Daybreak Wednesday, 2/4/26

Partly to mostly sunny, calm. There’s a slight chance of some snow showers first thing, but even so, we’ll be getting back up into the upper 20s—though today’s highs will be a few degrees lower than yesterday’s. Back into the single digits overnight.

More playful snow. Seriously, it’s got a sense of humor…

Northern Stage expands again: Will use former VFW post for productions, classes. The former Post 2571 building, which sits behind the theater, “will serve as a center for theater education and for additional performances beyond our mainstage,” the company wrote in an announcement yesterday afternoon. The theater plans to make upgrades to the building and start using it this summer for “theater education classes and camps; small cabaret-style performances; new play readings and developmental workshops; and professionally produced, possibly more experimental, performances.” This comes on top of last year’s new housing for staff and performers.

Vershire home in the running for HGTV’s “Ugliest House in America.” You know Seven Days writer Ken Picard had a fine time with this one: “a three-story cacophony of color and dreadful design decisions”; “monkey-themed kitchen cabinets, wall-mounted swordfish”; “an interior blue-and-orange color scheme straight out of the New York Mets’ locker room, with a papier-mâché, bird-themed railing on the stairwell that is definitely not up to code. The sunken, pool-themed living room features seating made from less-than-cushy material: concrete.” Owners Brooklyn and Dylan are up against stiff competition, Picard writes. The winner gets a $150K home makeover.

SPONSORED: People need a hand, and you can help! Based in the Upper Valley, Hearts You Hold supports immigrants, migrants, and refugees across the US by asking them what they need. These include a Haitian refugee in Lebanon who’s hoping for a bed frame, and immigrants across the country who need baby supplies, basic kitchen goods, boots and winter clothing, and school supplies. At the burgundy link or here, you'll find people who need your help. Sponsored by Hearts You Hold.

Upper Valley Music Center begins offering tune-ups. Got an old flute or trumpet or cello you haven’t pulled out of its case for decades but eye longingly from time to time? Starting later this month (with winds and brass instruments), UVMC faculty, staff, or local technicians will check out any instruments you bring in, help tune them, and offer up repairs if needed. It’s a pretty cool idea, actually. “Many people come through our doors with instruments wondering what needs to be done to get them in good working order,” the nonprofit’s Danelle Sims says in the announcement. “This program will help get them moving in the right direction.” Also coming: free technique tune-ups.

Hibernation, how bees winter over, and finding stories in the snow. The VT Center for Ecostudies is up with its “Field Guide to February”, and it starts with Dana Williams looking at how animals down for a long sleep know when to wake up. Northern Meadow Jumping Mice, for instance, do so when the soil surrounding their winter nest starts heating up; bats, when airflow in their caves changes. Spring Beauty Miner Bees, Spencer Hardy and Jason Hill write, “having never before seen the sun…are able to dig their way out of the ground within a few days” of their flowers of choice appearing. And Kent McFarland advises using iNaturalist to figure out what tracks you’re seeing.

SPONSORED: Frost Lights at Dartmouth: Open to all! Community members, come experience Frost Lights on the Dartmouth campus Feb. 5th-7th! (Note date change due to expected cold temperatures over the weekend.) Join us in College Park on top of Observatory Hill for an enchanting winter wonderland you won't forget, thanks to a remarkable immersive and interactive light and sound installation inspired by this year's Winter Carnival theme, The Blizzard of Oz: Wicked Cold. This special outdoor experience is free and family friendly. Sponsored by Dartmouth.

In 25 seconds, a lesson in the system—and the power of art. It’s a “seemingly inconsequential moment” in Episode 6 of Season One of The Wire, from back in 2002. Most of it is a guy—a careerist Baltimore police commander named Rawls—putting on his jacket and adjusting the lapels. But in those few seconds, Jeff Sharlet writes in this week’s Enthusiasms, you can find an entire world of cynicism and what it’s like to be a cog in a machine. Taken together with the scenes before and after, Jeff writes, it’s “a study in authority. Nothing profound, just the observation that we pass suffering along.” He drills down into what makes that moment, and the series, so compelling.

A raptor rescue with an upbeat ending. Back on Jan. 11, the Lebanon PD got a call from motorist that a hawk had struck a vehicle’s windshield on I-89 near Exit 20. The caller wasn’t sure whether the hawk was still alive. Officer Samuel McClory responded, found the hawk, and took it to VINS. It turned out to be a Red Tail with a broken leg. Over the weeks since, rehabilitators have nursed it back to health, and yesterday, the LPD reports in a press release, McClory helped VINS staff release the bird back into the wild. Photo of bird and officer at the link.

For a brief moment, Ford Sayre in the spotlight. It’s at the 1:15 mark in NBC10 Boston’s segment on Mikaela Shiffrin and Kirk Dwyer, who was her ski coach when he ran Burke Mountain Academy, where she trained on her way to the big time. “You could see she was something special,” he says, as a photo of Shiffrin in a Ford Sayre bib at age 11 pops up, showing stellar slalom form. Dwyer talks about what training entailed, especially the technical work that comes into play on the course. Thanks, PG!

