Year: 2024

Sox win big on left coast

The Big Story News Item – Sox Jump Out Fast: We’re just 10 games in, so it’s too early to call the surprise of Baseball 2024. But raise your hand if you had the Red Sox winning 7 of those 10 games. Especially since all 10 came on the West Coast. Most surprising has been the starting pitching, which had a collective ERA of 1.53, with the best being Tanner Houck and Nick Pivetta giving up just one run in four starts.

The only down so far was shortstop Trevor Story dislocating his shoulder diving for the ball Friday, and there is talk as I write this on Monday he could be lost for the season.

The second 10 games come at home vs. Baltimore, Anaheim and Cleveland. We’ll know more after that.

Sports 101: Who holds the NBA record for playing the most consecutive games without fouling out?

News Item – Big Moment for Women’s Basketball: TV ratings often signal when a sport has arrived as a force in American sports. Last Monday may have been that day for women’s basketball as the grudge match between defending NCAA championship LSU and Iowa drew a largest-ever women’s college basketball audience of 12.3 million TV viewers. The return engagement went to Iowa 94-87 behind 41 points by Caitlin Clark. That was followed by similar ratings winners when Iowa got by UConn amid a controversial ending (it was the right call) in the semi-final before losing to South Carolina in the title game on Sunday. A great week for women’s basketball.

News Item – Keith Dickson: He’s one of those guys who’s been so good for so long it’s hard to remember what came before him. For the retiring Keith Dickson that would be taking over at Saint Anselm in 1986 and going on to win 719 games with a .687 winning percentage, make the NCAA Tournament 22 times and take one trip to the Final Four. All the while never having even one team I can remember that did not exceed the sum of its parts. Best of all was the rivalry between the Hawks and SNHU during the tenure of Dickson and Stan Spirou that was an on-going treat for local college basketball fans.

Well done, young fella.

The Numbers:

30 – stolen bases in 33 career attempts for Red Sox speedster Jarren Duran after going for 6 out of 7 so far in 2024, when he’s also batting .343.

400 – career goals scored by Bruins nudge Brad Marchand, a number that makes it hard to recall that the supposed to be Bruins star the year he was drafted was second overall pick Tyler Seguin. For the record: Seguin has lasted as long in Dallas but was 51 g’s behind Marchand when he reached his milepost.

10,000 – mark in career points reached by Jaylen Brown during his 26 effort in a 124-107 win over Portland.

… Of the Week Awards

Player of the Week: The Houston hurler Ronel Blanco gets it for the no-no he threw at Toronto last week in just his eighth MLB start, a 103-pitch, 7-strikeout gem.

Why Can’t We Get Guys Like That Award: In Dalano Banton’s first game since leaving Boston as part of the Xavier Tillman deal, the 6’9” point guard juiced the Celtics for 28 points and 9 assists Sunday. And it wasn’t a one-game thing. In 28 games he’s averaging 16 points, 3.3 assists and nearly 5 boards with Portland.

Sports 101 Answer: Most incorrectly believe that Wilt Chamberlain holds the record because he never fouled out even once. But he only played in 1,045 games in his career. And while Moses Malone had five early career foul-outs, he later played in 1,212 straight without fouling out.

A Little History – Wilt Chamberlain: While never fouling out is noteworthy, it’s not the most amazing of Wilt’s many records. It’s that in 1961-62 when he scored 100 in one game and 50.4 points per game, he actually averaged more minutes per game than there are in a game as thanks to a few OT contests he averaged 48.5 per and would have played every second all year if he hadn’t gotten tossed in one game after getting two T’s for arguing with the refs.

Final Thought – Thumbs Up to Larry Lucchino: The greatest Red Sox team president passed away last week at 78 after a career of sports triumphs that included putting baseball back on the path to embrace its intimate ballpark, urban roots origins with the creation of Camden Yards as President of the Orioles. Conversely he was also smart enough to understand that Fenway Park was a jewel that should be saved and revitalized, not replaced. As for on the field, in my not so humble opinion he, not John Henry or Theo Epstein or Terry Francona, was the straw that stirred the drink that turned the Red Sox from perpetually frustrated losers to four-time champions this century. And they haven’t been the same since he left after 2015. RIP.

