It sounds like the set-up for a joke: how many Jewish rugby players are there in America? But that was the question Menemsha native Jasper Wilson asked himself last fall as he pursued try-outs for the American rugby team traveling to the World Maccabi Games in Israel this July.

Edgartown School students joined town and library officials Monday to celebrate the first visible marker of Edgartown’s new library: a sign announcing the beginning of the project. A group of students from kindergarten, first grade and third grade at the school posed for a picture in front of a sign that says: “Watch your new library being built here.” The sign is in front of the old brick Edgartown School, which will be demolished this summer to make way for the new library.

Todd Ruggere sat by himself at the bar of the Plane View Restaurant at Martha’s Vineyard Airport. Normally his visits cause quite a stir, but it was a Wednesday afternoon and nobody knew he was coming ­— he just needed a place to get a beer.

Mr. Ruggere is touring the state of Massachusetts and drinking a beer in each of the 351 towns, all in under a year.

A Vineyard organization devoted to spaying and neutering feral cats will be closing its feral cat shelter at the end of the year.

Laurie Huff, the founder of Cattrap Inc., said the organization will lose its lease on a barn sheltering rescued feral cats in December. Cattrap is scrambling to find homes for some of the 15 to 20 cats, now semi-feral, who call the barn home, including Holiday, a friendly calico who was found with a distended colon; Frasier, a big black cat who lived under a porch, and Misty from Katama.

On Saturday afternoon a crowd gathered at the Gannon & Benjamin Marine Railway. They had come to witness the launching of a 28-foot replica whaleboat which had been built at the shipyard as part of the restoration of the Charles W. Morgan, the only remaining wooden whaling ship in the U.S. The crowd was not filled with mere bystanders, though. Muscle was needed.

“It takes a village to put one of these together,” said Nat Benjamin, one of the shipyard’s founders. “It looks like it’s going to take a whole city to launch it.”

The annual Taste of the Vineyard dinner and auction Saturday night turned into a tribute to artist Ray Ellis, who has raised more than $1 million f