Daybreak Wednesday 12/16/20

WELL HI, UPPER VALLEY!

Things will start out cold... and then climb all the way into the low 20s, though the winds will make it feel colder. Sun to start, but clouds will build in as the main point of interest approaches: the nor'easter bringing snow totals to points south that in a just world would be ours. Still, projections here have been inching upward, at least for the region's southern areas. Guess we'll see tomorrow. Snow should start sometime this evening, a few inches by morning.Snow totals: Right now the Weather Service predicts around 6 inches for Hanover/Leb/Norwich/Hartford and south, 9 starting around Springfield. Here are the projected total maps for New Hampshire and for Vermont.A bird in the hand... Among the bird species descending south in search of food this year are redpolls, which breed in the Arctic. On Sunday, Katrina Wagner was at home in South Royalton when a redpoll hit her window as its flock foraged in the garden. "Stunned on the ground with wings akimbo," she writes, "it allowed us to pick it up and take some pictures. After about 5 minutes hanging out with us while turning its head back and forth towards whichever one of us was speaking, it flew off to rejoin the flock down the hill."With a story shaved off, apartment plan for Leb's Bank Street appears on track. Developer Jolin Kish was rebuffed last year when she proposed a four-story building to replace the old boarding house across from AVA. But now, reports the Valley News's Tim Camerato, her proposed three-story building is drawing favorable comments and no opposition from neighbors. In the eyes of one planning board member, it "reflects the type of growth many have called for in downtown Lebanon — new housing that’s accessible to public transportation, city services and recreation," writes Camerato.PINE chefs, mixologist, manager move to Montpelier. For the past two years, the Hanover restaurant's executive chef and sous-chef, Justin Dain and Amanda Champagne, have been looking for the right spot in VT. They found it on State Street in Montpelier, reports Seven Days' Melissa Pasanen, where they're opening the farm-to-table restaurant Oakes & Evelyn (named for Dain's grandfather and great-aunt). It's due in February, and they'll be joined by PINE's legendary bartender, James Ives, and restaurant manager Emily Chism. SPONSORED: Have you had to put your athletic goals on hold? The new Cioffredi Sports Performance Center in Lebanon offers a unique opportunity to discover and overcome the barriers that have kept you from achieving your full potential. Their experienced clinicians work one-on-one with you, combining expertise, experience, and state-of-the-art technologies to analyze and develop your individual performance. Learn more about the new facility and grand opening gift certificate specials at the maroon link. Sponsored by Cioffredi & Associates.About that Woodstock ski hill... Readers weigh in on yesterday's '40s-era photo. "The actual hill is about a mile or so north of the Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Park (Billings Farm) on Route 12 headed toward Barnard,. There is a commemorative plaque next to the road," writes one. Another forwards this from a friend: "I believe this is the second lodge put up by Bunny Bertram after he couldn't make a deal with Clint Gilbert to keep the business on his property. This is at the base of the backside of Suicide Six, an area called the Gully. A trail from Suicide Six uses this slope today, called 'The Gully.'"FEMA sends staff to help out at Hanover Terrace, other NH nursing homes. WMUR reports that 10 US Public Health Service nurses are being detailed to three facilities for up to 30 days. Four started work at Hanover Terrace yesterday, as news came that a sixth resident has died. “I have some staff members that have been here without a day off since the outbreak began, and so this will be a nice break from them to be able to take some well-deserved time off,” says Martha Ilsley, the facility's administrator.Things continue to be interesting in Laconia. First it was last week's public meeting in cramped quarters on the county budget. Now there's a furor over a GOP state rep and school board member, Dawn Johnson, who last week posted a link on Twitter to an article with an anti-Semitic image from the neo-Nazi website the Daily Stormer. She later took it down and apologized for the source, though as the Laconia Daily Sun's Roger Carroll points out, "it was not clear that she disavowed the content of the post." The school district has been swamped with demands that she resign.Differences between NH, VT approaches are telling at this stage of the pandemic. NHPR's Peter Biello spoke to Dartmouth professors Anne Sosin and Elizabeth Carpenter-Song recently about their research into how the states have handled things. VT has taken a firmer hand with state mandates, pursued a more targeted approach as cases rose in the fall, and worked closely with towns, schools and local networks to get ahead of outbreaks. NH's laissez-faire approach and centralized public-health system were overwhelmed by the fall surge, though local public-health networks have filled in some of the gap.The vaccine in New Hampshire. The first doses of the Pfizer vaccine arrived in the state on Monday and yesterday, five frontline health care workers at Elliot Hospital in Manchester rolled up their sleeves in a public event. Meanwhile, says NHPR's Jordyn Haime in a Q&A on what's ahead, 8,000 doses of the first shipment are being sent to CVS and Walgreen's to administer to residents in long-term care facilities starting next Monday. Only a quarter of this week's shipment will go to high-risk health workers. Another 37,000 doses are expected next week, but after that it's unclear how many will arrive each week.The vaccine in Vermont. The state got 5,850 doses this week, and has begun vaccinating health care workers, reports VTDigger's Erin Petenko. As in NH, pharmacies also received doses to begin vaccinating long-term care residents. Even by the end of this month, health commissioner Mark Levine said at a press conference yesterday, the state won't have received enough doses for everyone in both groups. On a positive note, Petenko reports, even though cases have grown in VT, it looks like there's been no surge associated with Thanksgiving, as there has been in other states.Dunne plans for expanding rural broadband take shape in VT, catch national attention. In a report commissioned by the legislature, rural innovation consultant Matt Dunne and his colleagues will recommend a state subsidy program for 20,000 Vermonters who can't afford internet and a short-term effort to connect another 40,000 households using mobile hotspots, writes VTDigger's Xander Landen. In the meantime, Dunne also showed up prominently yesterday in a Tom Friedman column in the NYT, advocating for more investment in digital connectivity and skills training for rural communities.Ancient Egyptian mariners roamed far. That's the conclusion Dartmouth anthropologist Nathaniel Dominy and his team have drawn from a pair of 3300-year-old mummified baboon skulls in the British Museum's archives. Dominy and his colleagues studied strontium isotopes in the skulls' teeth and concluded the baboons had come from what are now Eritrea, Ethiopia, or Somalia. This is the region archeologists believe was the fabled land of Punt. "Long-distance seafaring between Egypt and Punt...was a major milestone in human history because it drove the evolution of maritime technology," says Dominy.Great moon pics don't just happen, you know. Certainly not in the case of photographer Zach Cooley's photos of October's full moon from Arches National Park in Utah. His shot of the moon framed by the North Windows Arch makes the whole thing look like an enormous eye. To get it, he used a set of apps that let him plot where the moon would appear at any given moment. The results are a little other-worldly, and definitely eye-... oh, never mind.

As for the numbers...

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Ayub Ogada, who died last year, was a Kenyan singer and master of the nyatiti, an eight-stringed Kenyan lyre. He was also an actor—in Out of Africa and The Kitchen Toto—but it was his pure singing voice and talent on the nyatiti, nurtured by busking in Underground stations in London (where he came to Peter Gabriel's attention), that brought him global notice. Here he is in 1995, with the hauntingly beautiful "Obiero." 

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