Email Dave Long at [email protected].

How to prepare for a hike

Conditions on the trail are not like in your yard

Lt. Jim Kneeland is the Search and Rescue Team Leader and Coordinator at New Hampshire Fish and Game, and the Hike Safe Representative/Partner with the U.S. Forest Service. Visit hikesafe.com.

What is your advice for inexperienced hikers?

Depending on experience levels I always think that hiking in a group is obviously a good idea. Then you can bounce ideas off of one another when you’re out on your excursion, like when to turn back or if you don’t feel comfortable with the conditions. Or better yet if you’re really inexperienced there are a list of guides that you can find online and going with an experienced guide, maybe taking your first time or two to kind of go through a safe way to go hiking … in adverse conditions or basic conditions that you’re not familiar with. That’s another good way to gain some experience is to go with a guide.

What should hikers know about springtime in New Hampshire?

Hiking enthusiasts [who] come from the south where their lawns might be green and the daffodils are coming out … there are still a lot of times late into the spring [with] winter-like conditions and that means you should be prepared … with clothing, footwear, traction devices, even after today you probably need snowshoes again here, even in April. That’s the kind of thing we see people usually screw up here and that’s the change of the seasons, being prepared for where … different weather conditions that are still going on here in elevation.

What is a Hike Safe card?

A Hike Safe card is a way that we help fund search and rescue here in New Hampshire. Traditionally, prior to the advent of the Hike Safe card, the only way that Search and Rescue was financed was through this $1 surcharge on OHRV [Off-Highway Recreational Vehicle] registrations and boat registrations, and that wasn’t eating the cost of search and rescue here in New Hampshire, so they came up with the voluntary Hike Safe card, which is a $25 per person or $35 per family Hike Safe Card which lets you support Search and Rescue in New Hampshire and actually has helped defray the cost of Search and Rescue placed upon the agency.

What should you do if you encounter a bear, bobcat, etc.?

We do have, obviously, bears, bobcats, coyotes, foxes, those kinds of things here in New Hampshire. It’s very rare, you might see one, but it’s very rare that you have an adverse interaction with one. Making noise, making yourself appear large, usually gets the animal to go the other way. I can’t think of a time, there’s only been a few occasions where … not myself, but I have heard of bad interactions with people outdoors and that’s typically because they surprised the animal or maybe even, in the instance of a bear, maybe got between a sow and its cub, but typically most wildlife doesn’t hang around long enough…. Noise is my best advice.

What should Granite Staters do to help preserve wilderness areas they frequent?

They can visit websites through the Forest Service, Appalachian Mountain Club and whatnot to see the best ways to protect those fragile environments above treeline and that’s basically staying on the trail, not trampling vegetation…. A lot of our trails are marked by rock cairns, which are piles of rock that mark the trails, and then in the summer months when you can see the granite that you’re hiking on there’s usually a painted blaze on the rock or a tree that depicts where the trail goes, so staying on marked trails…. Then obviously, no one likes to see garbage and stuff up on the trail. Take what you bring. It baffles me to go hiking and you see people putting dog poop in the green bags and leaving the bags on the side of the trail. If you’re going to pack it in, you can pack it out, so that’s my advice on trash….

—Zachary Lewis

Featured image: Lt. Jim Kneeland. Courtesy photo.

News & Notes 24/04/11

Higher education task force reports

A press release from Tuesday, April 2, stated the Public Higher Education Task Force released a report of its findings on the strategic alignment of public higher education in New Hampshire, including short-term and long-term initiatives intended to reduce financial barriers, increase accessibility, drive the state’s economy and ensure the foundation for an active and engaged citizenry in accordance with Executive Order 2023-06 issued by Gov. Chris Sununu. The task force, which was composed of leadership from the Community College System of New Hampshire (CCSNH) and University System of New Hampshire (USNH), state officials and industry leaders who solicited statewide input from various stakeholders, recommended long- and short-term initiatives, according to the press release.

