Har! Har! Har!

RE: “After Fukushima, another anniversary” [Letters, March 22]:

Ted Jordon is so funny comparing the risk of same-design baseballs to that of same-design nuclear reactors. Har! Har! Har!

I'm sure they're rolling on the ground in Fukushima. Well, not their ground; they've been evacuated.

Here's another one - this just happened. The power supplying the pumps cooling four of the spent fuel pools at Fukushima failed, and they don't know why! Har! Har! Har!...

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Grant will fund ramp at Athens Town Office

Volunteer, pros continue work on historic building, once a schoolhouse

The smell of fresh paint and the appearance of a new ceiling are the first sensory indications of improvements to the at-least-155-year-old Town Office building. The work was completed earlier this month spurred by the Town Office Volunteers, an ad hoc group formed last fall desiring to spruce up...

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Guilford artist uses running as inspiration for paintings

John S. Dimick of Guilford is best known around the area for his years of coaching successful cross-country teams at Brattleboro Union High School. Since retiring from his lengthy career of teaching and long distance running two years ago, he has returned to one of his first loves: painting.

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RFPL celebrates National Poetry Month with state Poet Laureate Sydney Lea April 1

The Rockingham Free Public Library will kick off National Poetry Month on April 1 at 6 p.m. with a special visit from Sydney Lea, Poet Laureate of Vermont. Lea is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated poet and author of more than a dozen books of poetry, essays, and fiction, and the founding editor of the publication New England Review. He has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller, Guggenheim, and Fulbright Foundations, and taught at Dartmouth, Yale, Wesleyan, Vermont and Middlebury Colleges. His...

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BMH recognized for excellence in statewide initiative

Brattleboro Memorial Hospital announced it has been awarded a $20,000 grant from the Vermont Program for Quality in Health Care, Inc. (VPQ) in recognition of efforts to develop a program that would reduce unnecessary hospital readmission. In addition, VPQ has cited BMH's comprehensive program and will highlight the hospital's work in the VPQ annual report this summer. VPQ challenged all Vermont hospitals to initiate a program that would reduce the risk of hospital readmission, specifically by providing disease management education...

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Amherst professor looks at icons of Western art at Brooks Memorial Library

Amherst College professor Carol Clark will discuss the works that have defined American “Western” art in a talk at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro on April 3. Her talk, “What's Western about Western American Art?” is part of the Vermont Humanities Council's First Wednesdays lecture series and takes place at 7 p.m. Clark will consider the works of painters such as Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper, George Catlin, and Albert Bierstadt to probe undercurrents of racial mixing, psychological displacement, and violent...

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Wanted: Lovers and Other Strangers

The Newfane Playhouse will hold auditions for the Renée Taylor and Joseph Bologna comedy, “Lovers and Other Strangers,” to be held at the Brattleboro Savings & Loan community room on Wednesday, April 3, and Friday, April 5, at 7 p.m. There will also be an audition on Sunday, April 7, at 2 p.m., at the Newfane Union Hall, off Route 30 near the village green. This production is directed by Robert DuCharme of Brookline, with performance dates Thursday, May 23,

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Milestones

Births • In Boston (Beth Israel/Deaconess Medical Cen­ter), March 13, 2013, a son, Adam Michael Hagger­ty, to Claire Willscher and Stephen Haggerty of Dedham, Mass.; grandson to Hugh and Betty Hag­gerty of Bellows Falls, and Lynn and the late Max Willscher of Wolfeboro, N.H.; great-grandson to Patricia Garbarini of Scarborough, Maine. • In Brattleboro (Memorial Hos­pital), Feb. 20, 2013, a daughter, Emma Rae Crandall, to Krystal Merithew and Grant Crandall of Brattleboro; granddaughter to Jim and Laura Merithew, and Joni...

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BCTV announces Spring Video Production Classes

Brattleboro Community Television announces its spring video production classes. Learn to make videos to share with local residents on cable channels 8 and 10. All classes are held at the Brattleboro Municipal Center, 230 Main St., suite 303. • Digital Storytelling: An advanced guide to editing techniques, Saturday, April 6, from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. In this workshop, participants will begin by considering several short documentary, art, experimental, and fiction video pieces as a way of looking at the...

