The Martha’s Vineyard Commission last Thursday approved a Verizon cell phone tower in West Tisbury and a harbor fuel facility in Oak Bluffs, two projects that raised objections from residents and abutters.

The harbor fuel facility will be the subject of discussion at the Oak Bluffs annual town meeting Tuesday, where an article to fund the facility appears on the warrant.

The Martha’s Vineyard Land Bank reported revenues of $65,340 for the business week ending on Friday, April 5, 2013. The land bank receives its funds from a two per cent fee charged on many Vineyard real estate transactions.

As spring arrives on the Vineyard, so will the reality TV crews.

According to a letter sent to Island town administrators, filming for the ABC Family reality TV show The Vineyard will take place May 5 through June 29.

Word came in February that the The Vineyard, announced as a docu-soap-reality show chronicling the lives of a group of 18 to 24-year olds, would be filming on the Island. The show is set to premiere on July 24 and production crews came to the Island and Boston in February for closed casting calls.

A bench trial for a Boston man charged with rape adjourned for the weekend Thursday afternoon. The trial, which stems from an incident in Chilmark nearly a year ago involving an alleged assault on an Island woman, will resume Tuesday in Dukes County Superior Court.

Bryant K. Brown, 34, is charged with three counts of rape, three counts of assault to rape, five counts of assault and battery on a retarded person, indecent assault and battery on a person 14 or over and threat to commit a crime.

John Clift has been the sommelier and beverage director at Atria in Edgartown for nine years. For six months of the year he works every single day at the restaurant, and now at Hooked, too. For the rest of the year he travels for both business and pleasure, which in his case amounts to the same activity. He visits wineries all over the world. This past winter he visited California, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, Malaysia, Italy, Egypt and Abu Dhabi.

This description of Mr. Clift’s off-season lifestyle is not intended to generate envy, although it certainly could.

Out in the real world, the ebb and flow of the seasons are nature-based. Mother Nature does her thing and coats are pulled out of storage each winter, shorts and flip-flops resurrected come spring, or summer for those not as itchy to feel the grass beneath their toes.

As recent lengthy obituaries in national newspapers attest, Anthony Lewis was a remarkable journalist. What always struck me most about his writing was the clarity of his thinking, the forcefulness of his prose and the directness of his voice. A legal journalist and columnist for The New York Times, he made the complicated decisions of the United States Supreme Court understandable to lawyers and non-lawyers alike.

I’m a lifelong Chilmarker. Growing up, Nashaquitsa Pond and its surroundings were my world. I consider myself both fortunate and extremely blessed to have had the opportunity to play amongst those hills as a child. This is where I was raised. This is where my father grew up, where my grandfather and great grandfather grew up . . . all the way back to the home of the first Benjamin Mayhew, whose father, John, was Chilmark’s first English settler.

When my mother and father met they were working at the same department store in our town; she on the fourth floor in girdles and bras and he in the mezzanine in sports equipment. She bought a baseball glove for her brother from him and was shocked when on the same bus going home that night there was the tall handsome salesman.

As we build And repair the harbor I see your hand It comes up Dripping From deep within The sandy bottom