Vermont General Election 2024: Local Candidates

The primaries are over, and it's on to the general election.  Among the local races, there is only one competitive race, for State Representative.

High Bailiff has a single nominee, Johnny Trutor, whose campaign is a Facebook page with a jokey video.  

State Representative is a rematch of the Democratic party primary:

• Missa Aloisi, now running as a Progressive.  She is a small business owner with two children in Burlington School District.  Missa's priorities are dignity & safety, equity, and affordability.
• Abbey Duke, a small business owner with two children in Burlington School District.  😁 Abbey  was appointed to Emma Mulvaney-Stanak's seat after she was elected Mayor of Burlington in March.  Her priorities include housing, education funding reform, and climate action.  She is also a neighbor.

State Senator has three nominees, from which we vote for three:

• Phil Baruth, the current senate president pro tempore, advocate for gun control, paid sick leave, and education (personalized learning plans, which have seen spotty implementation).
• Martine Larocque Gulick, a current senator.  Her top priorities are reforming education funding, housing, and healthcare.
• Tanya Vyhovsky, a current senator who previously served as a state rep.  Her platform priorities are economic justice, social justice, environmental justice, and reproductive justice.

These are the three who won the Democratic primary.  Stewart Ledbetter, who also ran in the primary, chose not to run as an independent or for another party.

Past Lives (2023)

 Got Past Lives out of the library and watched it last night, so now I've seen 3 of the Oscar-nominated films for Best Picture from 2023.  I think Barbie is still my favorite, but definitely enjoyed Past Lives.  There isn't much plot to speak of; in the opening scene we are presented three people at a bar and voiceover wondering how they're related to one another.  We then jump back 24 years to the childhood of two of them in South Korea, just before one of them emigrates** to Canada.  We then jump to 12 years later, when these two reconnect for a while online, and the one in Canada meets and marries a New Yorker.  Finally we return to present day, when the person who stayed in Korea visits New York.

Because Celine Song (the writer/director) doesn't invent events to create artificial drama, the story can focus on the thoughts and feelings the characters have and their interrelationships.  There are strong themes about living across/between cultures.

I fondly recalled the Before Trilogy while watching this, and prefer this style of storytelling to that of One Day, the series (I haven't read the book or seen the film), which I felt invented things for the characters to do and to happen to them to create artificial drama.  

** in the subtitles, they speak of "immigrating to Canada", but IMO while in South Korea they are emigrating from South Korea to Canada.  

A House of Sky and Breath (Sarah J. Maas)

Five years ago I reported on the frequency of throat bobs in Sarah J. Maas's books. She has since published four more books.  I've read three of them and am happy to share an updated chart of the progression of throat bobs across Maas's ouevre.  The steady rate since page 4800 has continued, with a few runs here and there during especially emotional moments.

One major change is the number of unnamed characters whose throats bob.  For the first 7000 pages or so, only named characters throats bobbed, and now four unnamed characters' throats have bobbed in the last 2000+ pages (though I suspect that the unnamed alpha mystic will get a name in House of Flame and Shadow).

  

House of Sky and Breath boasts the third-most throat bobs among the novels:

... and Bryce is now tied with Aelin as the queen of throat bobbing, with a whole book to take first place.