A PLEASURE TO SEE YOU, UPPER VALLEY!
Rinse, repeat. There are various areas of low pressure moving around out there—up high, down low, to the west, to the east. The result: showers today, highs at best getting into the low 50s. As for tonight, let's just quote whoever was on duty at the weather service in Burlington yesterday: "By Wednesday night, exited east the low pressure system has. Abate from west to east rain will. Restricted to the Northeast Kingdom by Thursday morning it will be. Through the overnight hours, increase northwest winds will." Oh, also, low 40s.Newbury man charged with murdering daughter. The incident began Monday when Karma Rheaume went to visit her father, James Perry. Several hours later her boyfriend went to check on her and found Perry, holding a rifle, who told him Rheaume was dead. State troopers who responded to the man's call found Perry inside, refusing to come out; they eventually persuaded him to give in early yesterday morning. He was arraigned yesterday afternoon, pleading not guilty, the Valley News's Anna Merriman reports. His mental health had been deteriorating recently, his son told police.Wing's Market building, land for sale in E. Thetford. But not the market itself, according to Laura Covalla in Sidenote. Altogether, she writes, the Wing Trust wants to sell the land the market sits on, the building, and two adjacent parcels with homes. Mary Wing Davenport, who owns the Wing's in both E. Thetford and Fairlee, "hopes she can continue to lease the space from whoever ends up purchasing the property." Covalla notes that the Isabell's Café building across Route 5 is also still listed for sale.New burger joint coming to Fairlee. Matt Walker grew up in town, headed off to Brooklyn, Winooski, and then last year had his eye on a waterfront spot in Burlington...until the pandemic sent him home. Where, he tells Seven Days' Jordan Barry, "I started fantasizing about what it would be like to open up something really cool in my favorite small town." He zeroed in on the old Lunchbox Deli, next to Samurai Soul Food, and in July will open Broken Hearts Burger. Midcentury-diner inside, large seating area outside with ice cream windows and lawn games... and locally sourced burgers, meat and non-.SPONSORED: Celebrate an extraordinary woman in your life! Put a song in her heart with an aria, musical theater ballad, or favorite from the Great American Songbook, all recorded by Opera North’s resident artists. There's no purchase needed for this tribute to your Extraordinary Women—just fill out a form to send a song. Details at the maroon link. Opera North tickets make great gifts, too! Check out the full performance schedule this summer and SingON with the perfect Mother’s Day, graduation, birthday, anniversary or just-to-let-you-know-I-care gift. Sponsored by Opera North.Local mask mandates in NH up for reconsideration. Although Claremont last week dropped its mask advisory, Enfield and Lebanon are taking a more cautious approach, reports Tim Camerato in the VN. Officials there, he writes, "are resisting calls to act earlier, saying they don’t want to do away with protections before people have the opportunity to become fully vaccinated." In Enfield, the Selectboard decided Monday to wait until early June to take up the issue; in Lebanon, the city council will discuss a proposal tonight to keep the mandate until June 30.Dresden/Hanover/Norwich school boards join two others in NH opposing "divisive concepts" measure. The Oyster River School District, in Durham, has signed onto a public letter opposing the measure, part of the House-passed budget that would bar state funding to organizations that teach "divisive" racial concepts. Various Upper Valley organizations and businesses, including DHMC, Dartmouth, and Mascoma Bank, are also signatories. Meanwhile, the Concord School District and the SAU 70 (Hanover/Norwich) boards, reports NHPR's Sarah Gibson, have now passed resolutions opposing the measure. Laura Knoy to leave NHPR's The Exchange. Knoy, who went to high school in Keene, started her public radio career in Washington, DC, at WAMU then at NPR. She returned to NH in 1995 to launch The Exchange, and for the past quarter century has hosted conversations on every topic imaginable affecting the state. She thought about leaving last February, she tells NHPR's Patricia McLaughlin, until the pandemic happened. "Now, though, feels like the right time," she says. After leaving in June she'll finish a novel and "see what the future holds next." NHPR says it will "take a fresh look" at the program.NH seasonal hunting camp named to National Register of Historic Places. This may be because it dates back to 12,500-10,500 