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Today’s Live Wire: Quick Links
- Feed Flagler Update XIII:
- Ice Skating in Palm Coast?
- North Korea, Madness and M*A*S*H
- Obama the Betrayer
- A Liberal Defense of Money
- Good Literary Sex, Anyone?
- Sex Advice From Poets
- Obama’s Moral Turkey Pardon
- Panic Over Caffeinated Drinks
- Holiday Trash Collection in Palm Coast
- A Few Good Links
Live Wire Rewinds
We’ve had a fantastic weekend, an even better week, and now we’re almost there: just $20 short of our goal of raising $1,000 for Feed Flagler. Thank you all, and today a big thank you to Kathleen Tomlinson for bringing us so close with a generous $100 donation.
Remember: every penny is going to either the Grace Tabernacle food pantry, behind Flagler Palm Coast High School, which is serving close to 1,000 families per month, or to the Bunnell’s First United Methodist Church’s food pantry.
Feed Flagler is designed to raise thousands of dollars and thousands of pounds of food for Flagler County’s food pantries and to pay for today’s Thanksgiving meal for some 2,000 people in the second annual Feed Flagler celebration. The effort is also designed to stock families’ and food pantries’ shelves well beyond Thanksgiving, which is what makes this necessary and particularly worthy.
We started our own fund-raising through FlaglerLive, seeding it with an initial contribution of $100 and further contributions from the following:
- Hollingsworth Gallery’s JJ Graham
- David Millonig in Pensacola
- Nancy Nally in Palm Coast
- Darrell Smith in Flagler Beach
- Palm Coast Bible Church ($100)
- Inna & John Hardison
- Anthony Mike Kales
- Kendall Clark
- Jim Guines
- Lynn Snyder
- Anonymous
- Anonymous
- Ann DeLucia (thank you for pushing us over the half-way mark)
- Anonymous ($100)
- Phyllis Jenkins
- Sharon Hennessey Pinard
- Charlie Ericksen
- Mario diGirolamo
- Neal Ecker
- Timothy McCue
- Kathleen Tomlinson ($100)
If you’d like to donate but would prefer to remain anonymous, just send us a note here and we’ll leave your name out of it. Thank you all. Keep it coming.
- Bug Guard Services, Inc. ($1,000)
- Acme Trophies
- Biblical Truth Ministries ($505)
- Phyllis Carmel
- First Coast Community Credit Union
- Grace Tabernacle Ministries
- Prosperity Bank
- Temple Beth Shalom
- University Women of Flagler, Inc.
- Jean MacAllister
- New Beginnings Church, Inc.
- Cornelius & Ruth Van De Weert
- P. Hassid
- Flagler County’s three Rotary groups
- Tax Collector Suzanne Johnston
- John’s Auto Parts of Bunnell ($1,000)
- Adella Latus
- Michael and Patricia Danforth
- Rev. Elizabeth & Charles Gardner
- Helio Creative
- Hijackers Restaurant
- ITT TDS
- Johnson Orthodontics
- Microhose
- Palm Coast Lions Charities
- Pepsi Co.
- Philippine American Association
- Rocky’s Pizza (Flagler Beach)
- Rotary Club of Flagler County Foundation ($500)
- Rotary Meeting (Single-Meeting Donation, $425)
- Cornelius & Ruth Van De Weert
- N.D. Walsh
- Waste Pro ($500)
- Winn Dixie
- FlaglerLive
Here are the members of Team Flagler’s Food Drive Challenge, coordinated by the county’s Joe Mayer and Christie Mayer (313-4094):
- Flagler County Board of County Commissioners
- Flagler County Tax Collector
- Flagler County Property Appraiser
- Flagler County Schools
- Flagler County Health Department
- Flagler County Clerk of Court
- Flagler County Sheriff’s Department
- Flagler County Supervisor of Elections
- City of Bunnell
- City of Flagler Beach
- City of Palm Coast
- Chicks With Cans
- Waste Pro
- Hammock Dunes Club
- Pop-a-Lock
See Also:
- Feed Flagler Ingredients: 100 Turkeys, 450 lb. of Ham, 170 Pies, and 2,000 Guests Wednesday
- Feed Flagler Raises $13,000 and Tons of Food Ahead of Wednesday’s 2,000 Free Dinners
- Feed Flagler Chicks With Cans Special
- Feed Flagler Suzanne Johnston Special
- Feed Flagler on Facebook
- Time to Get Involved: Feed Flagler Challenges County’s Thanksgiving Compassion and Beyond
- Calvary Christian’s Bus Ministry: Treasuring the Homeless, One Sunday at a Time
- Daviana’s Excellent Adventure: Halloween Bash Fills Carts and Kitty for the Hungry
You read right: ice skating in Palm Coast’s Town Center, but at a cost: $8 for adults, $5 for children.
