitalizations—392—and, writes the Concord Monitor's Teddy Rosenbluth, hospitals "are so inundated with COVID-19 patients, Granite Staters are traveling hundreds of miles, sometimes across state lines, to receive routine healthcare." As numbers continue to rise, Sununu yesterday urged the state's residents to get booster shots. “We’re opening as many sites as we can,” he said.Which is why NH is launching a "booster blitz." The state aims to provide 10,000 booster shots on Saturday, Dec. 11 in 15 communities around the state. Registration opens this morning, and among the sites state officials announced yesterday are 367 Washington St. in Claremont, Richmond Middle School in Hanover, the Common Man Function Hall in Plymouth, 62 Maple Ave. in Keene, and Clifford Memorial Building in Woodsville. No walk-ins, but at his press conference yesterday, Sununu said each user can make appointments for up to five people.Meanwhile, VT hits new Covid hospitalization high; ICU capacity drops. The 84 cases reported by the state yesterday easily passed its previous record: 70 on Nov. 23. The number of available ICU beds, reports Seven Days' Derek Brouwer, has dropped 32 percent over the last week—10 were available statewide yesterday morning. Many of the hospitalizations, says Gov. Phil Scott, are in Bennington and Rutland counties. More than two-thirds of those hospitalized over the past week had not been vaccinated, the state reports.Time for an indoor mask mandate, says former VT health commissioner. Yesterday, Harry Chen, who was the state's health commissioner from 2011 to 2017, publicly parted company with Scott and current commissioner Mark Levine. He noted in a VTDigger commentary that the state's health care system "is stressed to the max." The biggest issue, he writes, is a shortage of skilled staff, which means the state must "do everything we can to preserve the capacity of our fragile system." To that end, he argues, exhortations from officials to mask aren't enough; nor are town-by-town mandates. "A virus does not respect town lines!" he writes.Loon populations rise in NH, VT. The increase is slight in both states, reports the AP. NH's Loon Preservation counted 326 "territorial nesting pairs" this year, compared to 321 last year; in VT, Fish & Wildlife reported yesterday, the count of 109 nesting pairs is the highest since the agency began monitoring loons in 1978. Maine also saw a jump among adult loons, but the number of chicks fell from 414 last year to 224 in 2021.UVM researchers create self-replicating “robot” cells. No, not a new sci-fi flick...though it could be. Fast Company’s Connie Lin reports on a potentially game-changing discovery. Early last year, researchers extracted stem cells from a frog embryo and created a “new breed” called xenobots that can survive for weeks without food—a scientific marvel. Now the xenobots have evolved. Researchers observe that the organisms have figured out how to replicate spontaneously, which offers possibilities for regenerative medicine and for critical tasks like cleaning microplastics from the ocean.Baby otter. Saying good morning from the Oregon Zoo. What more could there possibly be to add?

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Back when he was a kid in British Columbia, James Hill was taught the ukulele as part of his school's music instruction program. Then he kept at it, becoming a renowned Canadian roots musician—and innovator. Like, for instance, turning his ukulele into, say, a bass and percussion section. Here he is showing an audience in Brazil a while back how he does it,

(they married about a year later; she now goes by Anne Janelle). Don't be thrown, by the way—he pronounces the name of his instrument the native Hawaiian way. Turns out there are strong feelings between non-native Hawaiians who say "YOOK" vs. those who say "OOK."

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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