Short-term initiatives include transfer credit and curricular alignment between CCSNH and USNH while expanding credit opportunities for experiential work, implementation of New England Commission of Higher Education (NECHE) accreditation for CCSNH as a single statewide college with locations throughout the state, the streamlining of admissions process to proactively accept CCSNH students with a predetermined GPA to USNH schools, notification of automatic acceptance to CCSNH for high school students, utilizing consistent admissions and financial aid processes for students of both systems, an increase in the use of online delivery to provide access to workforce opportunities, the recruitment of employers to assist graduates with loan repayments when they begin working, and co-locating the CCSNH and USNH system offices in a shared workspace to foster the streamlining and coordination of common administrative functions, according to the release.

Long-term initiatives include the implementation of a study on having the two systems under one governing board and one chancellor, developing a rolling six-year plan, updated every two years, the elimination of institutional competition through program duplication where duplicate programs are not needed, the expansion of online offerings and potential consolidation to a single platform across both systems, the examination of offering CCSNH courses and programs on USNH campuses and vice versa, improving transfer ability from CCSNH to USNH, and the analysis of physical assets and program utilization across both systems for space utilization and the potential for shared facilities, according to the same release. Visit governor.nh.gov for the entire report.

Medicare scams

In an April 5 press release, Attorney General John M. Formella issued a consumer alert for New Hampshire residents, especially New Hampshire Medicare recipients, warning of receiving multiple reports of scammers posing as Medicare representatives to obtain personal identifying information, The scammers ask whether the recipient has received a new Medicare card, and if the recipient states they have not the scammer then asks for the recipient’s personal identifying information, including the recipient’s Medicare and Social Security number, according to the same release.

Scammers can use the personal information obtained to perpetrate additional scams, engage in identity theft or commit additional crimes, including fraudulently accessing financial resources of the victim, according to the release.

Medicare is not issuing new cards to recipients in 2024, and Medicare does not make unsolicited calls to recipients asking for personal or private information. If you receive a call from anyone claiming to be calling on behalf of Medicare asking if you received a new Medicare card or seeking personal identifying information, it is a scam, and consumers who receive calls should hang up immediately, according to the release.

Call 1-800-MEDICARE (1-800-633-4227) for all Medicare-related inquiries. Complaints can be made to your local police department and by calling the Consumer Hotline at 271-3641 or by visiting doj.nh.gov/consumer/complaints/index.htm.

Renovations at New Hampshire Hospital

The New Hampshire Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) announced in a March 26 press release the completion of construction in the “E” Unit at New Hampshire Hospital (NHH), a unit that was designed for children, has been renovated to accommodate the adult population, and reopened on Monday, April 1, bringing 12 more psychiatric beds online and increasing NHH capacity to 164 beds. Further renovations will bring six more beds online by May for a total capacity of 170 beds to serve adults. In a similar fashion the “F” unit continues with renovations, with the intention of NHH being at full capacity of 185 beds later in the year, according to the same release.

Increasing inpatient bed capacity is a component of “Mission Zero,” the Department’s plan to eliminate an occurrence known as “ED boarding,” where people in acute behavioral health crisis seek care in medical emergency departments while they wait for care in another setting. This was a top focus outlined in New Hampshire’s 10-Year Mental Health Plan.

Lori Weaver, DHHS Commissioner, said in a statement that “as we make steady advancements in our work toward eliminating ED boarding in New Hampshire, the increase in bed capacity at New Hampshire Hospital will help reduce wait times for people who need inpatient psychiatric care. However, inpatient capacity-building is just one part of a multi-pronged effort to eliminate the wait list. The mental health system continues to make strides in many of our Mission Zero strategies that will help reduce the need for, and length of, inpatient psychiatric admissions.” Visit dhhs.nh.gov for more information.

