GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, warmer. I'm going to use that hed tomorrow, too, and probably Friday, since as the Weather Service says, "Our stretch of North Country Chamber of Commerce weather continues..." High pressure edging down from Canada is keeping any moisture from Tropical Storm Arthur well to our south, and today we get clear skies, gentle breezes from the southeast, and temps into the 70s. Down into the 40s tonight. Sometimes, the ho-hum isn't so ho-hum. To birders, writes photographer Jim Block, the Common Yellowthroat is an "ordinary" bird. "It skunks around in low brush, often going unseen." But it's also a stunner, and in Lebanon the other day he spotted one hiding out in some brush at the edge of a pond. In one of those moments that must make bird photographers' hearts leap, he got off a long burst of shots as it preened and dried off.If you're a Gmail user... I know, it's never a convenient time to add Daybreak to your "contacts." Which is why a pile of you didn't get it yesterday: Gmail decided it was spam and deep-sixed it. Here's the thing: Their algorithm is persnickety and changes all the time. So the only sure way to let them know you want to see Daybreak is to add it to your contacts, dang it! Hover over "Daybreak" in the sender column until a box pops up, then click "Add to Contacts." You'll sleep better at night.
Let's keep track a bit longer...
NH announced 69 new positive test results yesterday and 1,292 specimens tested, bringing its total reported cases to 3,721. Of those, 1,275 have recovered and 182 have died (up 10), yielding a total current caseload of 2,264. Grafton County is up one to 63 all told; Sullivan remains at 16. Merrimack County is at 283 (up 1). Hanover, Lebanon, Enfield, Claremont, Newport, and New London remain at between 1 and 4 current cases.
VT reported 4 new cases yesterday, bringing its total to 944, with 820 people recovered (up 4). Of the known active cases, 3 remain hospitalized. Deaths still stand at 54. Windsor County gained one case and now stands at 48 altogether; Orange remains at 8. The state reported 766 new tests, bringing the total to 24,591.
Turns out that until last weekend, it was among a handful of states that were combining the results of viral tests for active infection with serological tests for past infection. "Public health experts say that can make for impressive-looking testing totals but does not give a true picture of how the virus is spreading," the AP reports. On Saturday, Vermont cut the number of total viral tests it was reporting by 1,000.
Former
VN
sports writer Tris Wykes posted on Facebook late last night, a tribute to the longtime Upper Valley coach—first at Woodstock Union HS, then at Hartford High, where Elberty coached soccer, ice hockey, and lacrosse. "Bill molded a zen mindset, fierce competitiveness and genuine caring into a unique coaching personality," Wykes writes. "I never heard him raise his voice in anger, but I witnessed him calm countless overwrought athletes... Bill's best lesson might be that a gentle approach doesn’t convey weakness or timidity...and there are literally thousands of teenagers and adults who carry that gift every day."
Opera North to try outdoor programming. It's "walking a line that is trying to accommodate safety concerns, governmental restrictions, and its own desire (and that of its patrons) to bring live opera back to the Upper Valley," writes blogger Susan Apel. So yesterday, ON announced "Bluegrass and Broadway" on Aug. 1 and The Magic Flute Aug. 7-8, both outside at Blow-Me-Down Farm in Cornish. Neither's a sure thing, Susan writes, but "in a leap of faith, we’re penciling you in . . . in big, block letters."And the bow and violin go to... One of the more creative fundraising efforts during the pandemic came about when Chelsea luthier Jacob Brillhart called up Emerson Gale, who teaches at Sharon Academy and Seven Stars Arts, and proposed raffling off a violin he'd make to raise funds for struggling artists. That was in March. This past weekend, $70,000 later, the violin and a bow worth $5,000 went to the winner, a Nashville violin-maker. The relief funds have mostly gone to artists in New England, Gale says, but also to some in Canada and elsewhere in the US. Here's the bow and violin together for the first time.And here's a challenge of a different sort. Cecily Byrd, who lives in Orford, is a paralympic equestrian. She was down in Florida training for an international competition when the pandemic hit, and, with everything cancelled, came home early. She and her friend Lily Kinder, who lives in Pike and rows for Bates College, inspired by their friends' quarantine workout videos, are partnering with Positive Tracks on a "Show Us What You've Got" challenge on Friday to raise funds for the WHO's Covid-19 Solidarity Response Fund. Post video or stills of yourself, make a donation, and you're in! Hashtags at the link. Montshire store goes curbside. The museum itself is still closed, but after a long hiatus, the store's reopened, cautiously. It's making its puzzles, science kits, games, nature guides, and other goods available for curbside pickup on Fridays between 1 and 3 pm—you just need to call or email by Wednesday at noon to order. Contact info at the link.DHMC's next "coping" webinar focuses on adults. The weekly series continues today at noon, with Robert Brady, who directs