WELCOME TO DAYBREAK DIVERSIONS, UPPER VALLEY!
For the next two weeks, you'll get one of these each weekday morning at 6—a quick and, here's hoping, entertaining read. Something like this...What it takes to get a ping pong ball in a cup. One thing the pandemic was really good for? House-bound Rube Goldberg wannabes. High marks for creative use of the kitchen and toy vehicles.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.Italian maker of wooden hat blocks is the last of his kind. The hand-carved wooden block molds the shape of the hat—a once milliner’s method that today only a few still practice. And Gian Piero Bellucci might be the only person still making these wooden blocks. Craftsmanship Quarterly’s Luisa Grosso has a story and a short film about Gian Piero, 89, who runs the small Tuscan workshop where as a boy he learned the craft from his father. It’s a poignant portrait of a man whose life-long passion is undiminished, even as old-style hat-makers disappear, and who admits, “After me, this job will no longer exist.”The Monday Vordle. With a word from the news.And finally, some Monday music. Somehow, it seems just right to step into these next couple of weeks with Keb' Mo' and a bunch of Playing for Change regulars from around the world doing Robert Johnson's "Walking Blues."See you tomorrow.
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