Today at the Editor’s glance: Choose your celebration: today you can pick either Richard Nixon, who was born on this date in 1913, or Simone de Beauvoir, the great French philosopher, born in 1908, one of whose great books was “America Day By Day,” her travel diary as she experienced this country in 1947. But no matter what you do don;t sing her happy birthday. In her Feb. 10 entry, on page 62 of Carol Cosma’s translation, De Beauvoir writes with faint indignation: “There’s always some holiday going on in America; it’s distracting. Even private celebrations, especially birthdays, have the dignity of public ceremonies. It seems that the birth of every citizen is a national event. The other evening at a nightclub, the whole room began to sing in chorus Happy Birthday while a portly gentleman, flushed and flattered, squeezed his wife’s fingers. The day before yesterday I had to make a telephone call; two college-girls went into the booth before me. And while I was pacing impatiently in front of the door, they unhooked the receiver and intoned Happy Birthday. They sang it through to the very end. In shops they sell birthday cards with congratulations all printed out, often in verse. And you can “telegraph” flowers on one occasion or another. All the florists advertise in large letters, “Wire Flowers.”” Think about that next time you’re in a restaurant and the wait staff unleashes one of those ridiculous public embarrassments of one or another patron who had the misfortune to be so ensnared.
Now this:
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June 2025
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
First Friday Garden Walks at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
Friday Blue Forum
First Friday in Flagler Beach
Free Family Art Night at Ormond Memorial Art Museum and Gardens
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Flagler Beach All Stars Beach Clean-Up
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Bunnell History Day
Sunshine and Sandals Social at Cornerstone
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
“North Americans are concerned with the problem of their origins, because what previously existed in America, the native world, was completely destroyed. The United States is built on the void left by destroying Indian cultures. The attitude of North Americans to the Indian world is part of their attitude to nature; they don’t see it as a reality to be fused with, but to be dominated. The destruction of the native world foreshadowed their assault on nature. North American civilization has set out to dominate, tame, and make use of nature exactly as a race or a people are conquered. In a way they have treated the natural world as an enemy.”
–Octavio Paz, from his interview with Rita Guibert in “Seven Voices” (1973).
Deborah Coffey says
Gotta love the cartoon! LOL.