Today at the Editor’s glance: Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Mostly sunny. Highs in the mid 80s. Southeast winds 10 to 15 mph with gusts up to 25 mph. Sunday Night: Mostly clear in the evening, then becoming mostly cloudy. Lows in the lower 60s. Southeast winds 10 to 15 mph.
“Company,” the 1970 musical by Stephen Sondheim, is staged by Flagler Playhouse at 2 p.m. at Flagler Playhouse, 301 E Moody Blvd, Bunnell. Tickets are $25.00, and $20 for students 21 and younger with ID. Book tickets here.
Notably: Today is the anniversary of the Dred Scott decision when, in 1857, Chief Justice Roger Taney issued a majority opinion of the Supreme Court that re-affirmed that enslaved persons were property, not human beings, and that Dred Scott, regardless of his status in “once free, always free” Missouri. The court voted 7-2, with Justices Curtis and McLean in dissent. Taney dismissed the case on procedural grounds: “a negro, whose ancestors were imported into [the U.S.], and sold as slaves,” was not an American citizen, and so could not sue in federal court. But Taney went much further, declaring the Missouri Compromise unconstitutional. The so-called compromise had enabled slavery to continue spreading below the 36th parallel. Also: The event inaccurately referred to as the “Fall of the Alamo” took place today in 1836 at the end of a 13-day battle. Like Texas itself, the Alamo is all legend and fabrication of brawn over fact, immorality as self-defense–in other words, the old American story that never gets old, as every Black victim assassinated by Stand Your Ground defenses would attest from the grave. The Alamo’s defenders had no more right to it than Putin’s shock troops have any rights to Ukraine. New Yorker writer Nicholas Lemann in a piece on George W. Bush in 2004 (“How George W. Bush reinvented himself“) relates this story: “In answer to a question from the audience, Bush alluded, with a low chuckle, to what I’d heard from friends in Texas was his favorite Nolan Ryan moment—on August 4, 1993. Ryan, on the mound at Arlington Stadium, with Bush not far away, in the owner’s box, struck Robin Ventura, of the Chicago White Sox, with a pitch. Ventura lost his temper and charged the mound. Ryan, who was then forty-six years old, twenty years Ventura’s senior, caught Ventura in a headlock and delivered six blows to his head and face, from a distance of about six inches, really whaling the shit out of him. The scene quickly became a canonical bit of sports video. It’s a wonderful example of super-aggressive behavior presenting itself as a form of self-defense when, strictly speaking, it isn’t—Ryan had started things by hitting Ventura, after all. But Ryan got to be doubly the hero, slower to anger but also unquestionably physically dominant. Bush, obviously, loved it. “It was a fantastic experience for the Texas Rangers fans,” he said.”
Now this:
Alfred Brendel Performs Schubert’s Three Klavierstücke, D 946
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.
January 2026
Free For All Fridays With Host David Ayres on WNZF
Scenic A1A Pride Meeting
Friday Blue Forum
Acoustic Jam Circle At The Community Center In The Hammock
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
Stetson University Concert Choir in Concert with Orlando Philharmonic
For the full calendar, go here.
Misery is manifold. The wretchedness of earth is multiform. Overreaching the wide horizon like the rainbow, its hues are as various as the hues of that arch, as distinct too, yet as intimately blended. Overreaching the wide horizon like the rainbow! How is it that from Beauty I have derived a type of unloveliness? — from the covenant of Peace a simile of sorrow? But thus is it. And as, in ethics, Evil is a consequence of Good, so, in fact, out of Joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been. I have a tale to tell in its own essence rife with horror — I would suppress it were it not a record more of feelings than of facts.
–From the opening of “Berenice: A Tale,” by Edgar Allen Poe.
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