WELCOME TO DAYBREAK DIVERSIONS, UPPER VALLEY!
For the next six weeks, you'll get one of these each weekday morning at 6—a quick and, here's hoping, entertaining read. ONE IMPORTANT NOTE: If you decide you want to stop getting Diversions, DO NOT unsubscribe unless you also want to stop getting Daybreak when it resumes. Instead, just shoot me an email and I'll take care of it for you. Though I'll be off email for the next week, so you might just have to suffer with Diversions for a bit.Now then...No one's saying there actually is a sea god. But if there is a sea god... Jeff Overs is a BBC photographer, and back in 2021 he was in Newhaven, which is an English Channel ferry port. The winds were fierce and the tide was high and the waves were crashing over the harbor wall and he was taking photos. And, well, one of them got to looking freakily like... the BBC calls it "Neptune." Somewhere, Poseidon's fuming, don't you think?Billions of fireflies flashing in sync—it’s as cool as it sounds. No one’s saying that number is exact, nor is it the point. When a phenomenon of this magnitude occurs, the math that really boggles is how these bugs learned to harmonize their bioluminescence. A YouTuber set up a camera as night fell on the Anamalai Tiger Reserve in southern India—undisturbed by artificial light after dark—and the fireflies put on a spectacle, blinking in rhythm en masse, or at times in concentrated clusters, like a murmuration of light. Fireflies respond to nearby light, says science, and at a certain density fall into lockstep.SPONSORED: Willing Hands' Garden Talk Series Continues Tomorrow! Join Willing Hands for our second Garden Walk & Talk event tomorrow at our Church Street Garden in Norwich! Enjoy a tour of our garden, greenhouse, wash-pack facility, and warehouse to see firsthand how our mission comes to life. Attend just the tour, or stay for a volunteer session in the garden to take part in making more fresh food available to our hunger-relief partners. Learn more and sign up at our Events page. Sponsored by Willing Hands.Somehow, they seem a lot bigger when they bang into your screen at night. Sphinx moths are one of the gifts of summer -- decorative, agile fliers... and, as this pic on Reddit shows, uncannily good at looking like a running shoe. The Monday Wordbreak. With a word from the regional news.And finally, some Monday music: You know that bust-loose feeling you sometimes get at the start of something new? Even classical musicians can channel it. This is L'Arpeggiata, a European early-music ensemble that focuses on Italian, French, and English music from the 17th century, often pairs up with jazz musicians, and is led by Austrian theorbist and harpist Christina Pluhar. Here's a rockin' encore they did for a concert in Utrecht, with male alto Vincenzo Capezzuto, mezzo Giuseppina Bridelli, soprano Nuria Rial, and renowned counter-tenor Jakub Józef Orliński—that's him in red, throwing down break-dancing power moves, "a skill singular among opera singers," as The New Yorker once put it.See you in a couple days.
Daybreak is written and published by Rob Gurwitt About Rob
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