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BFUHS Drama Club presents ‘The Pajama Game’

The Bellows Falls Union High School's Drama Club presents its spring musical, “The Pajama Game,” on March 29 at 7 p.m. and March 30 at 2 and 7 p.m. in the BFUHS auditorium. The dangers of a workplace romance are explored to hysterical effect in this romantic comedy. Conditions at the Sleep-Tite Pajama Factory are anything but peaceful, as sparks fly between new superintendent Sid Sorokin, played by James Morton, and Babe Williams, played by Paige Moody, leader of the...

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‘Six Feet Under Vermont’ features works of Adam, Barlow

Although painter Sarah Adam and photographer Daniel Barlow work in different media, the two artists speak to shared themes in a new joint show, “Six Feet Under Vermont.” The exhibit draws inspiration from New England's scenic and historic cemeteries, presenting these sites as places of wonder, magic, and mystery. Many of the paintings and photographs in the show focus on beloved Vermont cemeteries. “Six Feet Under Vermont” kicks off on Friday, April 5, during Gallery Walk, at Latchis Gallery, 50...

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Parts are parts

Somewhere near you there is a junkyard. You may have never been there, which is a shame, because a junkyard is something worth seeing. Each one is a world unto itself, a monument to the American spirit. Like people, junkyards have their own personalities. Some are neat and organized, with rows or vehicles in engineer-straight rows. They have computers and even offer warranties. Others are old school, with piles of cars stacked on one another. These days, some of them...

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Around the Towns

International Speech Contest March 28 BRATTLEBORO - Competitors from BrattleMasters, the Brattleboro-based chapter of Toastmasters International, are going head to head at the group's spring speech contests, and you're invited. The event is Thursday, March 28, from 6 to 7:30 p.m. at Marlboro College Graduate Center, room 2E, 28 Vernon St. There's no charge to attend, and refreshments are provided. Winners of both the international speech contest and “off the cuff” table topics contests held that night will represent BrattleMasters...

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Winter Farmers’ Market wraps up season with annual CSA fair

Saturday, March 30, marks the final week for the seventh season of the Winter Farmers' Market. It is also the sixth annual CSA Fair hosted at Post Oil Solutions' Winter Farmers' Market. A variety of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) Farms will join the regular market line-up to offer information about their farming operations and their CSA share options. Take this opportunity to do your CSA research and pick your farmer for 2013. Visitors will find farms with weekly CSA shares...

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Three local players named to Vermont Shrine team

Three local high school football players have been selected to play on the Vermont squad in the 60th annual Shrine Maple Sugar Bowl on Aug. 3 at Dartmouth College's Memorial Field in Hanover, N.H. Lineman Zachary Tarvit and running back Zachary Rawling will represent Bellows Falls, while quarterback/defensive back Tyler Higley is the lone Brattleboro representative on the Shrine team. More than 200 graduating high school seniors from New Hampshire and Vermont were nominated by their coaches for the Shrine...

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Bouncing back from Irene — the next phase

Gail Nunziata, managing director of Latchis Arts and Latchis Corp., recently addressed a crowd gathered in the theater's stately, glossy Art Deco lobby. “It wasn't so glorious in 2011,” she says. For 46 days the Latchis Theatre and Hotel was shoveled, mopped, and scrubbed of the damage and debris left behind by the floods of Tropical Storm Irene. The Latchis weathered the post-flood financial fallout, she said. Many small businesses weren't as fortunate, and Irene's effects linger. Nunziata credits local...

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Spring Osher Lectures begin April 1

The Osher Lifelong Learning Institute (OLLI), announces its spring series of morning and afternoon lectures, to begin on April 1. This spring's lectures are devoted to the Broadway musical and the Arab Spring upheavals in the Mideast. In the morning series of six lectures, Zeke Hecker will discuss musical theater on Broadway beginning with “Showboat” and the musicals through the 1920s, and culminating with the rock musicals of the 1970s. Hecker, a longtime English teacher at Brattleboro Union High School,

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Sunny electricity bills ahead

Brattleboro town schools can look forward to saving 10 percent on electricity. On March 20, the Town School Board signed a $130,000 solar net metering credit purchase agreement with Southern Vermont Renewable Energy (SOVEREN), a solar installation and development company based in Westminster West. Soveren's 500 kilowatt (kW) solar farm, still in the permitting phase, will be located in Westminster and be worth an estimated annual $130,000 in net metering credits for the four town schools. The farm will tie...

