Vineyard Haven Band

Begins Summer Practice

The Vineyard Haven Band has started rehearsing for its 138th season of Sunday evening concerts, which begin June 29 at Ocean Park in Oak Bluffs, alternating with Owen Park in Vineyard Haven.

Other venues this summer include the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown and the Tabernacle in Oak Bluffs.

New musicians are welcome to join the returning members by attending rehearsals at 7:30 p.m. on Monday evenings at the Sailing Camp Park off Barnes Road.

Friday, June 13: Sunny and warm. Not as hot. Temperature rises to the high 70s in the sun. The air is dry and fragrant. Rosa rugosa blooms on small sand dunes at State Beach. Floral display lines the Edgartown-Oak Bluffs road. Beach towels and swimmers color the beach.

Edward W. (Ted) Hewett is back painting wood chests. The 81-year-old Vineyard Haven artist, who has done all kinds of paintings from portraits to abstract, is revisiting an art form.

“Friends ask me, ‘So when are you going to do another wood chest?’” Mr. Hewett said.

The answer is now.

Mr. Hewett used to paint a lot of wood chests: functional art that is a mix between something useful in the house and a one-of-a-kind piece of art work.

While most of us know that it is not polite to spit, there are some who refuse to follow even this basic tenet of manners.

By MARK ALAN LOVEWELL

The 27th annual John Havlicek Celebrity Fishing Tournament made a lot of money for the Genesis Fund last weekend, and not all the draw was the celebrities who attended. Much of it had to do with good fishing, and that success was tied to Vineyard and Nantucket fishermen.

With the final numbers still being worked out, the long weekend event on the Vineyard grossed at least $340,000, slightly more than last year. The gathering included a live and silent auction at the Harbor View Hotel in Edgartown.

Visions of wide open spaces are what one thinks of when they hear the name prairie warbler. Unfortunately, this lovely yellowish warbler has not been named appropriately. Dendroica discolor is the prairie warbler’s Latin name. Loosely translated, this Latin moniker means multicolored dweller of trees. Now that aptly describes the prairie warbler. How prairie got into the mix remains a puzzle to me.

A continuing contractual dispute between the state Department of Environmental Protection and the University of Massachusetts at Dartmouth is delaying efforts to clean coastal waters all over the Cape and Islands, and must be solved quickly, state Sen. Robert O’Leary said yesterday.

The 11-month standoff has left towns without important data, compiled under the Massachusetts Estuaries Project, documenting the health and particularly the nutrient loading of their estuaries, bays and ponds. The information is needed for remediation and planning.

The boom years are over, the Island population is aging at a rapid rate and an underground economy — conservatively estimated at $34 million in unreported wages — threatens to undermine the stability of the Island community.

This is the conclusion of a recent study prepared for the Martha’s Vineyard Commission by John J. Ryan, a consultant with Development Cycles in Amherst.

Katie Mayhew is one of three finalists in the Boston Pops High School Sing-Off. She sang with the 75-musician, full orchestra on Wednesday night, standing near conductor Keith Lockhart.

The 16-year-old singer will perform again with the Boston Pops on Tuesday, July 1 at Symphony Hall.

Each time a Steamship Authority boat has docked at Woods Hole or Hyannis over the past week or so, the captain has turned off the engines. In the time taken to load the vessel, the SSA saved five or six gallons of fuel.

Multiply the number of trips by the number of boats, and the boat line’s latest energy-saving measure makes a saving of more than $30,000 a month. Which sounds like a tidy sum, until you consider the cost of the fuel the boats still are burning.