Visit the Spring Craft Fair in Tilton on Saturday, April 13, from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. at Winnisquam Regional High School (435 W. Main St.), where there will be a myriad of crafters and vendors.

On Wednesday, April 17, from 4:30 to 6 p.m. at Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord (45 S. Main St., gibsonsbookstore.com) the Poetry Society of New Hampshire will host an afternoon of verse with this month’s headliner, Miriam Levine, and an open mic follows her reading.

Stratham Historical Society holds its annual spring appraisal day Sunday, April 14, from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Stratham Firehouse (4 Winnicutt Road). Experts will appraise antiques and collectibles for a small fee; a limit of five items is recommended. See strathamnh.gov/historical-society (click Meetings and Programs) or call 778-0434 for details.

Making lemonade

Jade Trio EP release show

By Michael Witthaus
[email protected]

Andrew North & the Rangers are a busy band. Along with frequent gigs, they lead the First Wednesday open jam session at Concord’s Bank of NH Stage. They began hosting it at the lush downtown venue after their regular Ranger Zone open mic night ended when Area 23 moved a few miles down State Street to become The Forum Pub.

The lottery-based open session is unique in offering local musicians the chance to play with a full group. Also, the venue has top-notch lights, sound and multimedia, which makes it a great place to shoot promotional photos. The opportunity extends to performers who typically can’t take advantage of an open mic, like a young drummer who stopped by recently.

“He can’t go to an open mic and be like, here’s my snare drum, I’m going to play three songs for you. It doesn’t really work,” North said in a recent phone interview. “So we got to jam with him and come up with some funk jams and things like that. It’s cool to get musicians who aren’t able to provide the full expression of what they do in a traditional open mic setting.”

North also encouraged non-musicians to come for the entertainment.

“The talent level is shockingly high most months,” he said.

In addition to their musical endeavors, however, the band — original members North, Rob O’Brien, Chip Spangler and Dale Grant, along with recent additions Jillian Rork and Randy Hunneyman — all have busy day-to-day lives, and getting all six together is difficult at times. “We’re made up of people who are parents and professionals, with a whole lot going on in their lives,” North said. “From a scheduling perspective, there’s often times when somebody can’t make a gig.”

A year ago, only three people came to a scheduled practice session — North, Grant and Rork. Rather than bail for a month, they began jamming. They called the result Jade Trio, a stripped down, intimate effort. Songs like “Ben Folds’ Mind” and a new take on the instrumental “Epiphone” originally on the Phosphorescent Snack album have an easy, neo-jazz quality.

They enjoyed playing together enough to document the sessions in Concord Community Music School’s rehearsal hall. A four-song self-titled EP will be released on April 5. On the same day, in the same practice space, the three will play a one-off show, followed by a full Rangers acoustic set.

A benefit concert for the school, the event exemplifies the tightly knit Concord music community. Back when Area 23 was preparing to relocate, North and his bandmates did a final show there. Fiddler Audrey Budington, who has played with North in the Senie Hunt Project and is currently a member of Rebel Collective, joined in for a few songs.

“She works at Concord Community Music School and was like, ‘We need to do something with you guys this spring,’ so that’s where this show came from,” North recalled. “It’s really fortuitous the way everything came together.”

Making it an all-acoustic evening was an easy call for North.

“They have a Steinway piano on the stage, and we’re going to take advantage of that,” he said. “We’re really excited to see what this ends up sounding like, because we haven’t played a show quite like this before. Also, because it’s out of our regular wheelhouse [of] music venues and nightlife type places that have a bar and things like that, we’re not sure what to expect as to who’s going to come.”

He’s eager for what may be Jade Trio’s only public performance. However, it can be a challenge to come up with a rhythm section while working in a piano, drums and baritone saxophone configuration.

