An Edgartown woman was arrested on drunken driving charges Tuesday after she was involved in a two-car crash in West Tisbury that sent two to the hospital with minor injuries, police said.

Jennifer Brown, 33, of Edgartown was headed south on State Road Tuesday just after 4 p.m. when she rear-ended a car driven by Joseph Spinelli, 72, West Tisbury police Cpl. Garrison Vieira said.

There are three places where you can check up on the schedule of Chappy Community Center activities and events: their very thorough website, chappycommunitycenter.org, their gigantic chalk board on the outside wall of the CCC and the bulletin board at the ferry point. You would need a whole page of the Gazette to tell it all, but I’ll mention just a couple of events.

Candidates to Meet

On Saturday, August 11, the The Martha’s Vineyard Democrats will host both candidates for the ninth congressional district of Massachusetts. The candidates are William Keating, who is running for re-election, and Sam Sutter, the district attorney for Bristol County.

The meeting takes place at 9 a.m. at Howes House in West Tisbury.

From Vineyard Gazette editions of July and August 1888:

Edgartown is now entertaining quite a number of summer visitors at hotels and private residences. Every train brings the stranger and returning Vineyarder, all rejoicing in the prospect of a week’s outing at this charming seaport town. All in all, Edgartown is enjoying a fair share of the Island’s prosperity, and the visitors always depart with a reluctance that speaks well for the hospitality and attractions to which the town has treated them.

"Nature abhors a vacuum." Aristotle said that or something like that in the original ancient Greek, observing that nature requires every space to be filled with something, even if that something is colorless, odorless air or house guests.

The flip side of this observation is that empty spaces are unnatural as they go against the laws of nature and physics. So kindly fill your chairs, sofas and beds with people whose company is compatible. You don’t want the science police knocking on your door and inquiring about unfilled spaces.

My architecture firm has designed about a dozen houses on Martha’s Vineyard in addition to the Middle Line affordable housing project in Chilmark. Some of these houses are large, so I have frequently been asked what I think about the discussion now taking place, not only about large houses, but also about the future of the Vineyard in general.

Just like the rest of America, health care on Martha’s Vineyard is in trouble — too often fragmented, unsafe, variable, hard to access and far too costly. Poor system designs are the cause, designs sustained by a fee-for-service payment system that pays for volume (how much you do), not value (how well the patient does). Doctors, nurses, other clinicians, staff, and managers do their very best to help, but they are often fighting upstream against systems that make their work harder.

The July 30 shark attack at Ballston Beach in Truro has focused national attention on the seasonal occurrence of white sharks in waters close to Cape Cod and Island beaches. White sharks are no strangers to residents here; I certainly won’t forget kayaking with friends to see a female white shark trapped in a coastal pond on Naushon island in September 2004. There seems little doubt that we have witnessed more white sharks in areas frequented by swimmers along the eastern shore of the Cape over the past few years.

They served our country in foreign wars on land, air and sea, some in the Pacific and European theatres of World War II, others in Korea, Viet Nam, Iraq and Afghanistan. They have returned home to the Island, some many long years ago, others more recently, to live as civilians with jobs and families, their war experiences quietly and indelibly stamped onto their lives. Other Americans thank them for their service and the United States government rewards them with some benefits, including health care.

The brief season of summer fundraising is almost over. Island nonprofits that rely on part-time residents to subsidize shrinking budgets are tallying up their take from an almost dizzying succession of cocktail parties, dinner dances and auctions, silent and otherwise, and taking stock of what it means for the year ahead.