It was raining yesterday morning — and thankfully the weather gods switched the downpour with Sunday’s splendor and the Martha’s Vineyard Festival which saw music jamming in Ocean Park from three in the afternoon until just past 11 p.m.

“It doesn’t rain on my shows,” declared Festival Network vice president Rick White just before the event.

NASA might want to get in touch with him.

Seriously, what could be a funnier title than Robert Frost’s Answering Machine? by Daniel Waters (Indian Hill Press, $15). The West Tisbury wit-man, known far and wide as D.A.W., has been posting his quatrains in The Vineyard Gazette, Yankee Magazine, and on N.P.R. When we hear his doleful voice – Disney could cast him as Eeyore in the Winnnie the Pooh cartoons — reading his own hilarious, too-true verbal apecues on the air, we pat down our desks for a pen so we can share the ditty with friends.

Like this one entitled Cricket

Is there any relationship more complicated and, when it works, more rewarding, than the mother-daughter bond? Two authors with strong Vineyard ties have approached this essential kinship from both sides, from the formative years, and during the final years.

How about this for an odd economic twist: the NASDAQ is down, gas is five dollars a gallon, and no one is buying anything except . . . art! Could that be? “Yes!” Vineyard artist Peg Thayer said yesterday at the All Island Art Show at the Camp Ground in Oak Bluffs. “We all enjoyed a brisk morning of sales. It was fantastic!”

Every summer the Vineyard Playhouse presents a Shakespeare play in the al fresco amphitheatre at the Tashmoo Overlook in Vineyard Haven, and those in the know about one of the very “funnest” things to do in the high season, are on hand to appreciate it.

PALACE COUNCIL By Stephen L. Carter. Knopf, New York, N.Y. July 2008. 528 pages. $26.95 hardcover.

There are some thrillers — The Big Sleep and The Maltese Falcon come to mind — where the plot is never going to make much sense, but for the reader to bog down on this point is to miss a jolly good ride. Stephen L. Carter’s new novel, Palace Council, is just the sort of book that keeps you turning pages — all 500-plus of them — until the clock blinks 3:28 a.m. in digital pixels and you force yourself to turn out the light.