“Between the three of us, we’re all kind of juggling who’s holding down that low end of things, so when Jillian is going to take a solo on the saxophone I’ll drop my left hand lower to make sure we’re covering that frequency range,” North said, adding, “I really enjoy that process of three people making music together in the moment and sort of intuitively passing off that kind of stuff. It’s really a pleasure to get to play with people on that level.”

Andrew North & the Rangers w/ Jade Trio
When: Friday, April 5, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Concord Community Music School, 23 Wall St., Concord
Tickets: $10 suggested donation

Featured photo: Jade Trio. Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 24/04/04

Local music news & events

• Blues Italiano: Beginning with the formation of his group Morblus in 1991, guitarist Roberto Morbioli made a name for himself in the blues world. One critic likened him to “Eric Clapton and a young Stevie Ray Vaughan.” Another called his mix of “funk, soul, shuffle, swamp, second line and everything else” a “relentless feast for the ears.” Lately, Morbioli is readying a new album for release. Thursday, April 4, 8 p.m., Stumble Inn, 20 Rockingham Road, Londonderry. See robertomorbioli.com.

• Local laughs: Headlining Nashua’s Center for the Arts was a career milestone for Drew Dunn, a Nashua South High grad. Though now based in New York, he’ll always be a hometown boy. He headlines a show with support from pal Paul Landwehr, Liam McGuirk and Danya Trommer, part of a regular Friday comedy series. After a few more New England dates, Dunn is off to Canada, Key West and Arizona. Friday, April 5, 7:30 p.m., Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester, $26 at palacetheatre.org.

• Fiddle finesse: A Scottish expat who cut her teeth in Glasgow’s rich session scene, fiddler Louise Bichan came to the States via a Berklee Music College scholarship. Bichan now lives in Cornish, Maine, but says Scotland will always be her home. Her latest single, the lilting instrumental “Coldstream,” dropped last month, and her area show coincides with the release of her new album The Lost Summer. Saturday, April 6, 7 pm., Blasty Bough Brewing Co., 3 Griffin Road, Epsom, $30 at blastybough.com.

• Groove rock: Raw, raucous and relentless, Catwolf is an all-female trio making waves in the North Country. In June they’ll host Underground Sunshine, a women-forward showcase. Their Lakes Region winery show starts with wine tasting; food is available for purchase. Sunday, April 7, 7 p.m., Hermit Woods Winery, 72 Main St., Meredith, $15 and up at eventbrite.com.

• Country girls: Though Emily Mann and Wila Frank, the duo known as Paper Wings, have rural West Coast roots, their banjo and guitar sound convincingly evokes Appalachian bluegrass. Songs like “Is It True” have a stomp and holler vibe, with forceful yet sweet harmonies. Now Nashville-based, they’ve released three albums, the self-titled 2017 debut, 2019’s Clementine and the new Listen to the World Spin. Tuesday, April 9, 7 p.m., The Word Barn, 66 Newfields Road, Exeter, $16 at thewordbarn.com.

Transient and Strange, by Nell Greenfieldboyce

Transient and Strange, by Nell Greenfieldboyce (W.W. Norton & Co., 211 pages)

The science writer Nell Greenfieldboyce has worked for NPR since 2005 and is a bit of an outlier. She doesn’t use social media much, lets her kids call her “Nell” and adopted a combined yet unhyphenated last name. She also has, until recently, resisted talking about her personal life in her writing. That changed a decade ago when a friend convinced her to write about a spider in her kitchen with which she had become entranced. And once that door was opened, a sort of floodgate opened from which Transient and Strange emerged.

“Transient and strange” is a phrase from a Walt Whitman poem about meteors, and meteors streak across the cover of Greenfieldboyce’s book, which combines science writing and memoir with a poignancy rarely seen in the genre. The author links discoveries undergirding disparate topics — tornados, black holes, spiders, fleas — to events in her own life, including her parenting mistakes, her parents’ physical decline and her husband’s health issues. The book is revelatory in every sense of the word.