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Slowing democracy to regain local control

At Newfane's Town Meeting this year, every one of the Selectboard's requests for funding, from employee salaries to town highways, passed. But voters were not able to take any binding action on three of the most pressing issues facing the town at this moment: Reimbursement from FEMA for flood damage from Irene; the siting of cell towers within our community, and our school budgets, which comprise a great deal more of our tax dollars than town government or road maintenance.

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Flushed with pride

It's hard to say what is the bigger surprise - that the $32 million upgrade to the Brattleboro Wastewater Treatment Facility was done on time and under budget, or that the plant stayed in continuous operation throughout the more than two years it took to complete the final phase of the project. Nevertheless, to Town Manager Barbara Sondag, that these two things did indeed happen was hardly a miracle. “This project represents a lot of dedication by the town's staff...

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Helping Bangladesh battle an epidemic of rickets

More than half a million children in Bangladesh are suffering from a crippling form of malnutrition linked to a man-made environmental disaster. In severe cases, their legs buckle at the knees or bow out because mineral-deficient soft bones cannot support their growing bodies when they stand up and walk. If uncorrected, children with rickets will be harmed for life. Rickets is most commonly associated with vitamin D deficiencies mostly caused by insufficient sunlight exposure. But scientific studies in sunny Bangladesh...

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BF issues annual Village water report

The Bellows Falls Village Water Department will be sending out its 15th report on the Village water system with its spring 2013 billing. The report includes information on testing, maximum contaminant levels, source of Village water, and basic health information. The Village operates a water treatment plant at Minards Pond. The report is required by the Safe Drinking Water Act. This year's Consumer Confidence Report covers the period between Jan. 1 and Dec. 31, 2012, per the requirements of the...

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Never had trouble parking in Brattleboro

RE: “Brattleboro needs to better explain parking rules, fees, procedures to visitors” [Letters, March 6]: I have never, ever had an issue with parking in Brattleboro. I have never had an issue finding parking spaces, paid or otherwise. You need change - that's the only rub. Most of the disgust comes from locals who seem to hate their parking lots and in particular, paying for parking.

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The better road

My road not taken was a road to violence, skipping classes, and defiance. I was a very defiant child when I was younger, and I got kicked out of my kindergarten and preschool. I wanted the world to feel what I did, because I was smacked around quite a lot. In elementary school, I didn't do my homework and got sent to the principal's office at least once a day. I would go to school with a new bruise every...

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‘Spell Check!’ returns to Latchis for fifth year of fun

So what if you can't spell trichotillomania. Someone can, and that someone might just be on the stage of the Latchis Theatre on April 6 at 6 p.m., playing in the Fifth Annual “Spell Check! A Spelling Bee for Grown-Ups,” sponsored by Latchis Arts. Join Master of Ceremonies Tom Bodett for the fifth year in a row as he weaves words into wordplay to host this popular, whimsical, bona fide grown-up spelling bee event. Lawyer/local radio host/Beekeeper Jim Maxwell will...

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The Grammar School performs ‘Carnival!’ on April 3-6

“Carnival!” is coming to town. For four nights only, April 3-6, audiences will thrill to the dazzle and daring of B. F. Schlegel's Grand Imperial Cirque de Paris at The Grammar School in Putney. An amusing love story set in a traveling circus, “Carnival!” brings us the popular theme song, Love Makes the World Go 'Round, and the whimsical, eccentric characters of Lili, an optimistic orphan; Marco, the magnificent magician; his partner the incomparable Rosalie; Paul Berthalet, a lonely, bitter...

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A brilliant golden light

The first day of Spring came and went, drenched in a thick blanket of fresh-fallen snow. Only the week before, we were basking in warm days, a whole string of them, our ears filled with the sounds of melting snow and the drip, drip, drip of sap into the buckets, while brown patches of earth began to emerge. We collected sweet sap all through that blissfully warm week, and through the pain of midweek news that broke our hearts. A...

