The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Tuesday, April 26, 2022

Weather: Patchy fog in the morning. Sunny. Highs in the mid 80s. South winds around 5 mph, becoming east in the afternoon. Tuesday Night: Mostly clear. Lows in the mid 60s. Southeast winds 5 to 10 mph, becoming south after midnight.

Today at the Editor’s Glance:

The Palm Coast City Council meets in a budget workshop at 9 a.m. at City Hall. The council will hear a year-to-date financial report on the city’s budget. It will also discuss its next year’s goals. The Parks department will present a year-round operation proposal for the Palm Coast Aquatics Center, including Frieda Zamba pool, which closes after Labor Day. The year-round proposal is floated at least for the short term. The facility, however, is in dire need of comprehensive repairs. Residents have voiced their concerns and suggestions for an improved aquatics center. But those long-term goals are not on the agenda today. The full agenda is available here.

Flagler County’s Affordable Housing Advisory Committee meets at 3 p.m. at the Emergency Operations Center (EOC), 1769 E. Moody Blvd., Bldg. 3, Bunnell. The committee with discuss surplus lands.

“Screen Agers: Growing Up in the Digital Age,” a free documentary, at 5 p.m. at the Flagler Auditorium, 5500 State Road 100, Palm Coast. Synopsis: “Are you watching kids scroll through life, with their rapid-fire thumbs and a six-second attention span? Physician and filmmaker Delaney Ruston saw that with her own kids and learned that the average kid spends 6.5 hours a day looking at screens. She wondered about the impact of all this time and about the friction occurring in homes and schools around negotiating screen time—friction she knew all too well. In SCREENAGERS, as with her award-winning documentaries on mental health, Delaney takes a deeply personal approach as she probes into the vulnerable corners of family life, including her own, to explore struggles over social media, video games, academics and internet addiction. Through poignant, and unexpectedly funny stories, along with surprising insights from authors, psychologists, and brain scientists, SCREENAGERS reveals how tech time impacts kids’ development and offers solutions on how adults can empower kids to best navigate the digital world and find balance.”

The Annual George Washington Carver Foundation Auction begins Monday. The purpose of the auction is to raise money to go back into the development of the Carver Center in Bunnell. In order to participate in this auction you must register for a bidder account on this 32auctions website. To register click login in the top right corner and then click “Create an account now” if you have not yet made one. The system will then send you an email with a link to confirm the registration. Your bidder ID will be the first part of your email address. If you would like to change the bidder ID you may go in to account settings and pick a new ID. Please pick a username you don’t mind being displayed publicly. The username of the current bidder will be displayed with the item.

Notably: Today is the bi-centennial of Frederick Law Olmsteads’s birth, an anniversary as significant about American character as American landscapes, since the two mirror each other so much: Olmstead was the founder of American landscape architecture. “Olmsted is part of the good fortune of New York, our lucky break,” Adam Gopnik wrote in The New Yorker in 1997. That, of all the designs in the 1858 competition for Central Park, it was his “Greensward” plan that won; that it got built more or less as he and his partner, Calvert Vaux, intended; that the park they planned is still more or less intact: all these things are so firmly contrary to the general run of New York compromises and near-misses that the Park remains our around-the-corner miracle. (Think, by contrast, of what happened at the United Nations complex, or what is happening in the new Times Square.) It works, and always has. Yet Frederick Law Olmsted the man has receded as a city hero, or, at least, has become a bit disembodied. If he has any reputation left as a thinker, it’s as a quaint believer in the moral power of pure landscape: closeness to chlorophyll will do you good.” Of course, Olmstead was a lot more than the designer of Central Park. “Olmsted’s artistry was always underpinned by sensible considerations,” Witold Rybczynski wrote in his fine 1999, biography A Clearing in the Distance. “Since the war cemeteries would be built in different parts of the country, he advocated using trees indigenous to each region. He also warned against the temptation to plant fast-growing species (they would be short-lived) and listed those to be avoided. Instead of buying expensive large trees, he suggested establishing nurseries next to the cemeteries where seedlings could be cultivated and transplanted after ten years or so. What if land for a nursery was unavailable? His novel suggestion: “nursery rows could be planted between the tiers of graves. They would be harmless for the time being and would disappear after a few years” as the trees matured and were relocated.” Landscape as forethought, landscape as thought, landscape as earthy, democratic monuments: Olmstead could never be rediscovered enough even as we tread and breathe the greens of his legacy. (Thank you to Andy Dance, a local landscape architect (“Transforming ideas into beautiful, inspiring and active spaces”), for reminding us of the occasion.)

From Statista’s Daily Infographics: “Emmanuele Macron has won the second round of the French presidential election against Marine Le Pen. With 58.6 percent according to the preliminary final results, the incumbent is well ahead of his right-wing challenger. But the gap has narrowed compared to 2017 (and even more so since 2002), as a look at this Statista infographic shows. Back then, Le Pen came in at around 34 percent. Five years later, 13.3 million French people have given their vote to the leader of the Rassemblement National (National Rally) – that corresponds to a share of 41.5 percent.”

Now this:

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