On Saturday, Dec. 11, Palm Coast will host a special Christmas (or winter, if you’re secularly inclined) celebration in Central Park in Town Center. Families can enjoy photos with Santa ($5 a pop), food (varying costs), music, exhibitor booths, arts and crafts and the annual Christmas Starlight Parade, starting at dusk. In an astounding show of generosity, the city is not charging money to watch the parade. (So far, anyway.)
The ice skating rink will open at noon, through 10 p.m. It’s open to adults and children. The rink will will also be available to the public in December at the following hours:
Mondays through Thursdays – 5:30 to 9:00 p.m.
Fridays – 6:00 to 10:00 p.m.
Saturdays – Noon to 10:00 p.m.
Sundays – 1:00 to 9:00 p.m.
Throughout the month of December, the Rotary of Flagler County’s Annual Fantasy Lights around the lake in Central Park will continue to delight the crowds with sparkling lighted holiday displays scattered across Central Park. Unlike the city’s treats, that one is free.
Information about each event is available if you log onto the City of Palm Coast website You may also call the Parks & Recreation Department, 386/986-2323 for more details.
See Also:
- Starry Saturday: Theater, Art, Grit and Glitz from Bunnell to Palm Coast
- Festival Filibuster: How Palm Coast Plays Hardball With Flagler Beach
- Cultural Development Richer Than Economic: How to Grow Palm Coast Into a City With Soul
North Korea, Madness and M*A*S*H
It’s not news that Kim Jong Il, the North Korean leader, is mad. It’s a bit more newsy when he decides to shell a South Korean island to get his rocks off, as he did on Tuesday. A Thanksgiving war? Not likely: Kim is into provocation, but he pulls back. Then again, men aren’t known for controlling events that are inherently hysterical. “President Obama and South Korea’s president agreed Tuesday night,” the Times reports, “to hold joint military exercises as a first response to North Korea’s deadly shelling of a South Korean military installation, as both countries struggled for the second time this year to keep a North Korean provocation from escalating into war. The exercise will include sending the aircraft carrier George Washington and a number of accompanying ships into the region, both to deter further attacks by the North and to signal to China that unless it reins in its unruly ally it will see an even larger American presence in the vicinity.”
Obama, keep in mind, may suffer from JFK syndrome: he wants, unnecessarily, to show the world that he has balls. JFK got the Bay of Pigs fiasco in return. Obama already has Afghanistan to contend with. Korea will make matters worse. Suicide, in this case, would not be painless.
Let’s pull back at a slightly different angle.
Here’s Alan Alda discussing M*A*S*H:
Michael Lerner in Tikkun: “Sometime in mid-September 2010, President Obama suddenly discovered that twenty months of governing by capitulation to the very mainstream ideas he campaigned against in 2008 was a losing strategy. But instead of acknowledging his errors, he acted as though his liberal and progressive base were betraying him. […] The reason progressives are upset with Obama and the Dems is not that we held a naive belief about how much he or the Democratic Congress could accomplish, given the fact that the Democratic majority in Congress was in fact filled with corporate-oriented “centrists.” We knew the limitations of this reality — a reality that was created by Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi, whose supposedly brilliant strategy in 2006 of backing the most conservative possible candidates in Democratic primaries in “swing districts” worked in the sense of giving the Democrats formal control of the House. Emanuel and Pelosi were more interested in securing political power than in changing the direction of the country. Not trusting the growing anti-war sentiment in 2006, they supported candidates who were ideologically pro-business and pro-war, constructing a Democratic majority in Congress that would back neither anti-war efforts nor the pro-working-and-middle-class measures that Democrats had promised. […] Obama may be able to slip into office a second time in 2012 if the Republicans nominate one of their more horrendous leaders, but until the Democrats and Obama really atone for the directions they’ve taken, and embrace a spiritual progressive worldview, they are unintentionally but powerfully helping to build the kind of resentment and humiliation that has in the past become the psychological underpinning for the emergence of powerful fascistic movements from the right.” The full column.
