GOOD MORNING, UPPER VALLEY!
Sunny, hotter. We're talking temps reaching near or above 90 by early afternoon. Things will start to drop out of record-breaking territory tomorrow, so we've just got to get through tonight, when the low won't get below the 60s. Breezes today out of the south, so they won't be much help.So, let's see...
NH announced 34 new positive test results yesterday and 1,674 specimens tested, bringing its total reported cases to 4,231. Of those, 2,550 (60%) have recovered and 214 have died (up 4), yielding a total current caseload of 1,467. Grafton County remains at 69 all told and Sullivan at 17. Merrimack County is at 324 (up 3). Lebanon, Enfield, Claremont, Newbury, and New London remain at between 1 and 4 current cases.
VT reported 5 new cases yesterday, bringing its total to 967, with 848 people recovered (up 5). Of the known active cases, 1 remains hospitalized. Deaths still stand at 54. Windsor County gained one to bring its total to 51 reported cases; Orange County remains at 8. Altogether, the state has tested 30,423 people.
A big shoe drops: Tunbridge World's Fair cancelled. In the wake of Gov. Phil Scott's order last Friday cancelling "traditional fairs and festivals" until further notice, there wasn't much choice. Since 1867, writes the VN's Alex Hanson, it's been cancelled only for the 1918 pandemic and WWII. “It’s a hard thing to have to do,” says fair president Alan Howe, “but this whole epidemic is a hard thing to swallow.” Meanwhile, the Cornish Fair board is meeting next week, but UNH Extension has already pulled the plug on 4-H and food vendors seem ready to cancel as well, says Meriden's Steve Taylor. Construction on Sykes Mountain Ave roundabouts in WRJ to start next month. The roadwork on the $6.5 million project will begin June 14, Hartford officials said at a teleconferenced community forum yesterday. It will last into 2021, and create a roundabout at the intersection with Route 5, another at the intersection with Ralph Lehman Drive, and a sidewalk running about a mile from Ralph Lehman Drive to Butternut Road. The plan also calls for widening the shoulder to create a bike lane. (VN, sub reqd)VT says Royalton shooting was self-defense. You may remember that back in mid-April, 23-year-old Nicholas Schultz of Prescott Valley, AZ, was shot in the leg by Jason Farina at Farina's home in Royalton. Investigators say that Schultz was carrying a gun and refused to put it down when Farina asked him to; Farina then shot him. The Windsor County State's Attorney's office has decided the shooting was justified, and will not press charges, WCAX reports."There's an energy in natural things, and as a winemaker you act...as a shepherd." That's Jon Piana, who with his brother Chris makes the ciders from Fable Farm Fermentory in Barnard (and runs Feast & Field). He and three other Vermont cider-makers feature in a beautifully produced 3-minute video from Terroir Review, the international wine/cider/food journal created by Lyme's Meg Maker. La Garagista's Deirdre Heekin, Eden Specialty Cider's Eleanor Léger, and Teddy Weber of Tin Hat Cider talk about what makes cider-making so much of a place and a season. Links to fuller print interviews, as well.If you could sneak in to catch a heron rookery, you'd do it, right? For the last few years, Andrea Miller and her partner, Doug, have been stalking (her word) a heron rookery at the end of their road in Weathersfield. Sunday, they caught an adult heron fly into the nest, where a second adult was waiting. "They did a lovely dance together," Andrea writes (that's the maroon link), "before the newcomer fed what we believe to be three babies." Here are the parents with the largest chick. "The tree looks like a rice painting, each twig holding a perfect small bouquet, emerald green and lacy." Ash trees are leafing out, naturalist and writer Ted Levin notes in yesterday's report on what's going on at home. "As a boy, playing on the sandlots of Long Island, I was under the spell of white ash; the only wood that ever spoke to me," he writes. Oh, also: mosquitoes. They're here. But remarkably, he's not judgmental."I don’t remember much from introductory neuroscience, but I do remember dipping broccoli into hummus..." Ever since King Arthur Flour announced it's closed its Baker Library café for good, there's been an outpouring of social-media sadness. Amanda Zhou, who graduated last year and was news editor at The Dartmouth, writes that KAF was the college's great unifier. "I suppose the baked goods were made of nothing more than flour, yeast, sugar and butter. But to the student looking to smooth over heartbreak or disappointing grades, KAF was nothing short of wizardry."Enfield chief says police are enforcing masks order. In a message to the town yesterday, Police Chief Roy Holland noted that "it is a criminal violation to not adhere to a Governor emergency order," and that as the town receives complaints about employees of retail businesses or restaurants not wearing masks, his department is following up, issuing warnings, and passing on the information to the state AG's office. Residents can also report straight to the Attorney General's office, he notes.Yet, hmmm. "We are not asking consumers to pick up the phone and we don’t have snitch lines and all that," NH Gov. Chris Sununu said at a press conference yesterday. "I don't believe in all that." Though the state did direct Lebanon to issue a written warning to Anytime Fitness in West Leb, after it opened its doors in violation of the governor's orders; it has since closed. Sununu said the state is considering steps agains Riverside Speedway in Groveton, which opened last weekend.Hey, they had somewhere they needed to be. The NH State Police report that they clocked 50 drivers doing over 90 and six topping the 100 mph mark over the long weekend. NH House GOP moves to block all legislation. As the legislature prepares to meet in person next month, House Republicans yesterday voted against changing upcoming House deadlines. "If it stands, that vote by the House Republican caucus would effectively block lawmakers from taking up any bills in the current legislative session," NHPR