Weather:
Today at the Editor’s Glance:
In Court: Felony court is not in session today.
Free For All Fridays with David Ayres on WNZF. David Ayres welcomes Flagler Palm Coast High School senior and activist Jack Petocz, just back from an LGBTQ-executive order signing at President Biden’s side, and Eryn Harris, who heads Flagler Pride, to discuss LGBTQ issues in the county and beyond, starting a little after 9 a.m. with my commentary.
Florida on Fire: The Fire in the Sky, a history presentations by Zach Zacharias, Senior Curator of Education and History at the Museum of Arts and Sciences in Daytona Beach, at the Flagler County Public Library, 2500 Palm Coast, 2 to 3 p.m. Take a rare look at a part of Florida history that most people have never heard of, urban fires. The Great Jacksonville Fire of 1901 was the nations third largest urban fire in history. Ocala, Deland, St. Augustine, Key West and other well-known cities all were devastated by urban fires in the 19th and early 20th centuries. Downtowns made of wood, which predominated most of Florida’s Cities, presented a common problem, the threat of massive fires. The presentation’s finale is the great Volusia Fire Storm of 1994.
Keep in Mind the Summer BreakSpot: Free Meals for Kids and Teens, Monday through Friday: Flagler Schools and Café EDU is providing free meals to all kids 18 and under this summer. It started on May 31, it’s running through July 29. Meals Must be Consumed Onsite. No Identification Needed. No Application Necessary. The Summer BreakSpot Program, also known as the Summer Food Service Program, is federally funded under the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) and, in Florida, administered by the Florida Department of Agriculture and Consumer Services. Sites are locally operated by nonprofit organizations (sponsors) that provide the meals and receive a reimbursement from USDA. For additional information, please reach out to Café EDU at 386-437-7526 x1159, or email [email protected]. The free meal locations are:
Flagler-Palm Coast High School
5500 E. Highway 100, Palm Coast, FL 32164
Breakfast: 7:45am–8:30am
Lunch: 12:15–1:00pm
Dates: May 31–July 29, Monday through Friday, except July 4.
Housing Authority
502 S. Bacher St., Bunnell, FL 32110
Breakfast: 9:00am–9:30am
Lunch: 11:30–12:00pm
Dates: June 6–July 29, Monday through Friday, except July 4.
Notebook: Would you believe that Ruth Westheimer is still alive, at 94? We missed her birthday a few days ago (June 4). My mind must have been in a different kind of gutter. She still lives in New York’s Washington Heights, after finding fame with her “Sexually Speaking” quarter hour, from 11:45 to midnight, on WYNY starting in 1980. My impressionable 16-year-old hormonal self used to listen and marvel: on the radio. What a country, I must’ve said Yakov Smirnoff style. The show, thanks to her delicious accent and Prince Myshkin-like honesty, quickly expanded to an hour, then was syndicated. She had a television show. She had movie and television cameos. She wrote books. Sex sells, but she was selling candor and inhibition-busting sex, approaching it no differently than a gourmet approaches food, or an art lover accosts the Met, with her audience as johns and johnsettes. The irony was not lost on anyone that her meteoric rise parallel Reagan accession to his role of a lifetime. “Get some,” Ruth would famously tell her listeners. And boy did we: how else to cope with that bonfire of a decade?
Now this:
Flagler Beach Webcam:
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.
July 2026
Flagler Beach Farmers Market
Coffee With Flagler Beach Commission Chair Scott Spradley
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Second Saturday Plant Sale at Washington Oaks Gardens State Park
American Association of University Women (AAUW) Meeting
Gamble Jam at Gamble Rogers Memorial State Recreation Area
ESL Bible Studies for Intermediate and Advanced Students
Grace Community Food Pantry on Education Way
Palm Coast Farmers’ Market at European Village
Al-Anon Family Groups
For the full calendar, go here.
Of course we would all like to “believe” in something, like to assuage our private guilts in public causes, like to lose our tiresome selves; like, perhaps, to transform the white flag of defeat at home into the brave white banner of battle away from home. And of course it is all right to do that; that is how, immemorially, things have gotten done. But I think it is all right only so long as we do not delude ourselves about what we are doing, and why. It is all right only so long as we remember that all the ad hoc committees, all the picket lines, all the brave signatures in The New York Times, all the tools of agitprop straight across the spectrum, do not confer upon anyone any ipso facto virtue. It is all right only so long as we recognize that the end may or may not be expedient, may or may not be a good idea, but in any case has nothing to do with “morality.” Because when we start deceiving ourselves into thinking not that we want something or need something, not that it is a pragmatic necessity for us to have it, but that it is a moral imperative that we have it, then is when we join the fashionable madmen, and then is when the thin whine of hysteria is heard in the land, and then is when we are in bad trouble. And I suspect we are already there.
—–From Joan Didion’s “On Morality,” in Slouching Toward Bethlehem (1968). .
Mónica says
Your depiction of the conservative majority in this cartoon makes no sense and is actually degrading to an African American judge currently in SCOTUS. Shame on you.
Pierre Tristam says
I’m glad you got the picture as intended. I won’t dispute that Thomas is African American. Calling him a judge, however, has strained credibility since his Long Dong Silver days. He never belonged on that court then. He doesn’t belong on it now. But he fits right in: that’s the paradox we’re doomed to live with, with much worse ahead. Reinstituting Lochner isn’t far behind.
Steve says
Justice Thomas= proof relic hominids exist in the 21st Century