Daybreak Wednesday 12/23/20

A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!

The calm before... It should be a quiet day out there, with high pressure building in (though it'll be short-lived), allowing for sun (at least in the morning) and cooler temps than yesterday. The high will bump up toward 30, then temps will drop a few degrees into the high 20s overnight ahead of a warm front moving our way. We'll just put off thinking about tomorrow until tomorrow.Sunrise over Cummins Pond. Lyme's Jay Davis slept in—it wasn't quite the latest sunrise of the year yesterday morning (we've still got a minute or two to go)—but he was still up and skiing in Dorchester early enough to catch the sun brightening up an otherwise cloudy sky over the snow-laden pond. Hanover police seek help identifying pair headed toward Green the night menorah vandalized. The images come from a video camera at the Hanover Inn and show two people—one carrying a "long and narrow" object—around 8 pm last Tuesday, reports the Valley News's Anna Merriman. A witness who saw them said they looked "young, possibly high school age," Lt. Scott Rathburn tells her. The witness also said that shortly after the two crossed the road, someone fired a pellet gun. Seven of the menorah's nine lights were shot out that night; a glass door and a window on campus were also damaged.NH State Sen. Bob Giuda tests positive. The Republican from Warren, whose district runs from Haverhill, Piermont, and Orford over to Tilton, first showed Covid-19 symptoms on Saturday, according to a press release last night from the Senate majority office. He was last at the State House on Dec. 7, and is now resting at home, NHPR reports. “Twenty years ago, you had to go maybe 15 miles from one eagle nest to the next. Now we’re to the point where we have nests within two miles of each other.” That's NH Audubon biologist Chris Martin taking Junction mag's Hazel-Dawn Dumpert on a tour earlier this month of bald eagle nests along the Connecticut—near the Wilder Dam, in Hartford, along the river-side of the 12A strip, down in Plainfield... There are more bald eagles in the Upper Valley than there were even a decade ago, Dumpert writes. "Kind of a lot more." SPONSORED: Join us for Christmas Eve! The Church of Christ at Dartmouth College invites you to worship with us on our YouTube channel. For Christmas Eve, we will have two offerings: a children’s pageant and a traditional candlelight service. Please also enjoy our Advent stories series. You can find all of our postings at the maroon link or by typing “Church of Christ at Dartmouth College” in the search bar on YouTube. Sponsored by The Church of Christ at Dartmouth College, UCC.Artisans Park gets some love from northern VT. The Milton Independent, a free weekly in the town a bit north of Burlington, has a nice tour of Windsor's "haven of Vermont businesses celebrating the delights of the palate and the great outdoors." Staff writer Kate Barcellos gives a short but detailed tour of each of the businesses that make it up—SILO Distillery, Artisan Eats, Vermont Farmstead Cheese Company, Great River Outfitters, The Path of Life Sculpture Garden, Harpoon Brewery, Simon Pearce—writing that the whole thing has "blossomed into the ideal Vermont village market square."MA fires back against NH lawsuit on remote-worker taxes. As you'll recall, NH wants the US Supreme Court to hear its suit against the Bay State for taxing the income of NH residents who commuted there before the pandemic but haven't set foot there since. In a new brief, reports NHPR's Todd Bookman, MA's AG, Maura Healey, argues that New Hampshire doesn't have the standing to sue, since the state itself isn't being harmed. Moreover, she contends, her state is just keeping an existing tax, making life easier for MA businesses. No indication of when the justices will decide whether to take the case.NH Supreme Court rules using hallucinogenic mushrooms as part of a religious ceremony may be protected by state constitution. The decision sends the 2018 conviction of a Colebrook member of the Oratory of Mystical Sacraments branch of the Oklevueha Native American Church back to the Coos County court that convicted him of psilocybin possession. Writing for a unanimous court, Justice James Bassett noted that the NH Constitution protects not just religious belief, but religious practice, reports the Monitor's David Brooks.Could NH actually get commuter rail? Not anywhere near the Upper Valley, mind you, but still, it's a start. NH Business Review's Michael Kitch reports that Gov. Chris Sununu and the Executive Council have signed off on a $5.4 million contract (funded by the feds) for design and engineering work on a proposed MBTA commuter-rail corridor from Lowell, MA to Nashua and Manchester. It's been kicked around since 2014, and Sununu himself voted against it as an executive councillor.NHDOT struggles with vacancies, Covid-related lack of training on snowplow