Not many people get out of Huntsville, Alabama, fashion designer Lorraine Parish said knowingly.

Artists wishing to participate in Treehouse Studios’ annual Nancy Luce show are invited to contact the gallery or submit works via e-mail to ruthadams1@comcast.net.

Works in all media will be considered for the show, which will open in October at the gallery located on State Road in West Tisbury, opposite Up-Island Cronig’s market.

The Manhattan Short Film Festival (ManhattanShort.com) has selected 12 finalists now screening across four continents this week — including here, at Vineyard Haven’s Katharine Cornell Theatre on Saturday, Sept. 27 at 7:30 p.m.

Island film lovers will have the opportunity to view and vote on the next generation of filmmakers. There were 429 entries from 42 countries. This week the finalists screen 295 times in 115 cities, from St. Petersburg, Russia to St. Kilda in Melbourne, Australia.

In this serialized year-long novel set on the Vineyard in real time, a native Islander (“Call me Becca”) returns home after two decades to help her eccentric Uncle Abe keep his landscaping business, Pequot, afloat. Abe has a paranoid hatred of Richard Moby, the CEO of an off-Island wholesale nursery, Broadway. Convinced that Moby wants to destroy Abe personally, and all Island-based landscaping/nursery businesses generally, Abe is obsessed with “taking down” Moby. Abe has rented a fishing boat for the Derby, knowing that Moby is also fishing.

It was a full house at derby headquarters Wednesday night. There were anglers bringing fish from all over the Island, there was a movie playing in Edgartown, but a seal managed to steal the early show at the water’s edge.

There is an official derby seal. Or, it could be more than one.

Derby enthusiasts who go and weigh in their fish from 8 to 10 p.m. at the foot of Main street in Edgartown have noticed a smart big seal swimming nearby.

Derby president Ed Jerome thinks the seal may be the same one that has come to swim off the weigh station for years.

Mr. Jerome said the “big guy” swims up when local anglers slap the water with a fish carcass. “He is there every night,” Mr. Jerome said. Even youngsters have fed the animal.

Outerland, the 29-year-old Vineyard nightclub that got a new lease on life less than three years ago, is up for sale, its books awash in red ink despite an outward appearance of success with a varied live entertainment scene.

“We gave it a great, great try,” said club owner Barry Rosenthal on Tuesday. Mr. Rosenthal bought the nightclub, formerly named the Hot Tin Roof, in January 2006, with his brother Dr. Arthur Rosenthal.

Enthusiasm for fishing runs rampant at the derby weigh station. Anglers will tell their stories. Occasionally someone sneaks in and posts a note or a drawing on the old building.

This morning a poem was posted on the wall, written by R. Gross:

I’m a fisherman can’t you see.

That’s all I really wanted to be.

Women or man the fire is lit.

In the boats and beaches we all have to hit.

The thrill of it all as we searched the ocean shallow and deep

A Chilmark police report on Middle Road traffic is in and the results are not flattering: of the 14,500 vehicles clocked in a 13-day period last June on the road which stretches from Beetlebung corner into West Tisbury, more than 87 per cent were speeding.

According to police chief Timothy Rich, who presented the data at a selectmen’s meeting last Thursday, the main offenders were local.

Occupying almost every available seat in the Chilmark Community Center, voters rejected a $2 million purchase of the Home Port restaurant at a special town meeting last night, flouting months of effort on the part of selectmen to acquire the Menemsha restaurant and surrounding property for public use.

As a result of last night’s vote, the longstanding Menemsha seafood restaurant will now likely go to Robert and Sarah Nixon, private buyers who signed an alternate purchase agreement with the current owners.