D-H's Anxiety Disorders Service, psychiatrist William Torrey, and Ken Norton, director of the National Alliance on Mental Illness, New Hampshire (NAMI NH). They'll be talking about how to manage mental health, stay informed, and remain connected and productive.Kennett HS goes to the top for its graduation. Literally. The Conway, NH high school will hold in-person graduation ceremonies on the summit of Mount Cranmore in June. Seniors and their families (in alphabetical order) will ride the ski lift to the top of the mountain's east bowl for photos and acknowledgement. "I think this might be my favorite thing to vote 'yes' on ever,” one school board member told the Conway Sun. The idea was cleared all the way to the guv.Maybe it's time for human-scaled streets? For a couple of decades now, a small band of renegade traffic engineers and urban planners have argued that roads should be designed for people first, not cars. Now, says Granite Geek David Brooks, their time may be at hand, as cities and towns (including Leb and Hanover) try to meet the needs of restaurants and other urban spots in an age of social distancing. "It took a global pandemic for us to let human beings use 180 square feet of pavement (an average parking space) instead of reserving it exclusively for short-term auto storage," Brooks writes. He's dubious it'll last.Big NH shopping malls may become a thing of the past. At the large enclosed malls in Concord, Manchester, Nashua, and Salem, there were already signs of struggle before the Covid crisis, writes NH Business Review's Michael Kitch. Now, with anchor retailers on the ropes and the future uncertain for small stores that have been dark since March, the big mall owners are looking at their options. In particular, says one asset manager, they may shift to creating mixed-use developments in place of pure retail. NH community colleges may partially reopen in June. They're working with the state to allow some in-person, on-campus instruction as early as next month, "but only for certain technical programs and hands-on course components like labs," NHPR reports. They're also exploring whether there are ways to join forces with the state university system to help the process along. Is VT ready to relax lockdown rules? VTDigger looks into the criteria set by academics and government organizations for readiness to reopen, and concludes the state's mostly—but not entirely—there. It's got the per-person testing capacity, though is still short of its own 1,000-per-day goal; it's got the hospital beds and ICU capacity; it has not yet seen 14 continuous days of new-case decline, though its percentage of positive test results is falling; and it falls well short of the number of contact tracers experts believe it should have.VT House, Senate leaders call on Scott to require face masks while shopping. In his executive order allowing retailers to reopen, the governor mandated that employees must wear masks, but not customers. Senate President Tim Ashe yesterday said this has the "very strange consequence" of protecting the customer but not the employee. Ashe is considering pushing the idea in the Senate; House Speaker Mitzi Johnson, though she agrees masks should be mandatory, is reluctant to go the legislative route.Oops. VT labor department mails unemployment claimants' social security numbers to wrong employers. And, reports VTDigger, one claimant has seen what appears to be a fraudulent credit application using his number. The mistake happened on March 30 in a batch of 5,600 notifications going out to employers; it took the department until May 14 to notify claimants that their SSNs might have gone to the wrong place. Scott administration wants 8 percent across-the-board budget cut. The proposal was floated to the House Appropriations Committee yesterday by finance commissioner Adam Greshin. It would affect spending in the first quarter of the next fiscal year, which starts in July, and is designed to buy time for the legislature and administration to craft the remainder of next year's budget. "It's meant to keep the lights on, to keep our programs humming and to set us up for a more spirited and fully educated debate come late summer," Greshin said.Hey, whatever it takes... The Rutland gym owner shut down by a judge after being sued last week by VT's attorney general has reopened. By moving his equipment into the parking lot and becoming an outdoor gym. “Fitness lives because we're outside,” he told the AP's Lisa Rathke.What gets Canadians to forget masks and social distancing? Baby foxes. Or, actually, an entire fox family: mom, dad, and kits, living under a boardwalk by Lake Ontario in Toronto. At first, the NYT's Catherine Porter reports, they were a welcome distraction. Now they're an out-and-out attraction. “People have been locked up for the last six to seven weeks and this is the first excitement they’ve seen," says a retired ad-exec-turned-photographer who lives nearby. "They go overboard.” Though we should note that the Times's photographer didn't exactly hold back, either. (Thanks, ET!)The national state of play. You may remember the link last Friday to a Covid case map by Reuters Graphics that shows the state-by-state trend lines in easily graspable little nuggets. They update after Sunday's numbers come in, so here's how things look this week. NH is looking better. So's MA. But TN, LA, and TX, not so much.
