Bench Sitting

It is just about time for Island benches to be filled with sitters. There are benches on overlooks and benches in parks, benches in woods and benches in towns — and of course there are benches at Vineyard Transit Authority stops.

Try, Try Again in Aquinnah

The energy district of critical planning concern in Aquinnah is a forward-thinking concept, but the bylaw that came before voters at the final session of the annual town meeting last week needs more work and fine-tuning.

Leaving

How can I bear to leave this place,

take the next boat out into the harbor,

pass the buoy, toss

a penny into the water for a return?

How can I bear leaving after 39 years —

built my own house, planted my garden,

tall-trees design, skylight to watch the evening sky,

see the night flight plane lights

blinking their way across the sea.

The Internet has been around for approx i mately four decades, but a team of Stanford University experts says it’s broken. It’s now in the midst of taking a pull-out-all-the-stops approach to developing a new prototype.

The project is called the Clean Slate Design for the Internet. It’s supposed to answer two questions: how to design a new global communications infrastructure from the ground up, and what will the Internet look like in 15 years.

The federal Minerals Management Service has received an unprecedented 40,000-plus public comments on the draft environmental impact statement for the “stalled” Cape Wind project, as it is described by one media outlet. Dozens of key groups and government agencies criticized the draft document which glossed over many of the serious threats the Cape Wind project would pose to public safety, marine wildlife and habitats, tribal and historic resources, commercial fisheries, and the local economy.

Vineyard woodlands are full of delicate pink lady’s slippers, the striking native wild orchids that grow here. In some places hundreds of lady’s slippers can be counted in a small patch of woods. Also called moccasin flower, the flower’s genus name (Cypripedium acaule) derives from the Latin word for Venus’s slipper.