B.C. The Potter Site, in the Moose River Valley in Randolph, NH, is one of the best-preserved Paleoindian sites in the state, writes David Brooks on his Granite Geek blog. In its press release, the state Division of Historical Resources says that some of the tools recovered there come from stone that doesn't occur naturally in the area, "indicating that people at the Potter site traveled throughout the region...and that the site itself was part of a much larger settlement system."You can pack a lot into a budget if you try. You're probably familiar with some of the big-ticket items, like Gov. Chris Sununu's bid to create a state energy department and House Republicans' "divisive concepts" measure. But NH Bulletin's Ethan DeWitt points out there's a lot more, and details some of the issues the Senate is now considering: tax reductions, new tools for combatting unemployment fraud, capping the guv's emergency powers, closing the state youth correctional facility, $20 million to pare down the ranks of "red-listed" bridges in the state, and more. Software entrepreneur buys three southern VT newspapers. The papers—the Brattleboro Reformer, Bennington Banner, and Manchester Journal, as well as UpCountry Magazine—are owned by New England Newspapers Inc. (not to be confused with Newspapers of New England, the VN's owner). They're being sold to Paul Belogour, who lives in Guilford, VT and founded Boston Unisoft Technologies and Brattleboro's Innovation Box. Meeting with staff yesterday, he said he purchased the papers to “invest in the local community ... I want to help the community as much as I can,” reports the Banner's Greg Sukiennik."They are there, they exist on the other end of that phone, to talk to you. That is what they're there for." That is Alison Krompf, who is essentially VT's suicide prevention coordinator. She spoke yesterday with VPR's Mitch Wertlieb about the coming national move to the 988 suicide prevention hotline. At the moment, many of VT's crisis teams are on a pager after-hours; that will change at the end of this month when a second call center comes online to cover nights and weekends. Until the 988 number goes into effect, people in crisis can call 1-800-273-TALK (8255) or text 741741."That’s not where I stand.” At a press conference yesterday, VT Health Commissioner Mark Levine said that the national acceptance that it might be okay for Covid to become a disease that younger and healthier people get is not okay with him. He wants Vermonters to encourage the people they know to get vaccinated. "Vaccination means protecting vulnerable relatives, visiting with family and friends, sending kids back to school, and adults back to the workplace, and continuing to make Vermont be the safest state to live,” he said.That's quite a drop! Over two days before VT shut down its online unemployment claims system because of a surge of fraudulent claims, it got 4,000 claims. After it switched to telephone only, Labor Commissioner Mike Harrington says, it got 343 over three days. The state, like others, has lost millions of dollars to fraud, reports Seven Days' Anne Wallace Allen. "What we know," Harrington says, "is it’s being done by national and international crime rings, and it’s a very coordinated effort.” The King and His Court Fool. That's the whimsical name of a photo of two lions, which has just won the Mammals category in the German Society for Nature Photography's 2021 competition. Overall winner is a striking, long-exposure shot of a barn swallow in flight... but then, pretty much every photograph, from a sea lion almost seeming to pose to lightning appearing to erupt from a mountain-top, is striking.
And the numbers...
Dartmouth remains at 4 active cases among students and 3 among faculty/staff. There are 10 students and 2 faculty/staff in quarantine because of travel or exposure, while 4 students and 11 faculty/staff are in isolation awaiting results or because they tested positive.
NH reported 252 new cases yesterday for a cumulative total of 95,714. There were 2 new deaths, which now number 1,307, while 85 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized (up 5). The current active caseload stands at 1,898 (down 81). The state reports 116 active cases in Grafton County (down 17), 62 in Sullivan (down 2), and 166 in Merrimack (down 2). In town-by-town numbers, the state says Claremont has 24 active cases (up 2), Lebanon has 20 (down 4), Hanover has 14 (no change), Haverhill has 10 (down 1), Sunapee has 8 (down 2), Charlestown has 8 (down 2), Newport has 8 (up 2), New London has 5 (no change), and Plainfield has 5 (no change). Warren, Wentworth, Orange, Enfield, Grantham, Springfield, Unity, and Newbury have 1-4 each.