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Staying Connected
At 9 am today, the Vermont Center for Ecostudies is hosting a Zoom webinar on loons and their behavior. Eric Hanson, the biologist for the VT Loon Conservation Project, will detail a quarter-century of work by one researcher in Wisconsin, and will talk about loon rescue efforts.
And at 12:30 pm, the Hood's Native American art curator Jami Powell will talk with museum educator Jamie Rosenfeld about how they develop "spaces for learning" and use the museum's educational resources to engage the public with the Hood's indigenous art collection.
Talk about timing. Last year, Dartmouth public policy lecturer Charles Wheelan published a satirical novel, The Rationing, about a pandemic that breaks out just as the US's stockpile of a miracle drug starts to run out. Today at 5, in the latest "Rocky Watch," he'll talk about why the Covid pandemic wasn't exactly surprising, and will look ahead to other “termites in the basement”—policy challenges you might want to know about.
It's open mic at Skunk Hollow Tavern tonight. Virtual, via Zoom, but just grab a beer and sit down and listen. Or play. Starts at 8.
Or, also at 8, you could join in the #SmallScreenFun with Lana Wilson, who directed the new Taylor Swift documentary, Miss Americana. Wilson also made After Tiller, the Emmy-winning documentary about the four most-targeted abortion doctors in America. She'll be talking to the Hop's film folks, Sidney Stowe and Johanna Evans, about "how she gets so close to her subjects, how film can effect social change, and how (on earth) to make an intimate and authentic portrait of one of America's most-watched musical icons."
Finally, this isn't an event until you make it one: Like Netflix, the BBC has just launched a way to watch its programming over the internet along with your friends and family, wherever you all are in the world. It's an experiment that lets you create a group session, which you then share by link so that everyone's stream synchs up and you're seeing the same thing at the same time. Unclear whether, as with the Netflix Party extension for Chrome, you can also share arch and witty comments along the way.
Reading Deeper
Remember those anti-lockdown protests? Turns out the people who went to them and stood cheek-by-jowl with other protesters dispersed pretty widely afterward. Like, hundreds of miles, all over their states and into neighboring states. That's according to anonymized cellphone data from people who attended the protests in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, Colorado, and Florida. This doesn't mean that the cellphone-carriers also carried the virus with them, but as The Guardian puts it, the protests may turn out to have been "epidemiologically significant events."
In many cases, reopening the economy runs through the cities. Which is going to make for an intriguing dynamic, longtime political analyst Ron Brownstein writes for CNN. Large urban areas in recent decades have become the drivers of states' economies—even states, like Texas, Arizona, and Georgia, that are run by Republican governors and legislatures intent on restarting economic activity quickly. But those urban areas, of course, tend Democratic, and are often run by mayors and other policy makers who are taking a far more cautious stance.
Will the corporate office ever recover? It's not just that the pandemic has shown it's possible for millions of Americans to work from home. It's that, as national security analyst Juliette Kayyem writes in The Atlantic, "until a coronavirus vaccine becomes available, corporate culture is over." For one thing, "Schools turn out to be a form of crucial infrastructure; as with water and electricity, if the education system is down, not much else can happen." Insurers may demand telework, public health officials are recommending it. Plus: "If your morning routine wasn’t long enough already, you’ll love waiting in socially distanced lines to get your forehead scanned."
In honor of this stunning weather, let's let the Jive Aces put down some swing with
It starts slow....Just ride with it for a bit.
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