WELCOME TO DAYBREAK DIVERSIONS, UPPER VALLEY!
"Can we bring our own food?” “This is Amtrak. We can probably bring our own livestock.” Harrison Scott Key was one of 15,976 writers not chosen for Amtrak’s Residency for Writers. So he set out to create the experience himself. On Longreads, he details his journey on the track not taken with his friend and muse Mark, “a wayfaring evangelist in the Church of Saturated Fat.” With the goal of writing something—anything—together, they ride the City of New Orleans 900 miles from Chicago to New Orleans. It's a lazy trip for them, a rollicking one for us. “Speed and convenience … maybe we’ve got enough of both already. Maybe we need to slow the hell down,” Harrison concludes.Why you really don't want to get a hippo mad at you. A pair of wildlife photographers from Florida were in Botswana's Okavango Delta, where they stopped to film a lone hippo, as Bill Klipp describes it, "doing what Hippos do, lounging in the water, snorting, staring at us, twitching his ears, rolling over, rising up and down with an occasional yawn and short rushes through the water. We speculated that he was kicked out of the larger nearby pod due to bad behavior, and boy was that right." Calm, kinda cute, and then suddenly: very much not. "Luckily," Klipp writes, "only the vehicle was injured."SPONSORED: Dig into a day of garden fun Aug. 23 10 am to 5 pm! Join Billings Farm & Museum, Marsh-Billings-Rockefeller National Historical Park, and Woodstock Inn & Resort’s Kelly Way Gardens for a celebration of summer blooms and garden exploration. Enjoy tours, tomato tastings, live music, and hands-on activities. Wander the Sunflower House, and explore gardens from classic to cutting, pollinator to production. To honor the Rockefellers' legacy of sustainability and community, Vermont and New Hampshire residents receive free admission to Billings Farm with ID. Sponsored by Billings Farm & Museum.Museums for dummies. Well, one anyway: the Vent Haven Museum in northern KY, the world’s only ventriloquism museum. It’s built on the collection of W. S. Berger, who bought his first dummy in 1910 and never stopped. The collection now numbers more than 1,100 dummies, including the famous—Lamb Chop and Charlie McCarthy—and the obscure—a plain wood, hand-carved model made by a WWII POW to cheer up other prisoners. Antiques are joined by replicas and contemporary characters, like Jeff Dunham’s Peanut. Director Lisa Sweasy says the collection was built over four decades of pre-Internet searching, and the stories behind the dummies are incredible.This week's jigsaw: The Dartmouth Bicycling Club, 1888. Cam Cross writes for the Norwich Historical Society: "Taken at the Bema: stolid expressions, varied hats, distinct clothing, and top-of-the-head parted haircuts. See the original photo, more Club pictures, information about the 'penny farthing', a German poster of variations on the 'bicycle', and a beautiful poster (and jigsaw) for 'The Romer', the next generation of bicycle, at The Curioustorian."Today's Wordbreak. With a word from the regional news.
Let's turn to Jeremiah McLane, Eric McDonald, Ryan McKasson and their newest Kalos piece, the beautiful Scottish folk ballad "Lowlands of Holland", followed by "Counterpoint", all recorded in a barn in Bow, NH ahead of a concert there.See you Friday.
Daybreak is written and published by Rob Gurwitt About Rob
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