The Internet did not arrive on the Island by chance, like the skunk and the raccoon. It was deliberately brought here by an anxious group of like-minded computer enthusiasts. Twenty years ago, it wasn’t even known on the Vineyard as the Internet.

Today, business on the Island doesn’t get done without a byte or a bit being exchanged. The Internet today is in every town hall, most municipal buildings and in just about every household. The world is linked to the Vineyard and the Vineyard is linked to the world.

T. Boone Pickens is a Republican billionaire from Texas who handsomely funded the Swift Boat campaign against John Kerry. Carl Pope is a veteran of the environmental movement, executive director of the Sierra Club and fierce critic of both George Bush and John McCain.

That the two men are in furious agreement on the need for a radical overhaul of U.S. energy policy, Mr. Pope said, says something very bad about the recent state of politics.

It is one of the enduring pieces of Martha’s Vineyard lore: you take your recycling to the transfer station, separate it as directed into containers for plastics, paper, cardboard, aluminum and so on, and then at the end of the day it all gets tossed in together and dumped.

Like glass, the myth recycles endlessly. But it is a myth.

Even Art Buchwald had his dream.

“I imagine it this way,” he wrote in a 2002 column in this newspaper. “I am going to be cremated and then have my ashes dropped over every cocktail party on Martha’s Vineyard. It’s the only way I can make all the parties held here in the summer. I want Cape Air, the friendly, nine-seat airline, to fly me . . . The plane takes off from Martha’s Vineyard Airport, and Mike Wallace is in charge of dropping the ashes.”

Today’s Vineyard Gazette is being delivered to every mailbox on the Island. We hope you enjoy the news, issues, features, information and events calendar in today’s paper. If you would also enjoy a signed copy of Espresso Love proprietor Carol McManus’s new cookbook Table Talk: Food Family Love (retail price $22.95), you can get one free with a subscription to the Gazette, at an on-Island rate of $41 a year. Enjoy 70 issues of the Gazette a year. Renew your subscription and your family mealtimes, your mind and body.

The West Tisbury byways committee has recommended including the Dr. Fisher Road in an expanded Martha’s Vineyard Commission special ways protection zone, after hearing complaints from residents about an increasing number of dump trucks and trash haulers traveling on the road.

The Massachusetts House of Representatives last week unanimously approved an environmental bond bill with a healthy allocation of $1.5 million for Oak Bluffs to help repair the retaining wall along Sea View avenue that partially collapsed in February.

The bill also includes $500,000 to build a new stand-alone public fishing pier adjacent to the Oak Bluffs Steamship Authority pier.

Up in West Tisbury, past the airport but before the Mill Pond, is a small building. A part of both Island and national history, it serves as a social and cultural melting pot and a way to track economic trends. It is the Lillian Manter Memorial Hostel and, on a recent Tuesday morning shortly after 10 a.m., every bed was booked, but not a guest was around. The hot July sun was out and the groups of bikers and summer campers, the travellers from Canada and Germany and the friends shacked up in the one private room were all off exploring the Island.

Jessica Pisano, founder of Belushi Pisano Gallery and an established artist, opens a new solo exhibition with a reception tonight, Friday, August 1, from 5 to 8 p.m. at the gallery on State Road in Vineyard Haven.

Over the past decade, Ms. Pisano has combined her black and white photography with painting. Using her photography as her canvas, Ms. Pisano paints with media including, oil, pastel and acrylics. In this series of new work, she will showcase her mixed media work presented on birch panel, tile and antique tin or wood frames.

It was U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell’s Feb. 5, 2003 address to the United Nations which convinced Bob Drogin that Saddam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

Until then, said Mr. Drogin, who covers issues of weapons proliferation, terrorism and intelligence — nukes, kooks and spooks — out of Washington for the Los Angeles Times, “I was a sceptic.”