VT reported 34 new new cases yesterday, bringing it to a total case count of 23,191. Deaths remain at 248, while 17 people with confirmed cases are hospitalized, (up 2). Windsor County gained 5 new cases and stands at 1,370 for the pandemic, with 85 over the past 14 days, while Orange County added 1 case and stands at 757 cumulatively, with 65 cases in the past 14 days.
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Today at 12:30, Hood Museum director John Stomberg hosts sculptor Ursula von Rydingsvard online to talk about her large cedar sculpture near Rollins Chapel on campus, Wide Babelki Bowl. The piece was installed last year, and in this second in a series on public art at Dartmouth, Stomberg will talk to von Rydingsvard about the sculpture and her work in general.
At 5:30 pm, the Dartmouth Political Union hosts Congresswoman Annie Kuster. She'll be talking both about her personal journey, from Dartmouth to law school to lobbying and, ultimately, into politics, as well as about life in Congress and the issues the House is confronting these days.
This evening at 6, the Shelburne Museum's curator of American art, Kory Rogers, sits down with photographer Elliot Fenander to talk about Fenander's black-and-white images of American circuses in the 1960s, as the old big top shows began to decline at a time of social ferment. Fenander donated over 1500 negatives to the museum back in 2011, and they're now part of its extensive collection of circus ephemera. (Thanks, CC!)
It's the first Wednesday in May, so Vermont Humanities has a full lineup of lectures this evening, all at 7 pm. Young-adult fiction writer Will Alexander talks about reading fantasy and science fiction and the "imaginative necessity of narrative weirdness"; Madeline Kunin will talk about her life in politics and her move into poetry; historian Lyn Blackwell will detail the struggle for women's suffrage in VT; Yvonne Daley, author of Going Up the Country, will talk about the '60s back-to-the-land movement; Middlebury prof Richard Wolfson takes on Einstein's theory of relativity and how it transformed our understanding of the universe; and more.
At 7:30 this evening, Perkinsville sculptor James Payne will be hosted online by Rhode Island's Jamestown Art Center. Payne, who'll have several works at this year's Sculpturefest in Woodstock, will be talking about his 30-foot-long wooden-beam swirl structure in Jamestown, Isolation, how he got from crafting tiny sculptures out of old credit cards to creating and installing huge ones out of wood and metal, and what the actual process of working on large sculpture is like.
Also at 7:30, Dartmouth hosts essayist and author Ijeoma Oluo, whose 2018 book So You Want to Talk About Race became a bestseller that year. The daughter of a Black father, she was brought up by her single white mother in Seattle, and devoted the book to responding as straightforwardly as she knew how to questions she was often asked—or wished she'd been asked—about race, racism, police violence, and a myriad of other issues.
And today through Sunday, the Vermont International Film Festival, along with VT PBS and ME Public Television, launches the "Made Here" festival online: five days of films made by filmmakers in VT, NH, ME, MA, northern NY, and Quebec. It runs through Sunday with a "pay as you can" policy—with some proceeds going to the filmmakers. There are 24 shorts and three features.
The Garifuna Collective first caught the world's eye back in 2007, when, led by Andy Palacio, they released
Watina
, which brought both the music and the Garifuna people of Central America to worldwide attention. Palacio died a year later, but the collective continued, blending indigenous and African rhythms with their own melodies sung in Garifuna, which mixes Arawak and Carib with French, English and Spanish.
a song from their second album.
See you tomorrow.
Daybreak Where You Are: The Album. Photos of daybreak around the Upper Valley, Vermont, New Hampshire, and the US, sent in by readers.
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