A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!
Things are moving fast up there. Yesterday's weather cleared out last night. Now there's dry air for us this morning, and we'll get sun as the day progresses, but there's a new low pressure system headed over from Lake Superior that will pass to our north, and things may cloud up somewhat in the afternoon. Temps getting up toward 30, winds from northwest. Down into the teens tonight.The reins pass at Norwich's Killdeer Farm. Longtime owners Jake and Liz Guest have moved out, and Valerie Woodhouse and Eli Hersh (and their black lab Molly and orange tabby Milo) have moved in. Woodhouse and Hersh, who ran a farm in Fairfax, VT, will continue selling vegetables and bedding plants, and plan to open a farmstand across the road in the spring. But whew! The Guests, who farmed the land for nearly four decades, will keep growing organic corn on a parcel they lease. The VN's Sarah Earle has the details.Some people were on to the dangers of antibiotic resistance WAY early. Yesterday's item about Gifford Medical Center's recent success at cutting antibiotic use in half brought an email from Thetford's Dr. EDM Landman, whose medical studies in the 1970s were at a hospital that was well ahead of the curve. "When resistance to a particular antibiotic started rising, it was taken out of circulation," she reports. "This ought to be standard practice in every hospital." More in Letters to Daybreak.New trail around the base of Mt. Ascutney in the works. The Southern Windsor County Regional Planning Commission has made a 14 to 18-mile "around-the-mountain" trail a priority as it plans for recreational development in the region. Still, don't haul out your fat bike yet. There are plenty of existing trails and logging roads that can be linked up, but many of them are separated by state- or privately owned land, which will need easements and permissions.Dartmouth, Leb at loggerheads over library storage plan. The college wants to build a 31,000-square-foot facility on Etna Road to house up to 1.2 million books. The building would join an existing storage facility, which is full. Last month, however, the Lebanon Conservation Commission, concerned that the building might infringe on wetlands and contribute to flooding in the Route 120 corridor, voted to recommend that the state reject a wetlands permit. Dartmouth has now submitted a revised plan. (VN)Sometimes an oil-on-canvas is worth a thousand words. "View from Mt. Equinox" — down in far southwestern Vermont — in winter. And it just... captures it. NH AG's office lays out new protocols for hate and bias crimes. The new guidelines come two years after the office created a civil rights unit in the wake of the near-hanging of a biracial Claremont boy earlier in 2017. They require local police officers who suspect or find any evidence that a crime was "bias-, hate- or identity-motivated" to document all evidence. They also call on police departments to designate one staffer who will coordinate the investigation and handling of alleged civil rights crimes and work with the state civil rights unit.VT human services head would like federal probe of women's prison. And maybe of the entire Department of Corrections. As fallout continues from Seven Days' story on sexual misconduct and drug use allegations at the Chittenden Regional Correctional Facility, human services secretary Mike Smith told a legislative oversight panel that the agency is looking for an "appropriate third-party entity" to investigate. His preference, he later told Seven Days' Paul Heintz, would be the US Dept. of Justice. Plenty of changes are in the works.VT child sex abuse case lands national legal attention. It involves a New Jersey man who alleges that in 1984, a Midwest businessman now living in Kansas flew him to Vermont in one of a series of trips "preparing him" for sexual assault. VT this year lifted the statute of limitations for civil cases involving child sex abuse, and the NJ man sued, but records were sealed under state law. When the defendant successfully had the suit moved to federal court, a judge agreed to allow the paperwork to remain sealed. That brought UCLA law prof and legal blogger Eugene Volokh into the case.... Yeah, it's tangled.How hard will it be for Census workers to count parts of NH and VT? David Brooks, the Monitor's "Granite State Geek," highlights a new interactive map put together by the Center for Urban Research at City University of New York. Tract by tract, it estimates how hard it will be to reach parts of the country. Dig in and it shows, for instance, that the census tract including Quechee is "one of the hardest to count in the country," as are the tracts including Tunbridge and Strafford, Plainfield, and Unity. Play around at the maroon link.
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SO, ABOUT TONIGHT...
You may know her from
The Wine Lover's Daughter
, or
The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down
, or maybe even from her stint as editor of
The American Scholar
. Tonight, though, she's here to talk about
Wally the Wordworm
, the children's classic written by her father, the poet, scholar, talk-show-host and literary jack-of-all-trades Clifton Fadiman. With illustrations by famed
New Yorker
cartoonist Arnold Roth. The book, about a worm who lives on words and suddenly discovers the dictionary, has been brought back into print. 7 pm. Email
.
This is a talk by Dode Gladders, who's UNH's Cooperative Extension forester for Sullivan County. She'll be covering forest ecology basics, especially the importance of diversity in resilient forests, as well as management tools for invasive species and other forestry topics of local interest. Cornish town offices at 7 pm.
This is a talk by UNH law prof. Albert E. (Buzz) Scherr, a civil liberties advocate who points out that millions of people's genetic information is being stored in databases around the world for a wild variety of reasons. He'll be looking at how it's used and why we should care. 6:30 pm at the Richards Free Library.
The Auk and the Yak and the Cassowary—They're all to be discovered in the Dic-tion-ar-y!So's the Jerboa. So's the Moa.And so are the Boa and the Protozoa.
— Wally's Wordsong, from Clifton Fadiman's
Wally the Wordworm
.
Take
that
into your day with you. See you tomorrow.
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