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:
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.
June 2025
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Pride Month Dance Party Rally on I-95 Overpass
Peps Art Walk Near Beachfront Grille
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Pride Month Finale Freedom Walk
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
Nar-Anon Family Group
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.