Digging into measles risk. A team at Boston Children’s Hospital, reports NHPR’s Olivia Richardson, has been looking at the number of children under the age of 5 around New England who’ve gotten the Measles, Mumps, Rubella vaccine. Overall, the team found a modestly lower vaccination rate for NH than for other states in the region, with the higher-risk counties being Cheshire, Sullivan, Merrimack, and Strafford, with 60-69 percent of kids overall being vaccinated. That compares to over 70 percent in other counties. A map (zoomable down to the town level) put together by Boston Children’s, Harvard Med School, and ABC News shows just how variable the rates are.

Two Scott appointees for VT Supreme Court approved. It was a cakewalk in the state Senate for former federal prosecutor Christina Nolan yesterday, who was easily approved, but things were different for top acting federal prosecutor Michael Drescher: The Senate tied 15-15. Drescher squeaked through with the tie-breaking vote of Lt. Gov. John Rodgers. At issue: his role representing the federal government in its bid to detain students Mohsen Mahdawi and Rümeysa Öztürk. In hearings, Drescher argued “he took the lead on those cases to spare his assistants” from bearing the cost of pursuing the feds’ immigration crackdown, reports VT Public’s Peter Hirschfield.

Running low on firewood? Restocking is going to cost you. Partly, of course, it’s just supply and demand right now: It’s February, it’s colder than usual out, and if you’re running low on dry wood, the kiln-dried variety can cost upwards of $400 a cord. But there’s more going on as well, reports VT Public’s Nina Keck. For one thing, with temps so low right now, the moisture in cut wood is frozen, so it can’t season. For another, there are fewer loggers out there willing to cut for firewood, fewer young people replacing the loggers and suppliers who’ve retired, and not many who are set up to make wintertime deliveries.

“Call us the Fun Police, but sometimes a little information can be a dangerous thing.” On Monday, Stowe Mountain Rescue was called out to find a backcountry skier in Smuggler’s Notch who’d been following a social-media map of backcountry ski lines and “found himself above an icy cliff band and had no option but to climb 700 vertical feet back up the gulley. It was dangerous, exhausting and time-consuming and he lost a ski and a pole in the process.” They were able to intersect him with snowshoes and get him to safety. But as always, they write, there are lessons: Learn backcountry lines first-hand with someone who knows them, and always have a buddy and a Plan B.

But when you do know what you’re doing… Here’s trail runner, skier, writer, and photographer Eli Burakian on the Windsor Trail on Mt. Ascutney the other day. “Love this mountain,” he writes on his post.

How do you describe the smell of old books and furniture? And can you preserve it? Scents, writes Kaja Šeruga in Knowable mag, are a valuable part of the experience of art and history, but they aren’t tangible the way an artifact or building is. Now, researchers are using sensitive equipment to capture chemical compounds in the air and create a “recipe” for the smell of, say, a 300-year-old library or a sarcophagus. (Weirdly, the smell of millennia-old mummified bodies is “surprisingly pleasant.”) Next up: a database of millions of “smell references” drawn from images and texts, to recreate the smell of the Battle of Waterloo or a canal in 17th century Amsterdam.

Today's Wordbreak. With a word from yesterday’s Daybreak. If you’re new to Daybreak, this is much like Wordle, only it’s no random five-letter word. It’s a random five-letter word that happened to be in Daybreak yesterday.

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HEADS UP
The World Is Not Silent begins its run at Northern Stage. Don Nguyen’s play premiered at Houston’s Alley Theater in 2024; this is its second-ever production. Nguyen wrote it out of lived experience: His father, an immigrant from Vietnam, speaks mostly Vietnamese; Nguyen, mostly English—until his dad began losing his hearing. “Part of what the play is doing is asking us to listen and to try and communicate across, and the consistent work of listening and communicating across generation, and experience, and language,” director Rebecca Wear told the Rutland Herald’s Jim Lowe the other day. Previews begin tonight at 7:30, opens Saturday, runs through Feb. 22.

The Orpheus Chamber Orchestra and pianist Marc-André Hamelin at the Hopkins Center. The Orpheus ensemble is known for working without a conductor, the Montreal-born Hamelin both for his many recordings and his own compositions. Tonight they’ll be performing works by Beethoven, Liszt, Schubert, and Hamelin himself. In Spaulding Auditorium, 7:30 pm.

And for today...

There were three Vermonters up for a Grammy the other night, including Grace Potter and classical pianist Adam Tendler. In the end, though, Jericho native Erin Bentlage walked away with her third Grammy in a row, shared with her compatriots in the LA-based vocal quartet säje. They won for their collaboration with composer and drummer Nate Smith on “Big Fish”. Smith will be at Brattleboro’s VT Jazz Center in a couple of weeks—but in the meantime, you can start your day on the right foot by tripping out on Paul Lackner’s video for “Big Fish”, both sound and visuals.

See you tomorrow.

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