The book begins with a sweet mildness that belies what is to come. She’s lying in bed with her children, when her 6-year-old shares that he’s been thinking about tornados, having listened to an audiobook that mentions one. At first, Greenfieldboyce is excited about introducing her children to this wondrous thing: “a spinning column of clouds snaking down to the ground.” But after watching her children’s eyes as they watch a short video, she realizes that she’s introduced not wonder, but fear, and indeed, both children, ages 3 and 6, become obsessively worried about a tornado hitting their home.

This leads Greenfieldboyce into her natural territory: making science relatable for a mass audience. Her attempts to calm her children’s fears lead her to call a University of Oklahoma scientist whose research led to the 1996 film Twister, then to read a book he’d read as a child, to learn about the development of Doppler radar, and the devastating tornado that hit Worcester, Massachusetts, in 1953, killing 94 people and displacing 10,000.

But then, she suddenly slips in some devastation of her own, a traumatic experience from her childhood that sends her to seek counseling as adult. Like a tornado, we don’t see this coming, and Greenfieldboyce skillfully weaves her own story with happened to the families in Worcester, as their ordinary lives were upended, then there was an eerie calm, and then the storm slammed into them again.

One of the more interesting details that she shares about the Worcester tornado is of survivors who described potatoes and eggs floating in the air as the tornado approached — a phenomenon caused by the wave of low pressure.

The story then easily flows into a visit with her hospitalized father, which leads into a discussion about — wait for it — meteors. Admittedly, this is no ordinary family. Greenfieldboyce has long been interested in extraterrestrial rocks; she wears a chunk of one as a pendant, and she’d just bought her father a piece of a moon rock as a Christmas present. (Maybe not as strange as it seems, even though it had wound up in a drawer; he’d once worked for NASA.) She takes us on a whirlwind journey of famous rocks (the revered Black Stone in Mecca) and improbable rocks (the meteor fragments that hurtle to Earth) and reminds us that what we take for granted today was practically heretical just a few centuries ago. Thomas Jefferson, for example, reportedly mocked Yale scientists who said rocks they’d collected had come from space, saying, “It is easier to believe that two Yankee professors would lie than that stones would fall from heaven.”

Walt Whitman muscles his way into this story, as Herman Melville does later, and Greenfieldboyce’s own words hold their own with these literary stars, even as she tells stories that involve several unsavory characters, like the man who tried to seduce her when she was 12. For someone who for 30 years was intent on not writing about herself, she writes with a shocking amount of candor, most of all when she writes about what she calls “my eugenics project.”

At 23, she fell in love with the man she would eventually marry. He had a genetic condition called polycystic kidney disease that would one day result in his needing a kidney transplant. Although she was in love and committed to him, she writes, “I didn’t think an organ transplant at the age of thirty or forty, and then years of taking drugs to suppress the immune system was anything to just shrug off.” And just as her boyfriend had inherited the disease from his mother, who had inherited it from her father, there was a chance that their children would inherit it too.

All this thrust the young couple into the world of genetic counseling and artificial reproductive techniques. He was against the “reproductive industrial complex”; she thought they’d be crazy not to avail themselves of scientific methods that might allow them to have a baby free of the worrisome gene. Their struggle to conceive a child — taking place at the same time that he is preparing to have a kidney transplant — takes the reader deep into the couple’s most intimate spaces. And quite by happenstance, it does so at a time when the nation is newly engaged in a conversation about in vitro fertilization and the ethics of frozen embryos.

Theirs is a deeply moving story, as is the book overall. Greenfield has said that she wrote the essays independently, not knowing what would become of them, but they flow beautifully, like water. She may not have all the answers to her questions — or ours — but the questions she raises are fascinating. Transient and Strange is neither; it is elegant, thoughtful writing that will endure in your thoughts. A —Jennifer Graham

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