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Weather: Sunny, cooler. Less humid with highs in the upper 60s. Northwest winds 5 to 10 mph. Thursday Night: Lows in the mid 40s.
- Daily weather briefing from the National Weather Service in Jacksonville here.
- Drought conditions here. (What is the Keetch-Byram drought index?).
- Check today’s tides in Daytona Beach (a few minutes off from Flagler Beach) here.
- Tropical cyclone activity here, and even more details here.
Today at a Glance:
In Court: A 12-member jury is deliberating and is expected to deliver a verdict in the first-degree murder trial of Brian Pirraglia, 39, in the death-by fentanyl of 38-year-old Brian O’Shea in their B-Section house in Palm Coast in 2022. If convicted, Pirraglia faces life in prison. Starting at a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse. See: “Now Up to Jury to Decide If Brian Pirraglia Deserves Life in Prison for Overdose Death of ‘Best Friend’.”
The Flagler County Commission meets in workshop at 9 a.m. to discuss its beach management plan, and the taxing mechanism that would go with it. It is the first workshop meeting with the two new commissioners, Pam Richardson and Kim Carney.
The Flagler County Canvassing Board meets today at the Flagler County Supervisor of Elections office, Government Services Building, 1769 East Moody Boulevard, Bunnell. The meeting is open to the public. Check the time in the sidebar or in this chart, which includes the full year’s meeting schedule (the pdf schedule does not include the dates and times of required Canvassing Board meetings which may be necessary due to a recount called locally or statewide.) The board is chaired by County Judge Andrea Totten. This Election Year’s board members are Supervisor of Elections Kaiti Lenhart and County Commissioner Dave Sullivan. The alternates are County Judge Melissa Distler and County Commissioner Donald O’Brien. March-April meetings are for the presidential preference primary, such as it is. See all legal notices from the Supervisor of Elections, including updated lists of those ineligible to vote, here.
The Town of Marineland Commission meets in workshop at 5:30 p.m. then in a regular meeting at 6. 9741 N Oceanshore Blvd, Marineland. See the agenda here.
Flagler Tiger Bay Club Guest Speaker: Carlos M. Cruz, on “What It Takes to Be and Remain an Individual of Influence.” 11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. at Hammock Dunes Club, 30 Ave Royale, Palm Coast. $35 for members, $40 for non-members with invitation. Carlos will also provide an Analysis Debrief of the 2024 election and will be available before and after the meeting for a book signing. He has extensive policy communications and public relations experience. He served as a legislative assistant for the pro-tempore of the Florida Senate. His years of service enabled him to become well versed on a variety of local, state and national policy issues. Following his tenure in the Florida Senate, Carlos served as executive assistant to a member of Florida’s elected Cabinet. As the youngest member of the Commissioner of Agriculture’s executive staff, he enabled the department to communicate Florida’s agricultural importance in the newly developing areas of Latin America and other Caribbean nations. Carlos has close relationships with legislators and staff as a former staffer in both the legislative and executive branches of Florida government.
Palm Coast’s Residential Drainage Citizens Advisory Committee meets at 6 p.m. at City Hall.
Model Yacht Club Races at the Pond in Palm Coast’s Central Park, from noon to 2 p.m. in Central Park in Town Center, 975 Central Ave. Join Bill Wells, Bob Rupp and other members of the Palm Coast Model Yacht Club, watch them race or join the races with your own model yacht. No dues to join the club, which meets at the pond in Central Park every Thursday.
Story Time for Preschoolers at Flagler Beach Public Library, 11 to 11:30 a.m. at the library, 315 South Seventh Street, Flagler Beach. It’s where the wild things are: Hop on for stories and songs with Miss Doris.
 Keep Their Lights On Over the Holidays: Flagler Cares, the social service non-profit celebrating its 10th anniversary, is marking the occasion with a fund-raiser to "Keep the Holiday Lights On" by encouraging people to sponsor one or more struggling household's electric bill for a month over the Christmas season. Each sponsorship amounts to $100 donation, with every cent going toward payment of a local power bill. See the donation page here. Every time another household is sponsored, a light goes on on top of a house at Flagler Cares' fundraising page. The goal of the fun-raiser, which Flagler Cares would happily exceed, is to support at least 100 families (10 households for each of the 10 years that Flagler Cares has been in existence). Flagler Cares will start taking applications for the utility fund later this month. Because of its existing programs, the organization already has procedures in place to vet people for this type of assistance, ensuring that only the needy qualify. |
Voltairomania: Voltaire is 330 years old today, and I am 60: we share the same year, he of 1694, me of 1964, though he would often insist we do not share the same day. Documentation of his birth on Nov. 21 is his baptism, recorded in the church of Saint-André-des-Arts in Paris on Nov. 22, referring to his birth the previous day. Was it authentic? Voltaire not only claimed he was born on Feb. 20, 1694, and far away from Paris, but that he was not the son of his legal father, that he was the natural son of an affair his mother had with a nobleman, that she had disappeared herself in the countryside for a few months, that he was born too skinny to survive, that he was expected to die, that he never did (still hasn’t), and that he was finally brought back to Paris for his baptism only after it appeared that he would live, and to reintegrate the legal normalcies of proper, bourgeois life. It was not uncommon in previous centuries to wait days before a child was baptized, though to the devout waiting too long was risky, since it risked condemning the baby to Limbo, should the baby die before baptism (that’s one of the