Please Adopt Us

The cast of characters at the Animal Shelter of Martha’s Vineyard remains pretty much the same as last week; if you are thinking about adopting a cat or one of our two dogs, please stop by the shelter and give our cats a hug and the dogs a pat — they love the attention and they all need to find good homes.

Think of humanity as a herd of caribou living on an arctic island with no predators and abundant sustenance. We reproduce wildly until inevitably the sustenance, the energy source, is overtaxed and collapses.

Then we begin to die. In the case of humanity, billions of us.

The analogy and the dark prophecy are Mike Ruppert’s. And he argues it already has begun, this great dying, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.

Under pressure from a vocal group of fishermen, the Chilmark selectmen this week reversed a recent decision to require Menemsha leaseholders to carry extra liability insurance at their own expense.

A lively crowd filled the town hall meeting room at the selectmen’s meeting Tuesday night to protest the vote that was quickly approved in a 2-1 vote on Feb. 16. Selectman Warren Doty voted no.

Martha’s Vineyard’s Indian tribe rejected a $1 million inducement to drop its objections to the proposed Cape Wind development in Nantucket Sound, in the interest of preserving a cultural tradition which some tribal members deny even exists.

The offer from Cape Wind was made during a series of meetings convened by U.S. Interior Secretary Ken Salazar in Washington in January this year. Both the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah), and the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe were offered $1 million each, to be paid in installments over 20 years.

It took the Martha’s Vineyard Film Festival about three years to get into the casual character it has enjoyed for the past seven. In the first year, a black and white printout distributed the day before the Grange Hall screenings announced a one-day program consisting of a collection of shorts, a few features and some ethnic food. The next year, a move to the Katharine Cornell Theatre in Vineyard Haven eliminated the food; eating wasn’t allowed at the site, so the festival moved again.

The remnants of a shipwreck turned up on South Beach near Wasque last weekend, following a series of winter storms that have pounded and eaten away the south-facing shoreline of the Vineyard in recent weeks.

The large piece of what appears to be the hull of a ship was spotted about 100 yards east of the Norton Point Beach opening by Skip Bettencourt, who saw and photographed it. The ship remnant is about 35 feet long and four feet wide.

If you call the office of the Island Affordable Housing Fund these days, you don’t get a secretary answering. You get Ewell Hopkins himself, executive director, chief cook and bottle washer.

“That’s what I am. Absolutely,” said Mr. Hopkins yesterday. “I’ve laid off the entire staff. I am a staff of one.”

In the week ahead the late night moon moves through the summer constellations. Tonight, the moon is in the zodiacal constellation Libra and rises late in the evening.

Temperature: Precip.

Day Max. Min. Inches.

Fº Fº

Feb. 26 45 32 1.37

Feb. 27 40 33 Trace*

Feb. 28 40 30 .04

March 1 40 32 .41*

March 2 47 34 .00

March 3 46 36 .00

March 4 36 33 .25*

*Melted Precipitation

My parents used to call such visitors “visiting firemen.” The guests could only stay for a day, not an overnight, so you tried to give them the best overview of the Island in a short time. The 50-cent tour as it is called. I find the same is true when I am in Florida. Recently I had back-to-back visiting firemen and had an excuse to put aside the bloody income tax preparation and go birding!