reports. Legislative Republicans accuse the Democratic majority of refusing to consult and using the pandemic to "pass a wish list" of measures. House Speaker Steve Shurtleff called the claim “preposterous and an outright lie."NH expands testing. It's now offering coronavirus testing to all workers who have prolonged contact with colleagues or the public while on their jobs, as well as to anyone with even mild symptoms of COVID-19, and health care workers, child care workers, and people over age 60 whether they have symptoms or not. It has set up nine testing sites, as well as mobile teams that can visit workplace parking lots, Health Commissioner Lori Shibinette said yesterday. The politics of NHers' responses to coronavirus info. In March and again in April, analysts at UNH's Carsey Center for Public Policy surveyed NH residents on whether they trusted scientists or the federal government as the crisis grew. The results were remarkably similar: most said they trusted science agencies, less than half had confidence in the federal government's response. There was a clear liberal/conservative divide, which of course is playing out as reopening takes shape. "Longstanding U.S. political divisions on science...will now shape whether and how the country recovers from this pandemic," they write.VT legislators move to sideline governor on vote-by-mail. The Senate Govt Operations Committee yesterday approved a measure putting the decision over how this year's elections will be conducted solely in the hands of Secretary of State Jim Condos. He and Gov. Phil Scott have been at loggerheads for weeks over the issue; Scott has said he's hesitant to approve switching to mail-in balloting, and that a decision could wait until after the August primary. Election officials say there wouldn't be time to make the switch after that. Mischief-maker or humanitarian? So there was this crow last week. And a hedgehog. And they were crossing a street in Ogre, Latvia. And it sure looks like the crow is encouraging the reluctant hedgehog to get across before they get run over. The nattering masses are torn—some think the crow was just using the hedgehog as a plaything. But don't you feel like you can almost hear it saying, "Dude! There's cars! Work with me!"News that connects you. If you like Daybreak and want to help it keep going, here's how:
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Heads Up
Today at 12:30, the Hood is hosting a virtual artist talk with Denver-based artist Stacey Steers, who's got a mixed-media installation in the museum's collection. She'll be talking about how she makes handmade animated films—which take years to produce—by sourcing imagery from early silent cinema and fragments of 19th-century engravings and illustrations.
Also at 12:30, VINS is doing a live "raptor encounter" with its American kestrel. "With extreme agility, these tiny falcons navigate a meadow and snatch up insects and small rodents with ease," they write. Learn about how kestrels have adapted to meadow life. Just go to this page at 12:30 and you'll see "LIVE" next to the video section, which will link you to the encounter.
Dartmouth government prof Herschel Nachlis will be doing this week's "Rocky Watch" presentation at 5 pm, talking about "Crisis Governance: Lessons from American Policy History." "If we step back and consider crises over the last century...we find a recurrent set of policymaking dynamics," he argues, which shed light on the government's current response.
At 6 this evening, NH Humanities is hosting an online "Granite State Gallery" talk about New Hampshire art and artists, from itinerant painters to landscape artists to Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Childe Hassam, and Maxfield Parrish. Sign up at the link.
"What's Needed to Reopen Safely?" Infectious disease specialist and long-time public health officer Peter Kilmarx, who's at NIH, will be talking at 6 pm with Geisel's Lisa Adams about Covid-19 infection rates, antibody testing, vaccine development, and what’s needed from a scientific perspective to safely reopen the U.S. It's a Geisel-hosted webinar, register at the link.
And, oh yeah, the first crewed rocket launch from US soil since forever—and the first by a private company. Here's how to watch the SpaceX launch at 4:33 pm, if it happens (the weather has to be right not just at Cape Kennedy, but out in the Atlantic, as well).
Reading Deeper
"May’s declining cases are the result of April’s physical distancing, and the consequences of May’s reopenings won’t be felt until June at the earliest. This long gap between actions and their consequences makes it easy to learn the wrong lessons." The Atlantic's Ed Yong takes a look at what he calls the "patchwork pandemic" and what lies ahead as states and communities within states all respond differently to reopening. "What’s happening is not one crisis, but many interconnected ones," he writes. "As we shall see, it will be harder to come to terms with such a crisis."
Research into a vaccine is moving along "faster than anyone could have hoped," Antonio Regolado writes in MIT Technology Review. But now comes the hard part: proving that a vaccine candidate actually works. And here's the irony: researchers depend on people getting sick in the wild in order to measure a vaccine's effectiveness. “You don’t say ‘Stop wearing a mask, or ‘Why don’t you meet people in a closed space.’ How is that for a weird dilemma?” says Arthur Caplan, a bioethicist at NYU Langone Health in New York. “The world is trying to get this under control, which I admire, but it does undermine the ability to study a vaccine.”
Ordinarily, you see poetry in this spot only on Tuesdays. But I didn't want to wait a week for this. British actor Emilia Clarke (Daenerys,
GoT
) has organized a series of her fellow actors reciting from a collection called
The Poetry Pharmacy.
And she's got Andrew Scott (yes, Moriarty, he's everywhere) performing
. Seems like a good time.
I lie here in a riot of sunlightwatching the day break and the clouds flying.Everything is going to be all right.
Here's hoping. See you tomorrow.
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