News
The America’s Cup is named after the schooner America, the first winner of the sailing regatta match around the Isle of Wight in England in 1851. The cup is the oldest active trophy in international sport, 45 years older than the modern Olympics. Both contests took place last month, and while many flocked to Vancouver for the winter games, I headed to Valencia, Spain for the sailing. It was a tough call, as I had taken pictures at the half-pipe in Salt Lake in 2002, which was thrilling, but I had to witness this special America’s Cup.
Jump Rope for Hope
Students at the Tisbury School recently raised $4,147 to support the Red Cross Haiti relief efforts through a jump rope event, held for all grades.
Just after the earthquake hit Jan. 12, two fourth grade teachers, Pamela Herman and Veronika VanDe Geer, and their students saw the many children who now had lost everything, and initiated a jump rope for hope event. Children generated sponsors to support their jumping during each gym class. The $4,147 check was presented to the Red Cross just before school vacation.
Poets, Please
The Island Voices Poetry in Performance series moves to Pathways at the Chilmark Tavern on Wednesday, March 10, at 7 p.m. All Island poets are invited. Linda Black and Michael West will perform their work, with an open reading to follow. Island Voices continues on one Wednesday night monthly through the winter and will move forward in an expanded schedule through the summer and fall, to include spoken word performers, rappers and freestylers, slam poets, singer-songwriters and free-verse and traditional forms poets.
Ending a dream season, the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School boys’ basketball team on Saturday lost 92-75 to Wareham in the second round of the Massachusetts Interscholastic Athletic Association tournament. With the loss the Vineyarders finish the season at 16-4, one of their best records in recent memory.
Think of humanity as a herd of caribou living on an arctic island with no predators and abundant sustenance. We reproduce wildly until inevitably the sustenance, the energy source, is overtaxed and collapses.
Then we begin to die. In the case of humanity, billions of us.
The analogy and the dark prophecy are Mike Ruppert’s. And he argues it already has begun, this great dying, and there is nothing we can do to stop it.
The United Way has given a $4,000 challenge grant to support the Red Cross Martha’s Vineyard Preparedness Initiative.
Greg Orcutt of Vineyard Haven, a Cape and Islands United Way board member, says: “We . . . ask Martha’s Vineyard to join us in supporting this Preparedness Initiative so that our Island residents can be ready for disaster.”