Election Day 2010

How a prisoner is treated in the Island jail. How a wind power developer is greeted at the state house. How much sales tax you pay. These are only a few of the ways real individual human beings will be affected by decisions made in Tuesday’s election.

Little to Fight About

It began with an idea, a concept really, followed by a fight, the ordinary course of doing business on the Vineyard, where good things are rarely accomplished without a fight.

Castaways

Saving Farm Pond

In the year the United States signed the Declaration of Independence, a tannery barn stood on the south shore of Farm Pond, which appears on a 1776 chart to have several distinct arms. These, like the tannery, have disappeared. Boats crossed into the waters for hundreds of years. Better yet, the pond’s history is full of herring, crabs and shellfish — softshell clams and oysters — in abundance, until the 1970s. But since that time, the pond has mostly been closed to shellfishing, and nitrogen is the killer.

Undue Pier Pressure

The American Academy of Pediatrics this week revealed that children and teens in the United States are spending an average of seven hours a day using television, computers, telephones and other electronic devices for entertainment.

On the same day this news came out, Island children Tate and Corbin Buchwald, Lauren DeCastro and Lachlan Cormie saw their names go on the board as daily winners in the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby.

Lyme Epidemic

The night sweats, the fever, the bullseye rash: the symptoms of Lyme disease are all too familiar to people on Martha’s Vineyard, where the disease is epidemic. Many Islanders are ready with prophylactic antibiotics when they find a pinhead-sized black arachnid clinging on their skin. What was not even recognized a generation ago has become the most common vector-borne (that is, spread by a host such as a mosquito, or in this case, a tick) disease in America.