A fast-moving fire swept through Deon';s restaurant on State Road in North Tisbury on Sunday night, completely destroying a preparation area in the rear of the building and causing severe structural and smoke damage to the kitchen and dining area.

Owners of the year-round restaurant said the eatery would be closed for repairs until at least the spring and may not reopen until summer.

The state fire marshall announced yesterday that the fire was caused by a wall heater in the preparation area at the rear of the restaurant.

A wind turbine project in West Tisbury hit a snag recently when a town committee that has been shepherding the project discovered that it had tapped the wrong group to prepare an application for a $40,000 state feasibility study.

The wind energy committee learned that because the turbines are planned for the West Tisbury School, the grant application to the Massachusetts Collaborative Technology Project must come from the Up-Island School District, not the town.

Outerland, the Island’s main music venue, will close Jan. 1 and not reopen again until spring.

Outerland owner Barry Rosenthal came before the Edgartown selectmen on Monday to request a change in his liquor license from year-round to seasonal, one month after he had been granted permission to shift from seasonal to year-round. He said his reasons are strictly financial. “It has been bleeding money since September,” Mr. Rosenthal said.

Correction

A Nov. 16 story in the Gazette about the sale of Thimble Farm reported inaccurately on the farm’s status in 2000 after former owners Bencion and Patricia Moskow sold the development rights to the Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank. The farm remained in continuous operation until it was sold to Lawrence Benson in 2002. The Gazette regrets the error.

Perched in the second row of a community hall at five o’clock in the afternoon, a plate of reconstituted Thanksgiving food balanced in one hand, and a decent glass of red in the other — it was an unusual way to take in a festival of modern music. No poorly maintained toilet facilities, no vomit, no overweight rave casualties passed out at your feet. Nevertheless, it was how Martha’s Vineyard’s musical elite saw fit to present themselves on Sunday.

The commercial bay scalloping season opened yesterday in Aquinnah. Aquinnah is the last town on the Island to open the commercial season. Fishermen have been harvesting scallops in Edgartown, Oak Bluffs, Chilmark and Tisbury.

The Yard, a performing artists’ dance colony in Chilmark, is among 54 charitable organizations newly listed in the 2007 Massachusetts Catalogue of Philanthropy, a publication mailed to the 120,000 wealthiest families in the state. The catalogue, published yearly since 1997, links charities and benefactors.

Island Woman Wins 5K

Amory Salem of Edgartown has won the women’s division of the annual Thanksgiving Day 5K in Oak Bluffs several times — but this is the first year she also out-ran the men as well to win. Congratulations.

Island residents, the Whiting family hopes, can have as much fun skating on Parsonage Pond as they have had watching the pond being dredged.

Onlookers were abuzz Tuesday morning as a unique paddle-wheeled excavator on pontoons crept into the two-acre pond and began snuffling pond grass and weeds into the maw of its extended rake, then churning back to shore to deposit the materials on the bank.

The Martha’s Vineyard Hospital Auxiliary will mark the 24th anniversary of its tree of lights fundraiser to benefit Martha’s Vineyard Hospital. Each December for over two decades, the great pine located in front of the hospital was lit with hundreds of red and white lights, each donated by an individual in honor or in memory of a loved one.