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Good news is in awfully short supply these days, as a scan of any daily newspaper confirms. People are starting to wonder — is there anything left but bad news?

To that end we perused the Gazette over the last year looking for good news, and happily found plenty of it. And so what follows is a sampler of good cheer to end the old year.

Kimberly Watts Peaslee, PhD, has been awarded the $10,000 Donald W. Banner Corporate Intern Scholarship. The Intellectual Property Owners Education Foundation awarded only two students in the country with this prestigious recognition. The presentation was made on Dec. 3, 2008, at a luncheon in Washington, D.C.

She is the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Paul Watts of Tisbury. Her husband Clifford Peaslee accompanied his wife to the luncheon, held in her honor.

The couple currently resides in Concord, New Hampshire with their daughter, Natalie.

The nights ahead this weekend are moonless. New Moon is tomorrow. The moon appears only briefly on Sunday night, when it is right under the bright planet Jupiter and Mercury. All three are close to the horizon and tough to see.

The plywood is up, the roof is ready for shingling. The new Oak Bluffs fire station which will house the old 1929 Maxim fire truck, Engine No. 2, is far from finished, though, and work continues in haste. It won’t just be a garage, it will be a firefighters’ museum.

The following students have made the honor roll at the Oak Bluffs School for the first trimester:

Sixth grade honors go to: Diamond Araujo; Mia Arenburg; Emily deBettencourt; Mariah Duarte; Nyssa Duarte; Ivy Fournier; Ryan Gonsalves; Yannick Gonsalves; Chad Guyther; Cal Howard; Emily Kleinhenz; Noah Keinhenz; Madeleine Moore; Kelsey Moreis; Austin Morley; Grace Oslyn; Sadie Parr; Charlotte Potter; Ellen Reagan; Peter Tennant; Cheyenne Tilton; and Jackson Yuen.

Some physicians, at a mid-point in their lives, might find an altruistic impulse, or if they’ve had the impulse all along, the need to express it more fully. So it is with Oak Bluffs obstetrician and gynecologist Dr. Jason Lew, with his wife, Injy, and their three daughters, Olivia, 23, a Middlebury College graduate (who just completed Michigan field work in the Obama campaign), Isabelle, 21, a student at Wesleyan University, and Sophie, 17, a senior at the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.

It is said that the concept of celebrating the New Year has existed for as long as earthly agriculture, as farmers were the first to notice and record the cyclical nature inherent in the procession of seasons.

About 4,000 years ago, the people of ancient Babylon welcomed the new year in what is now known as March, with an eleven-day festival during which class distinctions and social conventions were set aside for the sake of a really good party.

There is no store where you can order parts for the Flying Horses, the oldest operating carousel in the United States. So in Mike (Panhead) Fuss’s motorcycle workshop in Vineyard Haven, a space almost hidden from view at the end of a dead-end lane, where parked motorcycles announce his business better than the Offshore Cycle signs, 132-year-old cast iron parts sit on a bench. Small chips of bronze and steel are on the floor. The air smells of cutting oil. A shiny gold-colored cylinder spins on a lathe. Moving his fingers delicately on the crank, Mr.

The disappearance of pay phones around the Island has raised public safety concerns in Tisbury and Edgartown.

In Tisbury, town officials pay a monthly fee to keep a pay phone working at the somewhat remote Park and Ride parking lot near the town water tower.

When the pay phone was removed from in front of the Edgartown police station this fall, officers inside had to rethink the way the public reaches the police after hours, when no one is at the station.

The Martha’s Vineyard Commission agreed last week that a full review of the revised plan for Bradley Square is in order and set a public hearing for early next month.

At its regular meeting Thursday night the full commission disagreed with the recommendation of its land use planning committee, which on Monday voted to recommend that a new public hearing is not warranted for the revised Bradley Square plan.