crews. The agency has about 100 open winter maintenance positions right now, compared to 70 at this time last year, reports NHPR's Casey McDermott. Also, because of Covid restrictions it can't have an experienced plow driver ride along with a newbie. So as the agency tries to fill vacancies with contractors, says one employee who's also a union steward, "we then have to go around the following days cleaning up just mistakes and inexperience, which just takes longer and longer.”"I had to have police come to the restaurant to stop threatening phone calls from Vermont." That is Carol Clancy, who owns Myrna's restaurant in Laconia, where social-media lightning rod Dawn Johnson worked until recently. Johnson's the Laconia school board member and newly elected state rep who linked to a virulently anti-Semitic cartoon on social media, and has since faced a firestorm of online harassment and demonstrations demanding her resignation. Johnson's critics and her supporters are saying the harassment has gone too far, reports the Laconia Daily Sun's Roberta Baker. VT loosens some restrictions. In a press conference yesterday, Gov. Phil Scott announced that two different households can get together from Dec. 23 to Jan. 2 (though he encouraged them to get tested seven days later), and that school and youth recreational sports teams can hold practices again starting Dec. 26 to work on individual skills and conditioning. Multiple households can also get together for skiing, snowshoeing, and sledding, "but must wear a mask for the activity," writes VTDigger's Erin Petenko.The first female detective on the Burlington police force. A Navy radioman in Vietnam. A woman famous for her Maple Dream Bars. These are among the Vermonters lost to Covid this year, listed atop a piece by VTDigger's Mike Dougherty profiling several who've died during the second wave. They include Lorene Shepard, who arrived in Hanover in 1954 to wait tables at the Hanover Inn—and there met chef Loren Shepard; they married and eventually moved to S. Burlington. “It just feels sort of extra tragic to know that there is a vaccine in the state...and yet it’s going to be just a hair too late for a lot of people," says Ruby Baker, executive director of the Community of Vermont Elders. VT reinstates moratorium on utility shutoffs. The move by the Public Utilities Commission came yesterday, reports Seven Days' Kevin McCallum, as a state program expired that offered financial aid to people struggling to pay power, water, gas, internet, and phone bills. That effort helped 10,630 people as of Dec. 15, and several hundred more were in the pipeline. In addition, McCallum writes, 27,100 GMP customers are behind 60 days or more on their bills.Seven Days hires Dave Gram to revive political column. "Fair Game" lapsed last year after the statewide weekly let columnist John Walters go over accuracy issues. Yesterday, it announced that Gram, recently fired from his daily WDEV talk show for being "too opinionated," will pick up the pen. Gram spent decades covering VT for the AP; he steps into a slot carved out by legendary—and nothing-if-not-opinionated—columnist Peter Freyne. "A journalist with institutional memory can do and say things in a column that aren’t possible in a traditional news story," says publisher Paula Routly.2020 wasn't all bad: Several new breweries made their debuts in VT. In the Burlington Free Press, Brent Hallenbeck takes a look at Lucy & Howe Brewing, which produces "Belgian-leaning" beers in Jericho and was started by former Magic Hat brewer Jesse Cronin; and at whatever's-more-nano-than-nano Mount Holly Beer, Daniel Tilly's home-based operation in—well, you can guess. Hallenbeck also revisits Black Flannel in Essex, Weird Window Brewing in S. Burlington, Kraemer & Kin on Grand Isle, and Whirligig Brewing in St. J. Oh go ahead, try this at home. Assuming, of course, that "home" doesn't include trekking to the North Pole to build giant snow rings. British "land artist" Andy Goldsworthy has made a discipline of ephemeral works using wind, rain, mud, leaves, and, maybe above all, ice and snow. Seems like just the right moment to draw inspiration from his playful use of these fine artistic materials we suddenly find all around us (for another day, at least). The French arts and visual culture blog Aesthesiamag has a tour. (Thanks, DH!)

Let's see...

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You remember Walk Off the Earth, the Canadian band whose wonderful, zoomy history of the Beatles ran in this space a few weeks back? Turns out they can do a cappella, too—well, if you make allowances for drums, cymbals, and stamping sneakers.

: Just the thing to get you up on a cold morning.

(Thanks, MT!)

Seriously. Those four big rings Goldsworthy made of snow? They were at the North Pole. Stand inside, look through any of them, and you were looking south. See you tomorrow.

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