In their ongoing search to fill the county manager seat, vacant since August, county commissioners are doing their homework.

The sole item on the agenda at the county commission meeting Tuesday night was discussion about references and background checks on the three finalists for the position. The finalists are Thomas Bernardo of Chatham, Troy Clarkson of Falmouth and Russell Smith of Aquinnah.

It is impossible to determine the total deer population on the Island, although most hunters readily agree to two things: the deer are out there, they are just harder to reach.

With the Island deer shotgun season scheduled to start Monday and run through Dec. 8, there are reasons to expect a healthy if not record-setting number of deer to be taken. For starters, the state Division of Fisheries and Wildlife last year agreed to expand the season from six to 12 days to help reduce the number of deer ticks, the primary transmitter of Lyme disease.

Dean’s List

Scott Yapp, son of Robert and Debra Yapp of West Tisbury, was named to the dean’s list at Syracuse University for the spring 2007 semester. Mr. Yapp is majoring in computer art and minoring in entrepreneurship and emerging enterprises.

If the Edgartown Great Pond is to be restored to environmental health, town authorities must find a way to cut nitrogen pollution coming from household septic systems by at least 30 per cent, according to a comprehensive scientific study of the pond’s water quality.

Ah, Black Friday.

The busiest retail day in America, a paean to consumerism with images of the Capital One Huns and Visigoths gathering in predawn siege before retail palaces promising super sales and blowout bonanzas.

On the Vineyard? Not so much.

The day after Thanksgiving does officially kick off holiday shopping here as everywhere, but in a context of artfully designed community celebrations that don’t shout Everything Must Go!

Here it’s more like Everyone Must Come.

Seventy years ago Addie Crist and Irene Flanders sat together to sew six red cloth stockings.

They filled them mostly with necessaries but also with a ray of Christmas delight for six needy Island kids.

They didn’t call it the Red Stocking Fund and could not have known their simple act of kindness would become an extraordinary source of hope and joy for several thousand Island children and their families.

Cheryl Andrews-Maltais’s landslide victory as chairman of the Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) last Sunday stunned some tribal members, and while the chairman-elect was surprised by her margin of victory, her opponent said he was not.

By the time the new permanent Lagoon Pond drawbridge is finished in Vineyard Haven sometime in the next decade, it will be one of the most expensive projects in Vineyard history with a total price tag well north of $30 million. It will also likely go down as the longest gestating project in Island history; the drawbridge plan has been stuck on open for nearly 20 years now.

If the bay scallop fishery can be restored to places like Cape Cod and Long Island, the Vineyard may be able to take credit for it.

The Wampanoag Tribe of Gay Head (Aquinnah) is in the midst of a multi-year scientific experiment in Menemsha Pond that could have a wide-ranging impact on the future of bay scallops in the region.

Geraldine Brooks has never written an entirely fictional book. She does not even think she could. She spent too many of her writing years, she says, “in service of the facts,” practicing journalism.

In a way she still does practice journalism, for her novels are born of news judgment rather than imagination. The initial inspiration for every book is invariably a true story, and a particular sort of story, in which only a few compelling facts are known, but the detail is missing.