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Cambodian artist and activist Arn Chorn-Pond appears at Next Stage

Next Stage Arts Project presents Arn Chorn-Pond on Friday, March 29, at 7:30 p.m., at Next Stage, 15 Kimball Hill, in a special appearance to benefit Next Stage as part of the Community Artists Performance Series. Arn, a part-time Putney resident, will perform Cambodian songs and speak about his survival during the Khmer Rouge, and about his work in Cambodia to transform his war- and genocide-ravaged country through the arts. He sings popular ballads and also plays the Cambodian flute...

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Raising money, awareness for area’s homeless

Weather permitting, the Brattleboro Emergency Overflow Shelter at the First Baptist Church will be closing for the season in mid-April. For the people who use the shelter, that closing date means the start of the second season of homelessness and another six months of sleeping in cars, in tents, or on friends' couches. Lucie Fortier, executive director of the Brattleboro Area Drop In Center, says that as Morningside Shelter is at full capacity with a significant waiting list year-round, the...

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‘Rock, blues, and bawd’

Jennifer Grossi wants a place where people can express the feminine in a powerful way, a bit like what Virginia Woolf had envisioned for women almost a century ago. But Woolf might blush when she discovers what Grossi and her friends have in mind for a room of one's own. Under her stage name, Jelly Nora, Grossi is part of a new band dedicated to spreading the message of sexual diversity, feminine strength, and joy: Chasing Macie, billed as rock,

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Conservation efforts take shape on Hogback Mountain

The 591-acre parcel now known as the Hogback Mountain Conservation Area has gone through many iterations. Bisected by Route 9, the property was a family-run ski area that operated from the late 1940s until the mid-1980s, when a development company purchased the land, and the open hillsides began to fill with trees. The Hogback Mountain Conservation Association (HMCA), a non-profit group of local citizens founded in 2006, raised enough money through grants and generous private donations to buy back the...

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At the Crossroads

As part of its mission to help bring stimulating entertainment to Southern Vermont, Green Mountain Crossroads (GMC) is hosting a series of cultural events in April. The new nonprofit community-building organization for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and allied communities launched in January and is already offering a full calendar of events. GMC was formed when The Men's Program of the AIDS Project of Southern Vermont closed at the end of 2012 over the loss of federal funding. Its...

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FEMA offers waiver to Townshend

A second appeal to the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has resulted in the agency agreeing that a box culvert, replaced after Tropical Storm Irene swept through in 2011, is eligible for additional funds under a separate disaster relief program that offers more flexibility. The staff of state and federal lawmakers stressed that the decision to make the project eligible as a “406 hazard mitigation measure” - so-named after the section of the 1988 Robert T. Stafford Disaster Relief and...

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Winged tiger of the woods

I overheard a conversation some time ago. A woman was lamenting the disappearance of her cat, who went outside at night and never returned. In the woods near her home, she had seen the tracks of a fisher. With a wavering voice, she concluded that her beloved tom had been taken by the fisher. The out-of-doors can be a dangerous place for all manner of animals. A house cat out-of-doors is a predator. A recent study has significantly raised the...

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Maps provide some clues to Athens schoolhouse history

The question of the age of the former town schoolhouse came up early on in the discussion of what to do with the building and whether it had been built on its current site or moved from another location. Sandi Capponcelli, who is spearheading the move to restore the building, has not reached a definitive answer, though she thinks the strongest evidence indicates it was built on site sometime around 1858. Capponcelli has been trying to solve a mystery. She...

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Newfane mulls federal flood land buyout program

More than a year and a half after Tropical Storm Irene tore through town, causing widespread flooding and complete washouts of some houses, the Selectboard is still only at the beginning of many cleanup projects. The town was informed recently that it had received grant assistance via the Hazard Mitigation Grant Program (HMGP) buyout program, a federal initiative targeted for properties that were partially or completely destroyed by natural disasters. Selectboard member Chris Druke presented the details of the buyouts...

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In Brattleboro, a marathon meeting focuses on the fiscal

Town Meeting Members hashed out town and school budgetary business during the long-day-into-night Annual Representative Town Meeting, a marathon that inspired one meeting observer to note that it was the most cantankerous he had witnessed. Underpinning many of the questions meeting members posed were fears over fiscal prudence. Discussion on the school budget question took six hours. Discussion on the municipal budget boiled down to debate on the police/fire upgrade project, marked by voters' remorse. The meeting, held at the...

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