Weather: Sunny. Highs in the lower 80s. North winds around 5 mph. Thursday Night: Clear. Lows in the lower 60s. East winds around 5 mph, becoming northwest after midnight. The tropics remain relatively calm but for a bit of a disturbance in the east Atlantic.
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
Nobel Prizes Week: The Nobel Prize in Literature is announced at 7 a.m. Palm Coast time, 1 p.m. local time, at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. The peace prize is announced on Friday. Of course Salman Rushdie, a long odd in previous years, is among the top favorites to win it this year. Other names: France’s Michel Houellebecq, Canadian poet Anne Carson, France’s grim Annie Ernaux, Syrian poet Adunis, Kenya’s Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, and Japan’s Haruki Murakami. Last year the winner was the obscur Abdulrazak Gurnah of Zanzibar. The dead cannot win it. Philip Roth, however, is still trying, and ought to be an exception. (Update: it went to Ernaux.)
On Wednesday, the Chemistry prize was awarded to Carolyn R. Bertozzi, Morten Meldal and K. Barry Sharpless “for the development of click chemistry and bioorthogonal chemistry.” In English? The New York Times quoted the chair of the chemistry committee: “Click chemistry is almost like it sounds,” he said. The term was coined in 2000. “It’s all about snapping molecules together. Imagine that you could attach small chemical buckles to different types of building blocks. Then you could link these buckles together and produce molecules of greater complexity and variation.”
In Court: Drug Court does not convene today. A remote, zoom hearing is scheduled before Circuit Judge Terence Perkins at 8:30 a.m. in the case of Starr v. Florida Hospital (AdventHealth) and Dr. Kizhake Kurian, a civil wrongful death suit relating to the death of 38-year-old Richard Starr on March 27, 2018. Perkins will also hear probation violation cases and conduct a sentencing.
The Flagler Tiger Bay Club’s non-partisan Election Forum featuring candidates for the general election is at 6 p.m. at the Palm Coast Community Center, 305 Palm Coast Parkway NE. The forum was originally scheduled for Wednesday, Sept. 28. The public is welcome. The forum will feature general election candidates for Flagler County School Board, Palm Coast City Council and the County Commission. Representatives from various sectors of the Flagler County community including faith-based, business, and young executives will serve as panelists, presenting questions from the community to candidates during the nonpartisan forum to help educate the public on issues, policy, and candidate platforms. The forum will be broadcast live on WNZF and streamed across many local media platforms, including FlaglerLive.
The Flagler Beach Historical Museum celebrates its 21st Anniversary at a ‘Moondance’ fundraiser from 5:30 p.m. to 8:30.p.m. at Beachfront Grille, 2444 S Ocean Shore Blvd., Flagler Beach. Tickets are $40 per person or two for $75 and can be purchased online at www.flaglerbeachmuseum.org, or by calling the Museum at 386-517-2025, or by stopping by the Museum at 207 S Central Ave., Flagler Beach. The Flagler Beach Historical Museum is an IRS 501(c) (3) not-for-profit organization. Admission to the Museum is free. They are supported by membership dues, donations, and grants.
Comedian Ron White 8 p.m. today and tomorrow at the Peabody Auditorium, 600 Auditorium Boulevard, Daytona Beach. Tickets here. Comedian Ron “Tater Salad” White, who first rose to fame as the cigar-smoking, scotch-drinking funnyman from the Blue Collar Comedy Tour phenomenon, has long since established himself as a star in his own right. Ron White first stepped foot on a comedy club stage in Arlington Texas in September 1986, and now more than 35 years later, White is consistently one of the top grossing stand up comedians in the country. In fact, he was nominated for Pollstar’s Comedy Touring Artist of the Decade. His comedy recordings have sold over 14 million units (solo and with the Blue Collar Comedy Tour). He has been nominated for two Grammys, he was featured in the Cameron Crowe Showtime Series, “Roadies,” and he even authored a book that appeared on the New York Times Best Seller List.
The deckled edge: The day the Nobel for Literature is announced should be an international holiday, the only international holiday possible, because what, other than language, is as universal as language, as accessible as literature? Music of course, but music doesn’t have an equivalent. The Pulitzers and the Grammys are too lopsidedly American. There just isn’t a prize equivalent to the Nobel that celebrates culture without borders. And that allows us once a year to act as absurdly as do the most fanatical football fans in Liverpool. So here are a few writers who did not win the Nobel for literature, first awarded in 1901: Chekhov, Tolstoi, Proust, Verne, Joyce, Wharton, Conrad, Nabokov, Orwell, Borges, Fitzgerald, Dreiser (who deserved it more than Sinclair Lewis), Roth. Here are a few who should not have won it: all but two or three of the first two decades‘ winners, Knut Hamsun in 1920, because for all his lyrical power there’s something odd, anti-humanistic, in awarding a humanist prize to a Nazi sympathizer (same goes for the Peter Handke award in 2019, substituting the small difference of fascism for Nazism), Pearl Buck in 1938, Winston Churchill in 1953 (a fine writer, but come on: not when Orwell was ignored earlier in the same decade), Elias Canetti in 1981, Claude Simon in 1985, that enigma of dullness V.S. Naipaul in 2001, and maybe today’s winner. Those judgments are as subjective as they are stupid. But so goes the judgment of almost all art and literature. The subjectivity is all, the vanity and pedantry of the judge the more so. A Nobel hero who can’t be praised enough, and whose win made up for Chekhov getting passed over: Alice Munro.
Now this:
Flagler Beach Webcam:
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.
May 2025
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Al-Anon Family Groups
RockabillieWillie At City Repertory Theatre
Flagler County Library Board of Trustees
Nar-Anon Family Group
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
For the full calendar, go here.
He was a man without armies obliged to fight constantly on many fronts. There was the private front of his secret life, with its cringings and crouchings, its skulkings and duckings, its fear of plumbers and other repairmen, its fraught search for places of refuge, and its dreadful wigs. Then there was the publishing front, where he could take nothing for granted in spite of all his work. Publication itself was still an issue. It was not certain that he could continue in the life he had chosen, not certain that he would always find willing hands to print and distribute his work. And then there was the harsh and violent world of politics. If he was a soccer ball, he thought, could he be a self-conscious soccer ball and join in the game? Could the soccer ball understand the sport in which it was kicked from end to end? Could the soccer ball act in its own interest and take itself off the field and out of range of the booted, kicking feet?
–Salman Rushdie writing about himself in his third-person memoir, Joseph Anton (2012).
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