See Also:
- Obama Caving on Tax Cuts
- Obama’s Ego Factor
- Offshoring War: How Obama—and Those Moments of Silence—Insult Military Sacrifice
From The Liberal: “It is not just the lending of money that is in crisis. A variety of business models are emerging which look set to challenge the previously unquestioned role of monetary prices in the relationship between retailers and consumers. Where products are intangible or experiential in nature, it is these models that look set to survive the current bout of creative destruction sweeping the high street. […] ‘Free’ products have existed for some time, thanks to various forms of cross-subsidy, either through certain consumers being subsidised by others or certain products being subsidised by others. […] Marketing specialists are now seeking to extend this model in all directions. When Anderson’s book on the topic comes out later in the year, expect a surge in idealistic declarations that post-recession businesses will be virtually philanthropic in their generosity to customers. If we are not paying for this blizzard of gifts out of our pockets, what are the costs? The problem is that they may not be economic at all. […] The neo-liberal response is adamant that there is a trade-off. According to the critique outlined by Hayek and Milton Friedman, societies that pursue socialist economic goals gradually lose political freedoms. If we want to safeguard ‘free as in speech’, we must abandon the pursuit of ‘free as in beer’. Of course prices prohibit those who can’t afford them, but the price system is guaranteed to preserve some element of choice, even for the poor. […] If a zero price really is “the future of business”, then now might be the time to appreciate what is culturally and ethically important about money. This is more than a little ironic, at a time when Hayek, Friedman and their valorisation of homo economicus are roundly dismissed as having led us to the brink of financial ruin. And yet the liberal defence of money needn’t be the neo-liberal one, which seeks to implant calculation to the heart of all social and political relations. What’s needed is a culturally attuned understanding of the precise areas where money needs to be conserved.” The full article.
Writing in the UK Independent, Arifa Akbar wonders if it’s ever possible to simultaneously combine good fiction and good sex scenes: “Howard Jacobson, who last month won the Man Booker prize for The Finkler Question, believes it is the discussion of sex that is the intriguing part, not its depiction. “The only point in writing a ‘he puts that in there and she puts this in here’ scene is to arouse, and I’m not interested in doing that. Some critics who should have known better complained that my last novel, The Act of Love, didn’t arouse them. It wasn’t meant to. It was a book ‘about’ compulsive jealousy. It wasn’t intended to make them jealous or otherwise titillate them. “To a novelist – to me, anyway – the ‘about’ is more interesting than the thing. Explicitness almost invariably takes you to bathos. The great sex scenes in literature for me don’t show sex at all – Dorothea in Middlemarch, for example, registering the sexual horror of her marriage through her revulsion from Roman art… It isn’t morality that determines this preference in me, but aesthetics.”
“[…]Do we even need these graphic interludes in an era which has made sex and its availability in all forms not only permissive, but pedestrian? asks [Rhoda] Koenig. Modern literary battles are no fought by publishers over sex, as they were by Penguin in 1960. One wonders whether DH Lawrence would see sex, such a disposable currency today, as the same potent gift to literary fiction. The most interesting writing about sex in the past two decades has arguably come from gay and lesbian novelists – Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, Edmund White – who have touched ground where there has still been sensibilities to disturb and imaginative barriers to break down. […] Yesterday’s sex might be today’s schmaltz, but [Doris] Lessing appears to present a simple yet convincing argument in its favour. What such scenes capture so vividly is a kind of social history of the bedroom that deserves a rightful place in literary fiction. “The description of what happens in the bedroom, between the sexes with all the power-play between the genders is a vital and valid documentation in literature,” she says. Bad sex, for this purpose, could be just as enlightening as good.”
See Also:
- How Gratuitous Is Anne Hathaway’s Nudity in Love and Other Drugs?
- Updike Redux: An Unpublished Interview
- Sex: How Much Is Enough?
Not to overdo it on sex the day before Thanksgiving (you don’t want to be worn out before the big feast), but this really was deliciously irresistible: Nerve, the online magazine, asked several poets for their best advice about sex. Some examples: “What technique do you recommend for delaying ejaculation? Recite poems in your head. Maybe Auden or Lewis Carroll, because they’re rhythmic. You don’t want to lose the flow, but it’s just enough to distract you a little. […] Is the word “pussy” ever inappropriate or offensive? When it’s being called “my man-pussy,” that’s a problem. […] What’s the best passage to read aloud to get you and/or your partner in the mood? “A Squeeze of the Hand.” It’s a chapter in Moby Dick, and it’s really hot. In Moby Dick? It’s the dirtiest thing I’ve ever read. It’s about the men squeezing the whale sperm into oil. They’re all in this huge vat of oil, sort of touching and squeezing each other. I don’t know if it translates if you’re straight. […] What technique do you recommend for delaying ejaculation? Check your email. […] What’s the best film to get someone in the mood? I like The Unbearable Lightness of Being. You have a long time to sit and touch knees with somebody. […] Do you have a favorite passage for getting yourself/your partner in the mood? There’s this poem by Pat Parker that kind of makes me laugh, but also gets me in the mood. It’s called “For Willis,” and she’s describing the sounds her lover makes when he’s coming — ?Oh God, Oh Jesus! Oh God, Oh Jesus!’ — and then she says, “Once again, some dude is getting credit for something a woman has done.” Don’t cheat yourself: Read the full bit, and by all means: give us your own answers below.
