Today at the Editor’s glance: On Free For All on WNZF, Host David Ayres is off this week (happy anniversary), so Palm Coast Observer Brian McMillan hosts, with guests Marc Dwyer, the Palm Coast attorney, who will talk about his recent pro bono award (see: “Senior Partner Marc E. Dwyer Wins 2021 Flagler County Pro Bono Attorney Of the Year Award“), and Black History Month, plus Kristin Peterson, sales manager for Adams Cameron, who will discuss real estate trends, starting a little after 9 a.m. on WNZF. In court: Circuit Judge Terence Perkins hears a motion in the case of Larry Cavallaro, whose trial is scheduled for early February. At 9 a.m. in Courtroom 401 at the Flagler County courthouse.
Cold Weather Shelter open tonight: From Sue Bickings, who heads the Sheltering Tree’s Cold Weather Shelter in Bunnell: “The weather this week is forecast to be below 40 degrees in Bunnell, according to The National Weather Service. The cold weather shelter will open at Church on the Rock in Bunnell on Friday, Saturday and Sunday nights. The cold weather shelter has operated in Bunnell for the past 13 years. The Church on the Rock is located at 2200 North State Street in Bunnell. The shelter will open at 5:30 PM and close at 8 AM the following day. If you are in need of shelter, or have no heat at home or are living in your car, join us at Church on the Rock on Friday, January 28th, Saturday, January 29th, and Sunday, January 30th at 5:30 PM. We will be ready with a warm cot and two great meals for you. Call 386-437-3258, extension 105 for more information. Flagler County Transportation offers free bus rides from pick up points in the county, starting at 4 PM. Call 386-437-3258 ext. 105 for information about transportation to the shelter.
The Friends of the Library at the Flagler County Public Library host a history presentations by Zach Zacharias, Senior Curator of Education and History at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach, at 2 p.m. at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast Pkwy NW, Palm Coast. The topic: “Florida History through the Amazing Illustrations of Harper’s Weekly.” See details here. Once the most popular newspaper in America from 1855-1910, Harper’s gave birth to modern journalism. Using amazing illustrations carved from wood engravings and new technology, Harper’s Illustrated Weekly could visually document moments in American and Florida History with great ease. A blend of art, technology and history, this presentation takes you on a visual journey through the state during The Civil War and Gilded Age of Florida. The art is exquisite and the stories are amazing. If you have any questions please contact the library at (386) 446-6763.
City Repertory Theatre stages “Wait Until Dark” at 7:30 p.m. in CRT’s black box theater at City Marketplace, 160 Cypress Point Parkway, Suite B207, Palm Coast. Tickets: $20 adults, $15 students, available online at eventbrite.com, by calling 386-585-9415, or at the venue just before showtime. True to part of its mission, City Repertory Theatre once again is offering a play that is typically off the radar of the local theater scene: a genuine, suspense-filled thriller. Susy has just been blinded in a car crash. While Susy’s husband Sam is away, three sadistic thugs track a heroin-stuffed doll they’re looking for to Susy’s apartment. A harrowing cat-and-mouse game ensues and soon involves Gloria, a young girl who lives in a nearby apartment. See Rick de Yampert’s preview, “Justice Blinded and a Heroin-Stuffed Doll Spark Thrills in City Repertory Theatre’s ‘Wait Until Dark.’”
Notably: Today is the anniversary of the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, in 1986, 10 miles after take-off. New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe and crew members Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Judith A. Resnik, Ellison S. Onizuka, Ronald E. McNair and Gregory B. Jarvis were killed. It is also Jackson Pollock’s birth anniversary. He was born on this date in Cody, Wyoming, in 1912.
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.
Nar-Anon Family Group
Flagler County Beekeepers Association Meeting
Bunnell City Commission Meeting
Palm Coast City Council Workshop
Book Dragons, the Kids’ Book Club, at Flagler Beach Public Library
NAACP Flagler Branch General Membership Meeting
Random Acts of Insanity Standup Comedy
For the full calendar, go here.
“For some years I had not had a single volume, and words would fail to tell the strange, deep emotion and excitement[Pg 364] which the first book I read at the jail caused me. I began to devour it at night, when the doors were closed, and read it till the break of day. It was a number of a review, and it seemed to me like a messenger from the other world. As I read, my life before the prison days seemed to rise up before me in sharp definition, as of some existence independent of my own, which another soul had had. Then I tried to get some clear idea of my relation to current events and things; whether my arrears of knowledge and experience were too great to make up; whether the men and women out of doors had lived and gone through many things and great during the time I was away from them; and great was my desire to thoroughly understand what was now going on, now that I could know something about it all at last. All the words I read were as palpable things, which I wanted rather to feel sensibly than get mere meaning out of; I tried to see more in the text than could be there. I imagined some mysterious meanings that must be in them, and tried at every page to see allusions to the past, with which my mind was familiar, whether they were there or not; at every turn of the leaf I sought for traces of what had deeply moved people before the days of my bondage; and deep was my dejection when it was forced on my mind that a new state of things had arisen; a new life, among my kind, which was alien to my knowledge and my sentiments. I felt as if I was a straggler, left behind and lost in the onward march of mankind. Yes, there were indeed arrears, if the word is not too weak.”
–Dostoevsky, from “Tales from the House of the Dead” (1860).
Ray W. says
James Joyce wrote a blurb describing the miniscule epiphanies people daily experience in their associations with loved ones, strangers, co-workers, the myriad others on whom we depend. Many, when asked about epiphanies, think of moments of religious joy, but the term has more than one meaning. In its crudest, or perhaps broadest, meaning: a moment of sudden understanding, epiphanies occur when one asks someone else what time it is. At the moment of reply, the unknown becomes known, if only for the briefest moments, yet an epiphany of understanding has occurred. Dostoyevsky writes of the epiphany he experienced as he wondered about the thoughts of another put into book form. As a teenager, I read a short story by an Australian soldier captured during the fall of Singapore and held for years in a POW camp. He came across a book about sailing a yacht off the shores of either New Zealand or Australia (I don’t remember that specific point). Not knowing when or if he would ever escape or be liberated from the camp, he set out to read the book at a rate of one sentence per day. He could reread previous days’ sentences, but he read only one new sentence per day and then he dreamed of understanding the events and experiences the author was trying to share. The problem? The soldier had lived his life before the army in the Australian Outback and had travelled on a troop transport only one time, so the sailing life was almost entirely foreign to him, yet he yearned to understand the taste of salt spray and all the other minutiae of the sailing life.
In a way similar to the Australian soldier and Dostoyevsky, whenever I had to defend a person accused of committing a specific intent crime, I had to be a chameleon in an effort to understand how it came to pass that a person formed the intent to commit the crime. What was their actual intent, not my perception of their personal, and perhaps unique only to themselves, actual intent? Put in another context, I have to wonder about events that had to have occurred throughout a person’s life that have coalesced into a unique worldview that permits an outwardly appearing and otherwise normal person to go on the radio to announce to whomever might be listening that Democrats need to be beheaded? But I have to accept that my wonder might never yield an accurate answer to the specific mental intent that had to exist at the moment of expression of the desire to behead Democrats.
A major flaw in many of the comments posted by FlaglerLive readers is that the commenters present their comments in a way that suggests a complete lack of desire to be a chameleon in the necessary effort to understand another person’s choices. Perhaps, it requires a lesser commitment to the exercise of intellectual rigor when commenters superimpose their perception of a person’s intent onto the narrative set forth in an article about the crime, without expending any significant level of effort to understand the defendant’s actual intent, but I accept that each commenter has his or her own reasons for not trying to understand another’s specific mental intent.