church’s innumerable little dogmatic cruelties). Suspiciously, I was not baptized until Jan. 3, 1965, according to my Catholic family booklet, as if my parents not only were willing to take that risk (was I that healthy?) but didn’t seem to want to bother baptizing me during the Christmas season. Voltaire loved his mother and sister but detested his imperious father and Jansenist brother. He chose to take a new name, dropping his birth name of Francois Marie Arouet soon after he was freed from the Bastille after an 11-month imprisonment in 1718: he had written scurrilous verses that accused the Regent Duc d’Orleans of sleeping with his daughter, and did too little to hide the verses, confiding in a man he thought was his friend. The friend turned out to be a police plant. Arouet became Voltaire, and Voltaire developed a suspicion of men he would never abandon. He took the name of Voltaire with the publication of his first play, Oedipe. Yes, Oedipus: the guy who murdered his father and who married his mother. There is all sort of speculation about Voltaire’s choice. He wanted to outdo Sophocles and Corneille, but clearly there must’ve been some daddy issues as well. And so the invention of the birth out of a noble blood line as well, since Voltaire hated the idea of emerging out of an untitled bourgeois family (his father kept legal books at court, or something to that effect: he was wealthy, but I could never figure out exactly what he did.) Historians have stuck to November 21, but there are enough shreds of evidence to raise questions, though that evidence relies on after-the-fact documents produced in the 19h century. So scholars and history have stuck with November 21. Whatever the case may be: today should be a global holiday. Vive Voltaire, and more than ever: Écrasez l’infâme.
—P.T.
Now this: Nicholas Cronk is the general editor of the 205-volume edition of the Complete Works of Voltaire, published at Oxford, a monument of scholarly publishing that was in the works from 1968 (when it started under Theodore Besterman) to its completion in 2022.
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The Live Calendar is a compendium of local and regional political, civic and cultural events. You can input your own calendar events directly onto the site as you wish them to appear (pending approval of course). To include your event in the Live Calendar, please fill out this form.
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Nar-Anon Family Group
Flagler County Beekeepers Association Meeting
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
Are you not tempted to declare that you will suspend the Encyclopedie until justice has been done to you? The Guignards have been hanged, and the new Garasse should be put to the pillory. Send me, I beg you, the names of these unfortunates. I will treat them according to their merit in the new edition that is being prepared of the General History. How I pity you for having to produce the Encyclopedia in an un- free country! Must this dictionary, a hundred times more useful than that of Bayle, be hampered by the superstition that it should annihilate; that we still spare rogues who spare nothing; that the enemies of reason, the persecutors of philosophers, the assassins of our kings still dare to speak in a century such as ours?
(In the original French: “N’êtes-vous pas tenté de déclarer que vous suspendrez l’Encyclopédie, jusqu’à ce qu’on vous ait fait justice? Les Guignards ont été pendus, et les nouveaux Garasse devraient être mis au pilori. Mandez-moi, je vous prie, les noms de ces malheureux. Je les traiterai selon leur mérite dans la nouvelle édition qui se prépare de l’Histoire générale. Que je vous plains de ne pas faire l’Encyclopédie dans un pays libre! Faut-il que ce dictionnaire, cent fois plus utile que celui de Bayle, soit gêné par la superstition qu’il devrait anéantir; qu’on ménage encore des coquins qui ne ménagent rien; que les ennemis de la raison, les persécuteurs des philosophes, les assassins de nos rois osent encore parler dans un siècle tel que le nôtre.”)
–From a Voltaire letter to Diderot, around Jan. 5, 1758. .
Pogo says
@As stated
Pogo says
@Of course
“…The piece premiered in 2019 at Art Basel Miami Beach…”
https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/crypto-tycoon-pays-6-2-million-for-banana-duct-taped-to-a-wall/ar-AA1usMYn?ocid=nl_article_link
Mark Twain, W.C. Fields, and Forrest Gump, were right.
Ray W, says
The Post reports that for 15 years now the polling firm, YouGov, has been polling Americans about their perceptions of economic well-being, better, same, or worse, compared to 12 months previously. According to its data, at the end of October 2016, 42% of Republicans told YouGov that their economic position had worsened over the past 12 months of the Obama administration. 9% said their economic position had improved over the past 12 months.
By the end of January 2017, a mere three months later, and less than two weeks after Trump took office, YouGov polling showed that only 25% maintained that their economic position had worsened over the past 12 months. 17% (nearly double) said it had improved over the past 12 months.
Make of this what you will.
Me? I suppose YouGov polls will come out two weeks after Trump takes office reflecting a similar change in Republican perceptions of economic well-being. The data will likely once again show that it will take less than two weeks for the new administration to turn the “horrible” economy around.
How can I predict this? YouGov data shows that s shift in perception toward positive is already happening. Polls taken two weeks after the election show a rise in positive Republican perceptions of relative economic well-being compared to 12 months ago, alongside a sharp drop in those Republicans who perceive they were worse off 12 months ago.
It’s amazing what a simple vote will likely do for the partisan perceptions of the most gullible among us to change.
As the Wall Street Journal opined, Trump will soon inherit an economy that is the “envy of the world.”
The American economy was not destroyed. We have the strongest economy in the world. We are better off economically than we were four years ago.