See Also:
Obama Outlines Moral, Philosophical Justifications For Turkey Pardon
Click On
| Oprah: Come Be Buried With Me | Saved from Wolf Blitzer |
| Steven Wright in His Prime | Justin Bieber, Pedophile |
| Days of Our Lives Bloopers | How AA Ruins Lives |
| Obama’s Moral Turkey Pardon |
From Reason: “Over and over again, fear-mongering officials and hyperbolic reporters cited two incidents—one at Ramapo College in New Jersey, the other at Central Washington University—in which students who drank Four Loko were taken to the hospital. These 15 students, most of whom seem to have been drinking other alcoholic beverages in addition to Four Loko, represent something like 0.015 percent of the 100,000 or so 18-to-20-year-olds who make alcohol-related visits to American emergency rooms each year. Yet their drunken stupidity was repeatedly presented as evidence of Four Loko’s unique dangers. […] The New York Times reports that Four Loko, which features a drug combination familiar to fans of Irish coffee or rum and cola, “has been blamed” for causing a 20-year-old Florida college student to shoot himself in the head. […] Despite such alarming reports, the FDA did not conclude that alcoholic beverages containing caffeine, which are made by dozens of companies, are inherently unsafe. Instead it focused on Four Loko’s manufacturer and three other companies that “seemingly target the young adult user,” who is “especially vulnerable” to “combined ingestion of caffeine and alcohol”—and too dumb, apparently, to mix vodka with Red Bull.” The full story.
Holiday Trash Pickup in Palm Coast
Palm Coast released the following trash and recycling pick-up schedules for Thanksgiving, Christmas and News Year’s holidays:
Thanksgiving:
There will be no trash/recycling pick up on Thanksgiving Day, Thursday, November 25th. Instead, customers regularly scheduled on Thursdays will have service on Friday, November 26th and customers regularly scheduled on Fridays will have service on Saturday, November 27th.
Christmas and New Year’s Day: As both Christmas and New Years fall on Saturdays this year, the trash pick up schedule will not be affected on these holidays. For additional information, please contact Dianne Torino at 386/986-2339.
- Thanksgiving: The Empty Chair of Family Estrangement
- How Can I possibly Be Free?
- A Still Leaner Pentagon
Cheryl Tristam says
Pierre isn’t here to update the thermometer, but we are both thrilled that with the help of our generous readers, we were able to reach our $1,000 fund-raising goal for Feed Flagler.
I am moved by your generosity to help your Flagler neighbors. I hope today’s meal leaves those in need with an overwhelming sense that their community cares deeply about them.
Personally, I’m heading to Hidden Trails with a violinist in tow to play some music with members of the Flagler Youth Orchestra, and their conductor Caren Umbarger and her husband Paul. Happy Thanksgiving!
Inna Hardison says
Awesome news, and thanks for the update, Cheryl. :-)
NortonSmitty says
Good news! We all need to do what we can to help our less fortunate. Shit, no! No! That’s not the right way to put it at all! I can’t believe I just sunk to describing the folks we are helping in those condescending and hackneyed terms. Me of all people!
But then again, when we hear the term “Less Fortunate”, we have been conditioned to automatically think of a polite term for the poor, flawed losers we pass on Ridgewood or see on the news. But at it’s root, this term pretty much sums it up if you think about it. Not less fortunate because of what they do or do not own. Things like intelligence they can market or even the defects and bad habits they have come to posses, these are the only difference between them and us. Compared to you and me and our crowd, they have definitely been Less Fortunate. Brains, looks family, wealth, drive, or the ability just not to fuck their life up, they got dealt a lesser hand. At least at this moment in our lives they are not doing as well as we are. But if you have ever played Poker, you know that lady luck can bite you in the ass in a heartbeat, and this could be you and yours tomorrow
As someone who went from flying his own twin engined airplane between his Pittsburgh and DC offices to sleeping under a sheet of plywood next to the RR tracks in North Miami (and perversely feeling more free than any one of you can imagine) I have a pretty warped perspective on life.
But one thing I am willing to bet on is that you reap what you sow. The only thing you have in this life that can’t be taken from you is a tattoo and what you’ve done to help others. When you are really desperate, you can’t pawn either, but the latter seems to have a value.
So don’t let this be the end of your charity, your not getting off the hook that easy. Give a bum a ten, fix something for someone who needs it but can’t afford it, overtip a waitress that has a kid, do something to put a warm fuzzy in the Karma bank. You aren’t doing it for them.
Trust me, you never know when you’re gonna’ have to make a withdrawal.